The White House Five: A Jury Is Chosen
The neighbors think that Thelma Wells is a mighty peculiar lady. Just try to talk to her sometime. “Hi, Mrs. Wells, how are you today?”
“None of your business!”
God only knows what is going on behind those bloodhound eyes in that skull-like face – the neighbors have long since given up trying to find out. The thrice-widowed Mrs. Wells has lived in the same spotless, two-story brick house for 25 of her 68 years and has hardly ever had a conversation lasting over five minutes with anyone on the block. The neighbors say that she sometimes holes up for days at a time, poring over her Rosicrucian literature and her astrology magazines. The only thing that brings her out of the house is her early-morning ritual of washing her prized possession, a used ’72 fire-engine red Cadillac.
The Cadillac has gone unwashed for several weeks now. On October 11th, Mrs. Wells joined the 11 other Watergate jurors in an overheated, yellow-brick motel that sits on the rim of a district of tatoo parlors and Go-Go joints in downtown Washington. She and her fellow sequestrees will undoubtedly celebrate Christmas there, and maybe St. Valentine’s Day as well. They will live under virtual house arrest, guarded by a platoon of U.S. marshals who will monitor their phone calls, censor their mail and newspapers, and snap off the TV whenever Watergate is mentioned. In exchange for enduring these deprivations, they have been given the power to judge the strength of the case against the Watergate defendants and to determine whether or not those five men, once among the most powerful in America, shall lose their freedom.
Thelma Wells, who never used to read a newspaper or watch a TV news show, is now listening to the White House tapes. Very few people in the history of the world have ever had such an intimate glimpse of a head of state with his pants down. Why should Mrs. Wells and her 11 cohorts, of all the thousands of people on the D.C. voter lists, have been chosen for this task?
The answer is largely a mystery, probably even to the lawyers who allowed Mrs. Wells to get on the jury. In any trial, the jury selection is the first battle between the defense and the prosecution, and the one that may well win or lose the war. The battle is usually fought with faulty intelligence on unfamiliar ground – it is a volley of shots in the dark. Most lawyers will admit that the most carefully selected jury can turn out to be as unpredictable as a pack of hyenas, and even the sociologists, psychologists, hypnotists, body-language experts and market analysts who have recently started to bring their respective disciplines to the game of jury picking have been known to make some horrendous mistakes. The lawyers in this trial made their own seat-of-the-pants decisions, without any coaching from experts. The prosecution, which has a tight case and plenty of gamy evidence, needed only to find 12 reasonable people and to knock off any stubborn, conservative types who might hang the jury. The defense needed about ten passive types and one or two strong-minded holdouts for acquittal.
The process by which the lawyers get to examine the prospective jurors is called the voir dire, and it works like this: Both sides submit long lists of questions for the judge to ask the prospective jurors. The jurors, half terrified, are then marched into the judge’s chambers, put under oath, and required to supply such information as the judge sees fit to demand – which is usually a good deal less information than the lawyers had hoped for. The lawyers are then allowed to try to convince the judge to dismiss certain jurors “for cause.” At the end of the voir dire, in open court, each side gets to knock off a specified number of jurors with peremptory challenges.
The Watergate trial voir dire was hectic and strained. Judge Sirica was in a hurry to get a jury before Jerry Ford’s appearance in front of the House Judiciary Committee brought a fresh blast of pretrial publicity, and he was apparently fearful that he might not get any jury at all if he questioned the prospective jurors too rigorously. The judge jettisoned most of the questions submitted by the attorneys, and staunchly refused to probe deeply into the opinions and motivations of the jurors. Some prospective jurors said that they had discussed the case. Sirica declined to probe with whom and in what terms. Others freely admitted that they felt that the five defendants were probably guilty. Still others said that they thought it was unfair to prosecute the defendants in view of the fact that Richard Nixon had received a pardon. Sirica simply listened and went on to ask the one question he considered decisive: Can you put aside your opinions of this case and judge it solely on the basis of the evidence which will be put before you?
The White House Five: A Jury Is Chosen, Page 1 of 4