Eight Months to a Verdict

Each morning at 7:30, they were awakened by sheriffs deputies and escorted under guard to their breakfast, then to the sheriffs bus that took them to the grimy criminal-courts building on Chicago's West Side. Day after day, they sat in silence as witnesses testified about the killing of three guards in the Pontiac state prison riot of 1978. Then they were herded back to the hotel, where the deputies monitored all their phone calls, surveyed them while they took exercise and enforced a TV curfew after 10 p.m.

Reasonable enough treatment of prisoners. But these were not the defendants; they were the jurors. The trial was the prosecution of the so-called Pontiac Ten, which dragged on for nearly eight months until last May, making it one of the longest criminal trials in U.S. history. More than 1,000 potential jurors were questioned by batteries of lawyers, and each side had 120 peremptory challenges. Jury selection alone took five months, and the jurors were sequestered during the whole trial. "How would I describe the experience?" asks Juror Harry Chartrand, 64, a retired electrical worker. "In two words: Lousy."

During the quasi imprisonment, one juror missed out on a job that would have doubled his salary, one had to prepare for and take an entrance exam to graduate school, and two endured the deaths of close relatives. Conjugal visits were permitted only on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. Jeffrey Vacek, 23, a computer technician, says of the separation from his steady girlfriend, "It was hell." Because of the boredom and isolation, the jurors, like many other kinds of captives, began to develop an obsession with food. "The main thing was eating," recalls Sherman Frooman, 53, a clothing salesman. "But after all that restaurant food, sometimes I just wanted a simple hot dog."

Despite the irritations, most of the twelve jurors and six alternates accepted their fate with equanimity. One reason was that Judge Ben K. Miller made a special effort to bar any juror who would regard the long sequestration as a genuine hardship. Says he: "I simply don't think that anyone who is angry or resentful will be an impartial juror. And there is the risk that he might taint the rest of the jury."

One oddity was that five of the jurors were under 24, all singles who had been living at home with their parents, and they naturally formed a social group. They invented a cocktail they called the "Pontiac" (Amaretto and soda with a twist of lime). They held occasional mock trials at which one of them proved adept at imitating the lawyers involved in the case. On April Fools' Day, Linda Tumino, 21, hid in the back of the sheriffs bus and caused a momentary panic among the deputies when they found themselves missing one juror. "All it was was party, party, party," complains one of the older jurors, but a younger one hotly defends the antics as "creative ways of relieving boredom."

The deputies also organized entertainments for the jurors: a trip to the harness races, a werewolf movie, a sightseeing tour, a night at the Shriners' circus, a lavish prime-rib meal (for which the jurors had to ante up because the cost exceeded the dinner allowance of $16), plus weekly shopping trips for snacks and toilet articles. But everywhere the jurors went, the deputies went too. All the defendants had been members of Chicago street gangs, and the authorities did not want to take any chances on attacks or disruptions by other gang members. "It was like a giant baby-sitting service," says Vacek.

The actual presentation of evidence took 67 days but proved remarkably inconclusive. Because prison officials had justifiably concentrated on disarming and locking up the 700 rioting convicts, they failed to produce such key evidence as murder weapons and fingerprints. The jurors finally took only five hours of deliberation to acquit all ten defendants. "I'm sure some of them must have been guilty of something," says Tumino, "but the state had no evidence."

Finally, the jurors returned to lives that they had half-forgotten. "We got so spoiled that it was a real shock to have to drive yourself around and pay for your meals," says Rosalie Cyrier, 20. Adds Tumino: "For the first few days, it was kind of weird being able to talk to anybody you wanted." Salesman Frooman, the one who lost the job prospect, went good-naturedly back to work. "It was a drag because it was so long," he says, "but the jury system is the best system there is."

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