On one wall of a windowless room at the Criminal Courts Building, jurors taped up huge sheets of butcher paper and, using felt-tipped markers, began listing reasons for and against a murder conviction of Jonathan Tolliver, the teenager accused of shooting Chicago Police Officer Michael Ceriale.
Ultimately, the “Innocent/Not Guilty” list had about 10 reasons. The list under a heading of “Guilty” was five times as long, with more than 50 entries, according to several jurors.
The papers and lists–a third had scrawled notations about the laws designed to guide their deliberations–became part of a mini-trial staged by the 11 jurors who favored conviction to convince the lone holdout on the panel.
On Friday, as more jurors began to speak publicly, they portrayed Sam Shipp as a man who increasingly sat alone at one end of the jury room while the 11 other jurors beseeched him to listen to their view and to agree.
Juror Tangerine Jordan, a hotel desk clerk from the South Side of Chicago, said it was as if Shipp was the judge and they were the prosecutors, presenting all the evidence, piece by piece, to make their case.
“For 11 people to be so sure, and one believing as he did–was just very difficult,” said juror Cecile Horsky.
For 10 days–more than 70 hours–Jordan, Horsky, Shipp and nine other strangers remained behind closed doors, struggling to agree on the fate of Tolliver, who was 16 when he was arrested in the case.
When Judge Dennis Porter declared a mistrial on Thursday over the objections of prosecutors and defense attorneys, the deliberations had already become what most courthouse veterans believed were the longest for a criminal case in Cook County history.
As early as the third day, the math had become starkly simple. The jurors had dispensed with the three drug counts–acquitting Tolliver on two of them, convicting him on a third. But on the most serious count of murder, they were divided.
For hour after hour, the 11 cajoled. They paced. And they implored.
But Shipp, a retired CTA supervisor, stood his ground, he would later say, because he believed prosecutors had failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Tolliver had fatally shot Ceriale in the predawn hours of Aug. 15, 1998.
Much like the testimony they heard in the courtroom, the jurors’ accounts do not match exactly. Shipp recalled suggestions of racism, name-calling, intimidation and threats. Some jurors said Shipp wasn’t correct.
Over that many days and so many hours, under pressure from the constant courtroom presence of the families of Ceriale and Tolliver as well as uniformed police officers, memories of the jurors were varied. Like the evidence, the deliberations were viewed through the prisms of their own lives.
Their number included a retired Chicago firefighter, a Chicago Board of Education cook, and a freight broker who has two cousins who are suburban police officers and a friend on the Chicago police force. There was an exhibit manager for a software developer, a former customer service representative for Fannie Mae Candy Co., and a computer systems analyst for the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District.
They included fathers and husbands, wives and mothers. Some had been on juries before, both civil and criminal. Another is a sales manager for a machinery company whose only appearance before in a courtroom was for a traffic ticket and when a daughter was married. One juror, a man with a cousin and a friend who are Chicago police officers, once served as a grand juror that returned indictments instead of deliberating after a trial.
On some matters, they do agree.
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They read aloud from transcripts. They argued. Doors were slammed.
And they wept.
Shipp, according to one juror, propped his feet on a chair and ate potato chips as other jurors sifted through transcripts for the combination of words or testimony that might budge him from his belief.
“We called him the Riddler because everything was like talking in circles with him,” Jordan said.
He was not to be moved.
A native of Lexington, Miss., who came to Chicago at the age of 20 and spent nearly 31 years working for the CTA first as a bus driver and later as a supervisor, Shipp, a resident of Chicago’s Gresham neighborhood, would not say he believed Tolliver was innocent.
Instead, adhering to Porter’s instructions, Shipp said he concluded that Tolliver was not guilty–the circumstantial evidence was not enough to remove his doubts.
And across the table, 11 others, believing they were following Porter’s instructions, came to the opposite conclusion and were just as adamant.
Night after night, the 12 came together to board a school bus. Accompanied by Cook County sheriff’s deputies, the bus rumbled over the city streets to a hotel–the jurors never stayed in the same place for two nights in a row–where they checked into rooms.
These were not ordinary rooms. There was no television. There was no radio. The telephones were blocked to prevent calls in or out. There was no newspaper waiting outside their door in the morning.
Each night they gathered in a restaurant and, almost as if they were out with friends, chose any entree they wanted from the menu–a gustatory delight after lunches of fried chicken and meatloaf in Styrofoam boxes. Those who wished were allowed two alcoholic drinks.
Some played cards to kill time. Others chatted. Shipp, Jordan said, became isolated.
And each following morning, under the watchful eyes of the deputies, they filed back onto the bus, headed back to the courthouse, where they were escorted to the jury room.
The feeling, Jordan said in an interview, was as if they were playing a part in a real life version of the movie “Groundhog Day,” in which each day is the same as the day before.
Behind closed doors, the 12 began anew, taking part in a cornerstone of the American system of justice.
The dynamics of jury deliberations have fascinated and intrigued judges, lawyers and other legal experts as long as there have been juries. It has spawned an industry of its own–jury consultants who conduct mock sessions with presentations of evidence followed by deliberations viewed through one-way glass windows.
Dramatized most famously in “Twelve Angry Men,” a 1950s film that portrayed the struggle of 12 jurors who moved from an initial vote of 11-1 to convict to a unanimous vote of acquittal, jury deliberations are a mix of personality, the law, common sense and emotion.
Serving on a jury–avoided by many as an inconvenience–has been compared by some judges as a public service second only to service in the military. By some accounts, the deliberation in the Ceriale case lacked only the combat.
The jurors began their deliberations late in the afternoon of Jan. 30, following several hours of final arguments from prosecutors and defense lawyers before a courtroom packed with police officers, including Ceriale’s partner, Joseph Ferenzi.
Jurors have varying recollections of their first vote, taken after selection of a foreman but before they began deliberating. As many as eight or as few as six voted to convict on the murder count.
Shipp remembers being the only one voting to acquit with three others “undecided.” Horsky recalls the first ballot resulted in six votes to convict, four to acquit and two undecided.
It was soon of little import–within days they were down to 11 against one.
Before the jury retired that night, foreman Tom Audy sent out the first of what eventually would be many notes, this one asking for a definition of a conspiracy and whether delivering drugs was an act of conspiracy.
On their second day, the jurors asked for and received transcripts of seven prosecution witnesses who had implicated Tolliver in some way during testimony before a grand jury, but at the trial had recanted, saying police threatened them.
Jordan recalled that they began to discuss the evidence piece by piece. They took turns, going around the room, offering their opinions. When it was Shipp’s turn, he invariably said, “Pass,” Jordan said.
She quoted him as saying: “Let me tell you folks about how it is about the police,” and going on to say he had been falsely accused by police of buying drugs.
Shipp said that description was basically accurate and that he wanted to emphasize for jurors that just because a police officer says something, doesn’t make it true.
On Thursday, the third day of deliberation, they received a transcript of Ferenzi’s testimony in which he said he could identify the gunman’s clothing and physique, but not his face.
On Feb. 2, their fourth day, they sent a note saying they had resolved three charges, but were deadlocked on the fourth. Outside the courtroom, observers speculated that they were hung up on the murder charge. Porter called the jury into the courtroom and read a special instruction that essentially told them to try to find a middle ground between their own beliefs and the need to reach a consensus–but without sacrificing their beliefs.
The fifth day, Saturday, was marked by a request for transcripts of testimony from seven officers and the note from Horsky asking about charges against Shipp. Porter did not answer the question and ordered the note put under court seal.
Jordan said Shipp “would just sit there. He wouldn’t put his input in. We kept saying, `Where are you coming from?’ He kept saying, `I can’t tell you. I can’t convince you. It’s 11 to one. You show me.'”
Shipp later said that each night as he went to bed, as the pressure from his fellow jurors mounted, he thought about taking the easy way out and changing his mind to go along with the majority. He did not, he said, because “I got to live with myself.”
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Some jurors began taking notes on what Shipp said, Jordan recalled. When they read them back, Shipp argued that he had been misquoted, she said. “Some people were so frustrated, they wouldn’t look at him.”
“I joked,” she said. “I told one juror that we did everything but hand puppets. That was going to be the next thing.”
On Wednesday, their ninth day, the frustration level reached a new high–they were deadlocked on whether they were deadlocked. Four jurors thought they were not deadlocked and one was continuing to argue a point of evidence just before they were summoned into the courtroom for the last time, where the mistrial would be declared.
Just before noon, Porter kept them outside for just a moment to address the packed courtroom.
“Oftentimes in criminal trials, some people are disappointed,” he said. “That is simply part of the nature of the beast. It is just the way it is. … These people have tried. We have asked them to decide the issues in a difficult case.
“And they have done their best,” the judge declared. “We can ask no more.”