Free Objection! by Nancy Grace Page B

courtroom the day the verdict was read. The best thing that ever happened? My own blood ran cold.
    The Simpson case might have been the tipping point for jurors-turned-pseudojournalists, but the incidence of such unabashed greed isn’t new. Before that case commandeered the title of “trial of the century,” it had been assigned to many trials, including that of Jack Ruby, who was the unapologetic vigilante-justice killer of Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of John F. Kennedy. The 1964 trial spawned one of the first jury-service-for-profit novelists. Max Causey, a thirty-five-year-old administrative engineer, was elected foreperson on the trial. During jury selection and trial, he kept extensive notes. Those notes became the basis for his memoir, The Trial of a Juror , published two years later. In 2001, Causey’s nephew, John Mark Dempsey, released the book with new material, including interviews with other jurors, under the title The Jack Ruby Trial Revisited: The Diary of Jury Foreman Max Causey.
    The Charles Manson case was another major trial in which jurors realized they could capitalize on jury duty and take it straight to the bank. The Manson jury spawned several books, including Trial by Your Peers by juror William Zamora, whose book was later rereleased under the title Blood Family. Also from the Manson trial: Witness to Evil by juror George Bishop. It turns out everybody saw dollar signs after that trial. In a bizarre twist on the juror tell-all genre, even the spouse of a Manson juror penned a book. Rosemary Baer wrote Reflections on the Manson Trial: Journal of a Pseudo-Juror.
    When I interviewed Bernhard Goetz after his trial, he told me in a quiet voice that the multiple shootings at the center of his “Subway Vigilante” case stood for more than the facts at trial. He explained that he saw himself as one man fighting back in his own deadly way against crime when no one else apparently would. His case now stands for the juror-gets-rich phenomenon as well. The Subway Gunman: A Juror’s Account of the Bernhard Goetz Trial was written by Mark Lesly with Charles Shuttleworth. Lesly, a martial-arts instructor, along with other O B J E C T I O N !
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    jurors, second-guessed postverdict and bent over backward to justify their decision to acquit. Cha-ching!!
    Hung Jury: The Diary of a Menendez Juror, authored by juror Hazel Thornton, proved that a verdict wasn’t a prerequisite for a juror looking to cash in on crime. I had no idea that someone would be so proud to be on a jury that couldn’t reach a verdict on a case involving two adult sons accused of murdering their father and mother in cold blood. But the story of two spoiled young men who escaped justice for a short time after running through their parents’ assets, drunk on money they would never have thought to go out and earn themselves, was just too sensational for publishers to pass up.
    While the Tyco jurors made plenty of headlines just by being themselves, it was reported by New York magazine that one of them, a nurse named Parker Bosworth, planned to write a tome entitled Tyco—The Trial: A Nurse’s Diagnosis but then reconsidered. Another one of the jurors, Peter McEntegart, a reporter for Sports Illustrated, wrote about the case for Time magazine. We’ll have to wait and see if his story or those of others who were in the deliberation room with him turn into juror tell-alls.
    This disturbing phenomenon cannot be blamed solely on the celebrity of the defendant. No one knew who Erik and Lyle Menendez or Charles Manson was before they committed their gruesome crimes.
    They became infamous because of their cases. What is most disturbing is not that books about high-profile murder cases are being written, but that the plan to write them may be born before or during voir dire. This concept is critical because, if true, it bears on the motives not only for jury service but for a particular verdict—the outcome of the trial itself.
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