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| Defense Attorney Richard Gabriel |
There was shock across the country in 2011 when 25-year-old Orlando mom Casey Anthony was found not guilty of the murder of her 2-year-old daughter, Caylee.
But there was one person who saw it coming.
Richard Gabriel is one of the country’s top trial consultants, working with defendants in high-profile cases to help steer the trial toward acquittal.
Having worked on more than a thousand trials, including those of Anthony, O.J. Simpson and Phil Spector, his expertise comes in helping defense teams learn which factors will most strongly influence jurors, and this begins with the all-important jury selection.
In his new book, “Acquittal,” Gabriel shows how he picked the juries that would say “not guilty.”
To prepare for jury selection in the murder case against Simpson, Gabriel and his team conducted a slew of research, including polls and mock trials.
What they learned was essential for Simpson’s defense, including that many in the potential jury pool wanted Simpson to be not guilty, that many doubted he had time to commit the murders, that only those under 35 placed faith in DNA evidence, and that many in the potential jury pool had “been treated poorly by the police.”
As a result of this last finding, the defense filed a motion to ensure that, when jury notices were mailed out, “lower socioeconomic areas were fairly represented,” as they sought jurors for whom “claims of police profiling and evidence planting were not desperate attempts of a defendant trying to escape conviction,” but rather, “a reality of living with the Los Angeles Police Department.”
They also uncovered some surprising findings on the attitudes of women.
“Almost half of the divorced or widowed women we spoke to leaned toward acquittal,” he writes. “Nicole Brown Simpson’s history of 911 calls and domestic abuse did not impress them as a motive for murder.”
Delving deeper, Gabriel learned that “some who had been in troubled relationships shared that they themselves had contributed to the volatility . . . and the stronger women were proud to claim they gave as much as they got.”
Given that the prosecution would be hoping to fill the jury with women, assuming they would be sympathetic toward Nicole, this was crucial.
“We learned that we did not have to be overly concerned with strong women who had been in physically combative relationships,” he writes. “This provided a big strategic advantage by allowing us to keep jurors that the prosecution would also want, gambling that our research was better than their intuition.”
A questionnaire was sent to prospective jurors, including 50 pages asking for their perspectives on anything that could come into play during the trial, and a one-page hardship questionnaire. Since the trial was expected to last six months, many ideal prosecution jurors could not serve.
“Many higher-income, conservative jurors who were more reliant on law enforcement and less willing to believe in police tampering or misconduct did not want to serve on this long a trial,” he writes.
This left, in large part, employees of the government and other large entities whose employers would pay for their jury time and who, being familiar with mind-numbing and inefficient bureaucracies, “were more receptive to the defense themes of police error and misconduct.”
In addition to deciding what type of individual jurors they sought, they also had to strategize about the jury as a whole.
Read the full story: www.nypost.com
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