The Ninth Juror – Giraud Chester, 1970 ★★★

Secrets of a Jury Room

If you have seen 12 Angry Men, you may remember the line: “No jury can declare a man guilty unless it’s sure.” But how practical an approach is that, really? How sure is sure?

Going by that play/movie, “sure” is well-nigh impossible if you can’t be sure a witness isn’t lying for attention or a defense lawyer is up to snuff. If we all followed that pious Henry Fonda formula, prisons would be full of bankers and not much else. The real world offers better examples of justice in action, like this long-forgotten book by a TV executive.

Giraud Chester had no deep interest in taking a break from his work as an executive vice president at Goodman-Todson Productions, a very prominent distributor of TV game shows, but he admits to being curious. He recalls a phone conversation he had shortly before his jury-selection interview:

“Many of the most interesting experiences in my life seem to have happened by chance,” I remarked. “All I did was not to run away from them or prevent them from happening.”

“The odds are so remote anyway,” said my associate, “that if you are chosen, it will almost be as if it were ordained. Why don’t we let Providence take its course?”

The case involved a 71-year-old dentist, Emanuel Rosenwasser, who one July day in 1966 was found shot to death in his Manhattan office in an apparent armed robbery. Twenty-eight dollars and a radio were taken. Less than a month later, the radio turned up at a Harlem pawn shop, which in time would incriminate two men: Hersey Boyer, 26, and John Locker Jr., 25. Locker had the pawn ticket on his bureau, and gave up Boyer as his accomplice.

While the facts of the case were depressingly mundane, the unspoken matter of race hovered over all. Boyer and Locker were black, Rosenwasser was white. Then as now the question of how police handled black murder suspects would be on many minds, and at the center of the defense’s case.

Even Chester, a liberal-minded member of the American Civil Liberties Union, found himself able to believe in the guilt of one of the accused, if not the other, partly on the basis of darker skin and thicker features, only to be surprised when the other was named as the triggerman.

“What other wrong impressions had I developed on my own?” Chester asks. And how were other jurors filtering their assorted impressions through prejudices of various shadings and hues?

Impartiality is something you want in a juror, more so than in an author. The ability to doubt yourself, to see both sides of an issue, and avoid true-believer syndrome, all are virtues when you are sitting in judgment but can hobble someone trying to grab and hold the slippery attention of a reader. Chester’s book was not a bestseller when it was first published and has been since forgotten. A contemporary Kirkus Review described it as a “low-pressure” account and concludes: “…perhaps too phlegmatic which is a handicap you can attribute to Mr. Chester’s fair-minded sincerity.”

I felt I understood the point. Yet Chester, who died in 1995, is not a dull writer, and The Ninth Juror offers up some sparks. No, not quite Henry-Fonda-driving-a-switchblade-into-a-table sparks. But the jurors in the Rosenwasser murder case were a divided group, and tensions did escalate during their deliberations.

The scene of the crime, 300 West 20th Street in Manhattan, as seen today. Dr. Rosenwasser was first met by his assailants here as he was heading into his office, enjoying a cigar. He took them up to his office when one complained of a toothache, where the killing then occurred. Image from Google Maps.

One juror saw evidence of police brutality in a defendant’s claim of being struck en route to the station house. Another questioned whether it was made clear a defendant could get legal representation during his police questioning, as it had not been requested.

Most jurors were troubled by the witnesses police had assembled to testify against Boyer and Locker: four drug addicts with criminal records who claimed the defendants told them of committing the crime.

But if Locker was innocent, what was he doing holding a pawn ticket for the stolen radio? And why was his voice, garbled at times but distinctly his, audible on a police recording telling a detective about how he committed the murder? If he wasn’t at Dr. Rosenwasser’s office on July 22^nd, where was he?

This back-and-forth fills much of The Ninth Juror’s second half; Chester found it illuminating: “It seemed to me as I listened to this type of exchange that we were going through a process of reformulation of ideas, and that a period of unhurried discussion of this nature with the freedom to give vent to doubts as well as to certainties was indispensable to arriving at a consensus.”

Chester himself was reasonably sure that Locker and Boyer were guilty; especially after witness testimony. The addicts called to the stand may have been dull-witted or even still using, but their testimony when taken together fit the case the prosecution was making, and did so in a way that could not have been coerced:

If these witnesses were to be believed, Boyer and Locker had made no effort to keep the events of Friday, July 22^nd, a secret. They seemed to have told their story to every friend they met, either out of a desire to boast or to purge themselves of the experience. The bizarre story, with its exceptional detail, remained reasonably consistent through all the repetitions. The killing had not been planned; it resulted, supposedly, from a misunderstanding. But there was no remorse.

There were eight white jurors, four black ones, all male. After the evidence was heard, six of the jurors, all white, including Chester, voted guilty, with the rest either saying not guilty or undecided. For the black jurors, it seemed police misconduct was seen as more of a possibility early on. A recent case in which an innocent black had been roughed up by police was referenced, as were stories of a police slush fund used to bribe witnesses not unlike the four heroin addicts heard in the Rosenwasser case.

But as the jury continued to deliberate, racial distinctions began to blur. A couple of black jurors came over to the guilty side, and one did so forcefully, emerging as an ardent advocate for a guilty verdict. Sure the drug addicts made for sketchy witnesses, he told the others, but that reflected the sad world the defendants traveled in and as one who knew his share of addicts, he found their testimony credible. And why didn’t Locker have an alibi for where he was on the day of the murder, a Friday, if he had a job like he claimed?

It would be two white jurors who pushed hardest against the tide to convict. One, an Irish-born bus driver, saw the police coercion angle as being too plausible; the other, a retired Jewish luncheonette owner, was dubious of everything the prosecution had presented. He honed in on the absence of counsel for Locker when questioning began:

“There was no lawyer there to protect him. He found himself alone. I don’t know how anyone, anyone of us, would act otherwise.”

Chester doesn’t identify the jurors by name, except himself. He gives each a first name, all pseudonyms. As he relates this part of the story, by far the most interesting, he lifts a veil over a little-understood aspect of the American criminal-justice system. Most of us have been called to jury at some point, but few ever serve on murder cases. Chester does a fine job letting you know just how a jury deliberation at one went down.

Giraud Chester, as he appears on the back of the first-edition book jacket of The Ninth Juror. Photo by Helen Marcus.

One juror, a white office worker which Chester dubs “Norby,” seems the Ed Begley Sr. character of this story, prone to hostile outbursts at anyone who doesn’t feel as certain as he that Locker and Boyer are guilty as charged. I kept waiting for him to get into a lather about “those people,” yet Chester doesn’t emphasize any overt racist or even racialist component to Norby’s thinking.

Unlike 12 Angry Men, temperatures don’t run so high all the time. Here, jurors slide back and forth between various positions, asking each other probing questions and sending out for clarifications from the judge. Like Fonda, the Jewish retiree remains fixed on the side of innocence, but his interactions with the others, while tense, are largely respectful. You can see why the Kirkus reviewer found the book too tame in that regard, but it feels more true-to-life than 12 Angry Men was.

Chester wasn’t the only person who found himself at the trial operating under a racial lens. After it was over, he had a chance to question one of the defense attorneys, and learned that the juror-selection process ran largely along those very lines, to somewhat ironic degrees. The defense was leerier of white jurors, and in fact nearly excluded from the jury the two men who came out strongest in favor of an innocent verdict, the bus driver because he was Irish, the retiree because the murder victim was also an elderly Jew.

Chester’s descriptions occasionally veer from a Joe-Friday just-the-facts tone. Of one counsel for the defense, he writes: “His hooked nose, the hanging, wattle-like flesh under his chin, and the amused glint in his eyes reminded me of a scrappy, old rooster who had been in the barnyard a long time and knew his way around.”

In the main, his tale may lack for color but offers a sense of solidity some may find reassuring when the subject is American justice. He’s not looking to score points for skepticism’s sake, but find reason to believe. For the most part, he does:

All the relevant questions of fact had been explored thoroughly during the course of the deliberation. The discussion had been essentially reasonable throughout. None of the jurors had been less than completely serious in carrying out his duty.