Foremanhood and Fatherhood -- Jodi Arias Case

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Celeb reporters Selin Darkalstanian and Jane Velez Mitchell cover the Jodi Arias trial 

photo by Camille Kimball

People have strong feelings about William Zervakos, the foreman of the Jodi Arias jury who first spoke out on Good Morning America, in what would be the pre-dawn hours in Arizona. right after the jury caused a mistrial in the penalty phase of the trial.

So many commenters have filled up my recent post about him that blogger is having a hard time keeping up and the page seems to fail to display some of the comments, even though I can see them in the administrative section. Even my own replies to people are having a hard time pushing through.

So people have strong feelings about the things that William Zervakos has been revealing about his thinking as he came to the decision to vote "deadlock" in the last phase of the trial. This vote forced Maricopa County to make the decision of whether to re-try the penalty phase with a new jury. It was an expensive decision and at this time it's a yes. So the County Attorney undoubtedly has some feelings about Zervakos, too.

But one of the people with the strongest feelings is Richard Zervakos, son to the jury foreman. He has written a blog post in defense of his father.

It is very honorable to defend one's father during a hailstorm of public criticism and I respect Zervakos fils for doing so. In fact, I want to tread carefully here because his sense of loyalty and love are good things and they are tender things.

But the jury foreman has made himself a public figure by going on one of the nation's biggest media venues at the earliest opportunity and continuing to grant interviews afterward. His son, Richard, has also made himself a public figure by jumping into the maelstrom amidst the backdrop of his own prodigious use of twitter, instagram, blogging and so forth. In his post about his father Richard even declares that he, the son, is a media whore.

So it's within all reasonable ethics to respond to him publicly myself.

Richard, the son, says that a trial "like this" comes along "once or twice in a generation." He wishes his dad could "decompress over cocktails" with the "one or two people per generation" who know what his dad is going through.

Once again, I find myself shaking my head, blowing a sigh through my teeth. How is it that so many can only remember one trial at a time? I guarantee you that the next big trial, which should bubble up in the next 10 minutes or so, will instantly become the "once or twice in a generation" trial that flabbergasts its assigned judge, incenses the defense attorneys, and "victimizes" interested third parties such as Zervakos and son.

The hit musical film Chicago puts a spotlight, quite a literal one, on this phenomenon. When her character first arrives in jail for the murder of her lover, Renee Zellwegger is awed by the famous inmate already there portrayed by Catherine Zeta-Jones. Soon, however, Zellwegger's character takes over the public imagination. But Zellwegger and Zeta-Jones both find the lights and attention suddenly re-focused on incoming murder defendant Lucy Liu. They both struggle to gain it back. At the end of the film, the sparkle of public attention enjoyed by Zellwegger on her day of triumph in court is quickly extinguished by a murder committed on the courthouse steps as all the assembled reporters and microphones dash outside to follow the new case.

In Jodi's case, the Chicago plot point "new case" occurred on Monday, May 6th, the first full day of deliberations in the guilt phase in Arizona. So real life actually was quite a bit more swift than the movie scenario. On May 6, three young women miraculously escaped an evil captor in Cleveland while Jodi cooled her heels in a courthouse holding cell and before she learned if she'd be deemed guilty or not.

That's just the crime portion of the screenplay of real life. The next big trial will start in a few days when HOA wannabe sentinel George Zimmerman defends his version of how he killed teen Trayvon Martin. If you thought the Jodi jurors had pressure, wait till that jury gets seated....

At least the Jodi jurors had the bliss of not knowing what they were in for when they went through jury selection process and promised to proceed with their civic duty. There will hardly be a person in the Zimmerman jury pool who can be unaware they are being selected for a racially charged case with national significance.

While writing this post I could easily think of 2 dozen other cases of extreme high profile that played out in the last 20 or 30 years. I don't know how Zervakos the younger defines a "generation" but just my idle memory without even doing any research works out statistically to one big case every 12-14 months, not one per generation.

My memory banks tilt toward the west coast, so I'm sure I'm missing quite a few, but here are the first dozen or so of the cases I came up with that had comparable attention: Casey Anthony, Amanda Knox, Drew Peterson, Scott Peterson, the Cleveland case, George Zimmerman, Warren Jeffs, Andrea Yates, Conrad Murray, Amy Fisher, Clark "Rockefeller,"  Menendez brothers,  Elizabeth Johnson (Baby Gabriel), Sandy Murphy (Ted Binion), Mary Kay LeTourneau, Daniel Pelosi, Andrew Luster and, well, a whole lot more. I didn't even get into the defendants whose celebrity status preceded their arrests.*

The good news for the foreman's son then is that there are way more people to commiserate with his dad than he thought. "Over cocktails" is going to be more like a cocktail party...in a convention hall.

Zervakos the son tells us how the media works and paints a picture of predatory ABC minions overtaking his dad's home and staying there overnight. I know how the media works, too, having been a part of it all my adult life. They don't carry bayonets and wear red coats, billeting themselves by force in the homes of hapless citizens. They had to be invited in. At any time in the process, Zervakos the foreman could have said no. Far from bayonets, most producers, bookers, and reporters carry a polished smile and a friendly voice in their back pocket arsenal. We already know about the foreman's level of immunity toward such overtures. At least he's consistent.

But none of this is to say that Mr. Zervakos pere did anything wrong by not voting to send Jodi Arias to execution. There are many good reasons not to give a death sentence. Jodi is young. People seem to find it easier to say your life is toast to a 52 year old than to a 32 year old. Even a death penalty supporter could make such a decision. Jodi did not come into court overtly glorying in bloodlust by displaying hand drawn images of stabbings or other gory acts. Her drawings may be offensive to many but you can find far worse stuff by some inmates.** A truly death-qualified juror can decide that is his or her own personal criterion for whether or not they will vote for Death Row.  These are two examples of defensible benchmarks for when a death-qualified juror might feel he could not deliver the ultimate verdict.

Marjorie Orbin, the defendant in my book WHAT SHE ALWAYS WANTED (see bookstore tab above), was spared the death penalty not because she was a busty blonde who looked hot in a french cut panty. Jurors stated she was given a life sentence out of deference to the grown man her child would one day become. They did not want to martyr her in his eyes nor deprive him of the chance to unload his feelings directly some day. Now that is a very excellent reason to stay the hand from the noose.

But what the Zervakos family is feeling the backlash of is not that the death penalty wasn't given snip-snap no questions asked, although some commenters in their venting of their feelings may sound like it. The backlash is from the stated reasons for causing a mistrial.  The defendant looks like my daughter/lost love/waitress-I'm-crushing-on not a murderer, although she admitted to the very acts we saw such terrible evidence of, is not a defensible reason.

Following it up with a raid on the character of the young man whose throat was sawed down to a "hinge" about as slender as Jodi's lethally supple wrist, is to throw out a challenge, a dare, a sortie that must be met by those who also have opinions on the case. And, as Mr. Foreman should have known by the network television foot soldiers scouting him out, they are legion.

Another way to avoid the tough time he is having now would have been if the foreman would have revealed during jury questioning that he felt influenced by the appearance of the defendant. He would have been excused well before opening arguments and would currently be happily enjoying public neutrality and obscurity, maybe barbecuing over the holiday with his loyal son, making conversation about how he was almost on that jury that's all up in the news right now.

That sounds kind of nice, jawing with your son about the news and sharing tales of your life over barbecue. Richard Zervakos, the foreman's son, closes his own column by invoking a vision of his sleeping four year old son and stating a message of love and loyalty to his father. It's lovely. I appreciate it.

It's so lovely that it reminds me that Travis Alexander had already lost his own father and that on June 4, 2008, he lost the chance to ever have a son.

If Zervakos, father or son, ever visits this blog, that line will evoke a strong emotional reaction. I actually do not mean to taunt them in any way. I strongly condemn any harassment of them. But perhaps they might be called upon to understand that the foreman's comments similarly provoked a deep emotional response in others. This is not because people are blood thirsty or sordid. It is because they are human.  The need to process grief is deep in the marrow. So very many of the people who send me messages on twitter, post comments on this blog, or meet me at book signings reveal some personal sorrow of their own. I believe this, more than anything, explains the magnetic attraction to trials and to true crime shows and books. It is not a phenomenon of social media, television, or even the printing press. It is a phenomenon of being human.

In the very ancient Greek story of the Iliad, Homer tells us about the woman Briseis who discovers her friend and protector Patroklos has been killed in battle. She sings a heart-wrenching lament about her friend and is joined by the other women of the community, women who did not have such a personal connection to the deceased. At the very end of her solo, Homer has a special message for us about the women behind Briseis, in the chorus:

"So now I cannot stop crying for you, now that you are dead, you who were always so sweet and gentle."  

So she spoke, weeping, and the women kept on mourning in response. 

They mourned for Patroklos, that was their pretext, but they were all mourning, each and every one of them, for what they really cared for in their sorrow.

                                             (Iliad translation by Professor Gregory Nagy)

Grief is personal. Grief is universal. Grief is heavy and it needs sharing. The Greeks of thousands of years ago knew it. For all our TV and web and mobile technology, we are still made of the same ancient stuff and must cry together.

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* Some more of the random big case names from the last 20-30 years: Aileen Wournos, Susan Smith, Betty Broderick, Phil Spectre, Michael Jackson, Robert Blake, Karla Hmolka, Tonya Harding, OJ Simpson, Anna Nicole Smith (Howard Stern criminal case as well as custody case). Oh, my goodness, how could I forget? The arrests and trials of the captors of Elizabeth Smart, Jaycee Dugard, that super-creep in Austria, what other painfully obvious case am I forgetting still?!

**Think of school shooter TJ Lane who, during a court appearance that took place in Ohio while Jodi's case was underway in Arizona, unveiled a hand made "KILLER" T shirt, flipped off the families, and bragged he used the same hand to pleasure himself that he used to kill their children.

• You can find the blog that inspired this essay by googling the term SamirsDad. It is a tumblr blog. 

• Also, click here << for a post about a similar mis-statement about big trials made by Casey Anthony judge Belvin Perry