THE NICHOLS CASE: Holdout jurors face pressure

Elizabeth Strong knows what it’s like to be confined in a room and look across a table at angry faces.

Strong was the lone holdout juror two years ago in a horrific and emotionally charged Fulton County case in which two teens were accused of duct-taping and broiling a puppy in an oven. Her stand caused angry shouting matches over three days of deliberations and caused a mistrial after which she was roundly criticized.

The 70-year-old grandmother was thinking of that ordeal last week as the jury in the death penalty trial of courthouse killer Brian Nichols remained deadlocked 9-3.

“I feel for those jurors (in the minority); I know they are catching it,” she said. “I’m glad I’m not on this one. Ours was hard enough. But this is human beings.”

She said the death penalty will ratchet up the emotions and the pressure. She believes the jurors voting for life imprisonment, “I think, are looking at him as a person. I think they are looking at the pressure he was under. I think they were looking at that he was pushed over the edge by the DA’s office trying the second rape case so quickly.”

Nichols went on his 2005 killing spree after there was a hung jury in a rape case against him and the case was almost immediately retried. He felt he would be found guilty in that and escaped, killing the judge and three others.

“Sometimes you get to a breaking point,” Strong said of Nichols.

Strong can still see the glares from fellow jurors muttering she was an imbecile.

“They told the news (afterward) that I would not discuss the case, that I had come in there with a made-up decision,” said Strong, who recently disagreed when a reporter called her a “holdout.”

“I don’t like the word ‘holdout,’ ” she said. “I went on the evidence given to me (no eyewitnesses saw the teens put the dog in the oven). It wasn’t good evidence.”

Strong, who is black, said there was an underlying and discomforting feeling of racial tension in the room. She said the other three black jurors “just went along with the group, went along with the leaders.”

Steve Young, the foreman, said others in the room were frustrated to the point of shouting. “Some people were getting very upset with her. They failed to see any logic in her reasoning. But no one was berated. As a foreman, I didn’t want anything like that to happen.

“She just was flat-out not going to budge,” he said. “It was obvious for the rest of us, even those with reservations. So we said ‘Let’s go through all the counts” and we taped pieces of paper to the walls. It was extremely clear-cut.”

The two teens, Joshua and Justin Moulder, later pleaded guilty and were sentenced to 10 years.

Strong, who has since met Young and hugged him, still disagrees about it being a clear-cut case. But her decision was not hard.

“It’s not difficult if you believe in yourself,” she said. “You can’t go back and say, ‘Man, I shouldn’t have voted this way.’ I hope and pray (the jurors in the Nichols trial) make the right decision —- for themselves.”

Lee Steinberg, a juror in the 1997 murder case in the killing of 8-year-old Brandon Searcy in Fulton County, said the man who was the lone holdout after a week of deliberations had told other jurors the trial “was like a vacation for him.”

During the deliberations, the vote went from 7-5 to 9-3 and finally 11-1 to convict Alexander Head. The resistant juror, said Steinberg, “said he could not convict a black person. He said a black person could not commit a crime like this.”

“He wasn’t listening; he wasn’t taking notes,” Steinberg said. “He had his mind made up before he walked into the room. It got pretty heated. It upset me (that) he took a stand for the wrong reason.”

Head was retried and convicted the following year.

Ultimately, Gwinnett County District Attorney Danny Porter said, it’s difficult to be a regular citizen sitting on a jury and decide another person should die.

“Everyone talks tough (beforehand), but it’s hard to pull the trigger,” he said.