From The Journalist and the Murderer (Janet Malcolm, 1990) pp111-2
McGinniss told Buckley and Abrams how the mistrial had come about: “After three days of deliberation, the jury expressed the view that they were hopelessly – not even deadlocked so much as confused – and were not going to be able to render a verdict. . . . There was a special verdict form which had thirty-seven different boxes to check off ‘Yes’ or ‘No,’ and it became apparent that they simply didn’t understand how the facts that had been presented at the trial related to the questions that they had in front of them, and after three days they announced that they were unable to really agree upon anything, and they asked to be allowed to go home.”
THE jurors themselves told a different story about the mistrial. When I met with four of them in Los Angeles, they said they had felt capable of making their way through the verdict form (two of the six jurors held master’s degrees), but were helpless in the face of a juror named Lucille Dillon, who refused to deliberate. After the first question on the verdict form had been discussed and voted on, with five in favor of MacDonald and one, Dillon, in favor of McGinniss, Dillon walked away from the table and would have nothing further to do with the group, sitting near a window reading, while the rest, perforce, deliberated on what to do about her. “Our mistake was that when we wrote a letter to the judge telling him that Lucille wouldn’t deliberate, we said she was for McGinniss,” Sheila Campbell told me. “If we had left it Open, and just said we were having trouble with Lucille, we might have got another juror in.” This was so. When the judge proposed to Bostwick and Kornstein that Dillon be replaced with an alternate, Kornstein naturally refused to relinquish a juror known to be on his side, and the judge was forced to declare a mistrial. The trouble had started early in the trial, when Dillon, an animal-rights activist, brought animal-rights literature to the jury room and wasn’t able to interest the other jurors in her cause. She became the weird Other to the majority, and they became the Oppressors to her. When the time for deliberations came, the majority realized too late – like other majorities who have ignored the warning signals of annoying minorities – that they had scorned this woman at their peril and were now powerless against her.
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