The following article by reporter Diana Walsh appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle on December 16. It sheds light on what Fran actually did and why she did it. If you are at all interested, please read on.

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BEHIND CLOSED DOORS
Two jury members were kicked off, the foreman was ousted, and the case was nearly deadlocked. Now jurors in the Scott Peterson case tell the story of their decision to sentence him to death.
- Diana Walsh, Stacy Finz, Chronicle Staff Writers
Thursday, December 16, 2004

It was to be their final vote, and few in the room thought they had reached a consensus.

The Scott Peterson jury had spent six months together, judged him guilty of first- and second-degree murder, but when it came to sentencing him to death or to life in prison without the possibility of parole, there appeared to be one holdout: Juror No. 2, a 55-year-old San Carlos resident named Tom Marino.

"I thought it was going to be a hung jury," recalled Steve Cardosi, the jury foreman, during an interview at his home in Half Moon Bay.

He also knew the jurors were at the end of their deliberations. They either would have a verdict of death, or they would be deadlocked with no hope of deciding Peterson's sentence.

In interviews with The Chronicle, four jurors talked in depth about what went on behind closed doors in the jury room. For five months, they had had front-row seats in the country's most watched trial; everyone in the world was allowed to talk about the case -- except them.

On Monday, Judge Alfred Delucchi, who presided over the case, allowed them to talk publicly for the first time. In interviews, they shed new light on their two rounds of deliberations, why two members were removed from the original jury and why the panel ousted its foreman in midstream.

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It was Nov. 3, the jury had just heard five months of testimony, and they were ready to begin deciding Peterson's guilt or innocence in the deaths of his wife, Laci, and their unborn son. After listening to jury instructions, the six men and six women filed out of the courtroom to a deliberation room located behind the courtroom.
Lunch had already been delivered. The jurors ate quickly and got down to business.

Someone quickly nominated Gregory Jackson, a man with degrees in medicine and law, to serve as foreman. Everyone around the table agreed.

As Jackson stood in front of the room's large whiteboard, the others called out topics they wanted to discuss. In time, the entire board was full with areas to explore: Peterson's lies, his phone conversations, locations of the bodies, his secret girlfriend Amber Frey, among dozens of others.

They then mapped out a key element of their analysis: a time line of everything they knew about Dec. 24, 2002, the day Peterson said he last saw his wife at their Modesto home before going fishing off the Berkeley Marina.

The time line began with the last call Laci Peterson made to her mom at 8: 30 p.m. Dec. 23 and ended the following day at 5:17 p.m., when Peterson called his mother-in-law to tell her Laci was missing. In between, on the chart, the jury noted Peterson's cell phone records, computer usage at his home and warehouse, and the time he purchased a parking pass for the Berkeley Marina.

Jurors also mapped the four hours on the 24th in which Peterson made not a single call, a break from his habit on most days to make cell phone calls every few minutes.

With the time line complete, the jurors decided to hear from Peterson himself.

A piece of evidence that the jurors said they could scantly remember from the trial - Peterson's first interview with Modesto police Detective Al Brocchini - was one of the first items they reviewed.

A tape of the interview was shown in the third week of the trial. Jurors said that at the time, they hardly understood the importance of much of what Peterson said. But when they reviewed it in the jury room, they saw Peterson lying six hours after he first reported his wife missing.

Each time they heard Peterson's explanations, he sounded more and more deceptive.

"We were looking for inconsistencies,'' explained Cardosi.

The jurors also listened to a taped conversation between Peterson and his mother-in-law, Sharon Rocha, and replayed a wiretap of Peterson whistling -- as if in relief -- when Rocha tells him in a message that divers searching San Francisco Bay had turned up an anchor and not a body, as media reports speculated it might be. Peterson's lies were so numerous that the jurors began to wonder whether they would really know when he was telling the truth.

"Can we believe anything he said throughout this whole case is the truth?'' juror Greg Beratlis said the jurors wondered.

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But trouble was brewing with Gregory Jackson, the foreman.
A scholarly man, Jackson had not forged many friendships on the jury. Many in the group had coffee with others on the panel. But Jackson, a corporate lawyer, spent most lunch hours and breaks by himself, often answering business e-mails on his Blackberry.

Still, the jurors felt confident in their choice. Jackson paid rapt attention to witnesses in the courtroom, and his scrupulous note taking -- he filled 19 notebooks -- had impressed many on the panel -- even as they joked about his running out of ink. In selecting him as their foreman, they thought his higher degrees in both law and medicine would surely be an asset in trying to weigh the testimony of medical experts who testified during the trial.

By the second day of deliberations, the jurors decided they needed a process, a methodical way to sift through the evidence and testimony. After they spent the first night sequestered in a hotel, Jackson came back to the jury room and laid out a plan. He wanted to comb through a mound of evidence and testimony. Not only did he need detailed notes, Jackson now needed a detailed analysis.

"We'll be here for months,'' one of the jurors complained.

The jurors plodded along, brainstorming, mapping, listening, watching and reviewing expert testimony.

By the third day, the jurors said they hadn't taken a vote, but it was clear that most, if not all, were leaning toward a conviction. But Jackson was bogging things down. He kept offering his expertise, first as a lawyer, then as a doctor. The others just wanted him to be a juror.

"He had to write it a certain way, and everything had to be a certain way, '' said Cardosi. "He tended to talk a lot and not remember quite as much. ... It wasn't going well. ... We were being ineffective as a group.''

At first, the jurors tried to get Jackson to sit down and go through his notes, letting someone else take over as facilitator for the group.

"The goal was not to remove him from the jury,'' said Cardosi. "Our goal was to have him sit down and have him go through all of his books."

The tension in the room proved to be too much for Jackson. On Monday morning, the fourth day of deliberations, he told the judge he wanted off the jury.

"He told us he'd never been through a process that was so argumentative, '' said Beratlis, who conceded that tensions were high, but he expected that because a man's life was at stake.

After refusing to remove him, Judge Delucchi called the jury into court and read them an admonition about getting along.

But Jackson's move angered at least one juror, Beratlis.

"I said, 'I'm disappointed in you -- you are ready to quit. You are not speaking for me. You are the foreman. You are speaking for all of us. Quitting is not an option,'' said Beratlis, who coaches youth sports.

Beratlis said he suggested they vote to pick a new foreman.

The motion failed by just one vote. Jackson kept his role, but the friction in the room only mounted. The following day, the fifth day of deliberations, there was more upheaval. Juror No. 7, Fran Gorman, was about to get booted.

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Gorman, who worked as a systems auditor for Pacific Gas & Electric Co., had been troubled by the testimony of a computer forensics expert who testified for the prosecution in August. Peterson had been confronted about his marital status by Frey's best friend on Dec. 6, and prosecutors said he had checked a fishing-oriented Web site on Dec. 8 -- which they said indicated premeditation. The defense, however, argued that Peterson had accessed the site on Dec. 5, which was the date on the information Peterson printed out. The expert never explained the discrepancy. (Fran's note: Actually, he did speculate that Peterson probably accessed the report on December 5th, saved it in his computer, and returned to print it on the 8th.)

Shortly after the testimony, Gorman had gone online on her home computer and discovered that the fishing Web site wasn't updated every day. Peterson, she determined, could have accessed and printed the fishing information on Dec. 8.

Early in the deliberations, Gorman mentioned that she'd gone to the Internet and accessed the site. But before she could even tell the other jurors what she'd found, she felt a tap on her shoulder. A fellow juror was cautioning her not to discuss her findings. A couple of jurors seemed bothered but didn't make it a big deal.

But when they appeared close to taking a vote on guilt on day 5 of deliberations, two of the jurors said they didn't think Gorman could be objective or fair because of the research she'd done. A note was sent to the judge, who after interviewing her and other jurors removed her from the panel.

In an interview this week, Gorman said she felt the jury was being kept in the dark about inaccurate information. "I don't know why the witness was allowed to give us the impression that Scott had gone on the Web site on the 5th,'' when that may not have been the case at all.

After excusing Gorman, the judge brought the jurors back to court and told them that with the addition of a new juror, alternate Richelle Nice, they would have to start from scratch.

But Gorman's departure meant more trouble for Jackson.

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Gorman had supported Jackson's bid to stay as foreman. Now, with the addition of Nice, the jury was told to start over. After ripping off everything from the walls and wiping the whiteboard clean, the jury voted to elect a new foreman. They settled on the man they called "Cap."
At 29, Cardosi was the youngest member of the jury. A paramedic firefighter from Half Moon Bay, he thought the defense team would never choose him as a juror. But in the end, he was the man who would guide the jury through the deliberations.

Jackson appeared distraught. The following morning, the sixth day of deliberations, he told his fellow jurors he wanted off and again visited the judge. The judge excused him.

"It became emotional for all of us,'' said Beratlis of the time he called "Jury Survivor." "We thought we'd spent five months here, and now we were all going to be told to go home.''

Jackson was replaced by alternate Dennis Lear. The jurors, who felt they'd come up with a good process, said they had gotten Lear up to speed quickly, rewriting the topics to discuss, mapping out another time line and replaying the Brocchini tape. Lear, a man who had a strange link to the case before it began -- his future son-in-law owns a restaurant once owned by Peterson -- seemed content with what the jurors showed him and had few concerns about the direction they were going.

Within hours, they'd all found Peterson guilty of the murders. But they still had to decide if the murders were premeditated. Peterson, they believed, had carefully planned his wife's murder, but several jurors felt he wasn't thinking about the Petersons' unborn baby when he plotted to kill his wife. There were many times Peterson had demonstrated how much he'd liked children, and, Cardosi recalls asking, if he'd really been focused on killing the baby, wouldn't he have stabbed his wife in the stomach?

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On the seventh day of deliberations, seven hours after Lear was seated on the jury, the group decided to split the verdict, convicting him of first- degree murder in the death of his wife and second-degree murder for his unborn son. Many of the jurors wept.
They would be back in the room four weeks later to make their fateful decision about Peterson's life.

On the first day of penalty phase, they started anew, voting Cardosi as foreman again. This time, he wrote on the whiteboard reasons Peterson should live and reasons he should die.

On Friday, the second day of deliberations, the jury had taken a straw poll. Six voted for death and two for life, and four abstained. They rested for the weekend, but two jurors still sought life Monday morning.

Then, Cardosi asked to see the autopsy photos and one of a very pregnant Laci Peterson shortly before she died. Cardosi, who favored death, said he needed to see the photographs of Laci and what Peterson had done to her, but he also wanted the others to get one last look at them.

Nice, a mother of four boys who was prone to crying during the trial, wept as she looked at the autopsy picture of the baby she dubbed "little man" and whom the jurors had come to know over the course of the trial as Conner. She remembered thinking the haunting photographs were a gruesome reminder of the baby who would never grow up to be "the good kid" his father was said to be.

The grisly photos of the decomposing baby were passed from juror to juror.

"They looked. I cried," she said. "I got emotional, and I said, 'His daddy did this to him.' "

Another straw poll was taken -- the vote now stood at 11-1, with Marino as the lone holdout.

Even before he was selected for the jury, Marino, a Roman Catholic, seemed to have been struggling with sentencing a man to die -- he'd told the judge during jury selection that he'd sought guidance from his priest on the issue. On Monday, the third day of deliberations of the penalty phase of the trial, his internal compass seemed to be leaning in favor of life in prison.

His fellow jurors asked whether there was anything else he wanted to talk about. Marino, who noted Peterson's lack of a criminal record and his many good deeds, said he'd like to hear their thinking one last time. So one by one, the 11 jurors told Marino why they favored death over life in prison.

Marino never tipped his hand, never gave any hint that he'd changed his mind. Still, the jurors decided to take one last vote before signaling the judge.

As they had before, the jurors wrote their verdict on a piece of paper and handed them to Cardosi. He read each aloud, and each had just one word: death. Shortly after 11:30 a.m. Monday, they informed the judge they'd reached a verdict.

"We had 12 for death,'' Cardosi said. "I was shocked.''

E-mail the writers at dwalsh@sfchronicle.com and sfinz@sfchronicle.com.

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