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Mehserle Jury Selected; Family Angry With Makeup

Posted: 9:45 am PDT June 8, 2010Updated: 4:47 pm PDT June 8, 2010

LOS ANGELES — A jury dominated by women and without any African Americans was selected Tuesday to determine the fate of former BART police officer Johannes Mehserle, accused of killing an unarmed man on a Bay Area transit platform less than 18 months ago.

The makeup of the 12 jurors and six alternatives was criticized by shooting victim Oscar Grant III’s family. Mehserle is white and Grant is an African-American man.

“It feels like we already have lost,” Grant’s aunt told KTVU.

The 12 jurors included eight women and four men. Of those, seven were white, four were Hispanic and one was East Indian. The alternates were composed of five women and one man. Three were Asian-Americans, two were white and the sixth was Hispanic.

Mehserle, who is being tried in Los Angeles on a change of venue from Oakland, entered the courtroom at 8 a.m. Tuesday as the tedious process of selecting 12 jurors and six alternates from the pool of 102 potential panelists began.

He is charged with first degree murder of Grant , who was removed from a BART train along with his friends after a disturbance broke out in the early morning hours of Jan.1, 2009.

Mehserle was one of several BART officers detaining the young men when a disturbance erupted on the Fruitvale BART platform.

The former BART officer has admitted he fatally shot Grant, but claims he thought he had pulled out his non-lethal Taser instead of his service revolver. Mehserle’s defense claims the former transit officer thought he was firing a Taser.

Over the weekend, attorneys on both sides of case huddled with their respective teams as they reviewed the 15-page questionnaires that all the potential jurors had filled out. The goal of those meetings, legal experts said, was to put together the best jury for your case and to weed out ‘stealth’ jurors.

“It’s very difficult to ferret out stealth jurors,” said former prosecutor Michael Cardoza. “They do get into the jury box and they tell untruths. They just don’t tell it the way it is.  They don’t tell how they really feel because they do have a hidden agenda.”

“For example, a police officer may have treated one of them very, very badly and it’s their time to get even with the cops. On the other side, you have someone law enforcement minded that says I’m tired of crime. I’m going to vote guilty. You pretty much don’t have to prove much to me. They don’t tell those type of things.”

“That’s why I like questionnaires,” Cardoza continued. “There are questions in there that ask them to point that out. I think jurors are more likely to do it on a questionnaire where they can do it privately.”

Cardoza said the process of voir dire – selecting the jury – will be different than a normal murder case.

“In this case, it is going to be a different of voir dire, the district attorney is going to want defense-oriented jurors,” he said. “They want more liberal jurors. In the sense that they are going to look at this and say ‘Wait a minute, I know what the police do in certain situations. I know what they can do to people.’”

“On the other side, the defense, they are going to want the very conservative juror,” Cardoza continued. “The very law enforcement minded juror.”

Jury expert Rich Matthews said the legal teams have to try to uncover a juror’s ‘emotional triggers.”

“In any group of regular citizens that will be some people who have certain emotional triggers,” he said. “There are going to have people who have strong feeling either for or against law enforcement officers. That’s going to get triggered in a case like this.”

Matthews also was critical of Judge Robert Perry’s timetable. Perry said he wants jury selection to be completed within 48 hours and to have opening arguments on Thursday.

“There is efficient and then there is just too darn fast,” Matthews said. “Something is going to get missed on the part of jurors in an important trial. I think in this case there is some chance that this judge is going too fast.”

Perry had told potential jurors that the case would last 3-4 weeks and they would be considering Mehserle’s fate in early July.

The case has stirred emotions in the Bay Area and was moved to Los Angeles on a change of venue because of all the pre-trial publicity.