20
TWELVE CITIZENS
The Santa Barbara DA’s Office got exactly what it hoped for on August 11, 2008. The Supreme Court of the United States, in a lengthy statement, ruled that the Santa Barbara County DA’s Office would not be pulled off the Jesse James Hollywood case, as the defense had hoped for. The Supreme Court justices admitted that this case was unprecedented and breaking new ground in the rules of law. Their decision stated, No federal or state court previously has addressed a scenario remotely resembling the circumstances here. That being said, the justices ruled that Ron Zonen may have made errors in judgment, he did not taint the entire Santa Barbara DA’s Office. That office could now prosecute Jesse James Hollywood in their county.
The jury selection process, when it finally began in April 2009, was intense by both the prosecution and defense. There was a jury pool of literally hundreds of people, and many of them would rather have been anywhere else than facing the prospect of sitting on a jury for two months or more. Many did have legitimate excuses for not serving, either for hardship reasons or prior commitments that fell into the days that the trial was expected to last.
Most of the people excluded from jury duty fell into the “hardship” category, because of financial reasons. Their employers would only pay them for a few days of service or wouldn’t compensate them at all. In fact, one man was let off because he was the entire workforce at his business. He was owner, employee and secretary all rolled into one. Another man let off was a fisherman, who could not afford to be away from the ocean for so long a period of time. Another group of people let off were students at nearby colleges and universities, and finals were only days away.
And so it went, hour after hour, day after day, in a lengthy and tedious process of elimination. Even Jesse James Hollywood seemed bored at times as he sat at the defense table. More than once he stifled a huge yawn behind his right hand as the questions from both defense and prosecution droned on. One major reason for exclusion was that a prospective juror was just too far at one end of the spectrum when it came to the death penalty question. One person said, “I’m not God. Only God can take a life.” Another answered that all murderers should be put to death, despite mitigating circumstances. Another knew Ron Zonen, and was excluded, while another knew a detective who had been to the Lizard’s Mouth murder scene. To try and make the process go more quickly, Judge Hill constantly kept trying to make the lawyers move along from prospective jurors who had little chance of being empaneled. Hill kept saying, “We have to be pragmatic about this.”
Once in a while there was a very unusual reason that someone would be excluded. One person had plane tickets to the Philippines to celebrate the recent win of a boxing match. And in another case, one of the prospective jurors had actually been a student of DDA Hans Almgren. In his questioning Blatt facetiously asked Almgren if the young woman had received an A in his class. Almgren shot back, “All my students are A students.” There was even a big laugh by one and all when one person stated on the questionnaire in big bold letters at the end, Please don’t pick me!
One of the most unexpected people in the jury pool was a middle-age woman. Alex Kessel asked her with a great deal of irony if she was glad to be sitting where she was, knowing that the overwhelming majority of people were not. The woman answered, “Yes.”
“You are?” Kessel asked in surprise. “Why?”
The woman replied, “Because it’s nice and cool in here.”
Outside on the streets of Santa Barbara, it was a very warm day, and the courtroom was one of the coolest places in town.
Oddly enough, if most prospective jurors did not want to be on a jury for six to eight weeks, there were a few who looked forward to the experience. They had the time and inclination to sit on a death penalty case. And eventually all those who were picked fell into the middle ground on the death penalty issue. They agreed that they would keep it open as an option, and follow all the instructions that Judge Hill would give them.
Ever since 2005, when Jesse James Hollywood had been captured in Brazil, there had been one delay after another as his case headed to trial. The largest delay, of course, stemmed from the movie Alpha Dog. By May 2009, it looked as if all the delays were finally over. And yet, there was one more huge delay that no one could have foreseen. It wasn’t caused by prosecutors, defense lawyers or filmmakers. It was caused by Mother Nature, and in its fury, it not only disrupted the trial, it threatened to wipe out the city of Santa Barbara.
It was learned later that the fire had been started by someone actually trying to trim back brush along a trail in San Roque Canyon above Santa Barbara, at about 1:40 P.M. on May 5, 2009. By 4:30 P.M., the fire had burned 150 acres, and there were seventy engines on scene, along with fourteen strike teams. Things were fairly well in hand at that point, but there were fears for the next day when afternoon winds were expected to kick up.
The fears were more than justified. The winds didn’t just “kick up,” they roared down from the mountains with near hurricane force. At around 3:35 P.M. on May 6, while the prosecutors and defense were still arguing issues before Judge Hill, the lights suddenly dimmed in the courtroom. When everyone stepped outside the courthouse, they were amazed to see that the fire, which had been thin wisps of gray smoke in the mountains, had suddenly blown up into a raging inferno. Thick clouds of black smoke rose above the city, like a malignant genie released from a bottle, and flames shot one hundred feet high into the air.
By 4:15 P.M., Santa Barbara Fire Department spokesperson John Ahlman told reporters, “This thing is out of control. All we can do now is try to save homes.”
By the evening of May 7, twenty-four thousand Santa Barbarans had evacuated their homes, some in mandatory evacuation zones, and others in precautionary zones. The courthouse, where the Jesse James trial was to take place, was only a couple of blocks from the mandatory evacuation zone. By now, one spokesperson told of upper Santa Barbara being a “ghost town.” Once again, by evening, “sundowner winds” kicked up, and flames leapt one hundred feet into the air. May 8 was much the same, with heroic efforts by firefighters to save homes surrounded by walls of flame.
In the end, though, it was the cool moist air of May 9 that more than anything allowed the firefighters to get a handle on the fire. It was their first break in four days. By the time it was over, the “Jesusita Fire” had consumed more than nine thousand acres, destroyed eighty homes and injured twenty-nine firefighters. At its peak, 4,200 firefighters had battled the blaze along with 428 engines. The firefighters not only saved Santa Barbara, they saved the Jesse James trial from moving out of town—a matter that the prosecution had been fighting ever since 2005.
Even before the fire was fully contained, prospective jurors were filing back into the courtroom on Monday, May 11. One by one, a juror was selected to sit on the jury, while nearly one hundred others crammed every seat available in the courtroom gallery.
One thing was certain, both William Blatt and Alex Kessel were as thorough and efficient as Cheri Owen had been careless in her pretrial jury selection. And on May 11, Blatt sprang a huge issue before Judge Hill. Kessel stated that both Graham Pressley and Jesse Rugge were slated to be witnesses for the prosecution, and that they had better have their lawyers consulted. The reason was, both Blatt and Kessel were going to impeach Pressley’s and Rugge’s prior testimony, saying that they had lied to the police and on the witness stand in previous trials. And if they lied in this forthcoming trial, and it led to a death penalty conviction of Jesse James Hollywood—it was actually Pressley and Rugge who could receive a death penalty for lying in the trial. Kessel stated, “Even Ron Zonen called Jesse Rugge a liar when he was on the stand in his own trial.”
This was, of course, a huge risk for both Pressley and Rugge, who might not want to testify at all. And it was a major concern for the prosecution. Both Pressley and Rugge were key witnesses in the prosecution’s theory of the case against Jesse James Hollywood as the “mastermind” of the murder of Nick Markowitz. It was Pressley who had supposedly told Natasha Adams and Kelly Carpenter that Jesse Hollywood had offered Rugge money to kill Nick.
And it was Jesse Rugge who supposedly confirmed this to the two girls on August 8, 2000. If the jurors never heard this from Pressley’s and Rugge’s own lips on the witness stand, the prosecution’s case would be diminished exponentially.
This was also a big issue for Judge Hill to decide upon, and he said to Kessel, “You’ve had the prosecution witness list for over a month. Why is this coming up now?”
Kessel agreed that he and Blatt did have the witness list for that period of time, but all during that period, they had been dealing with other issues in court. Then Kessel said, “I don’t know of any prosecutor who has ever put on the stand, witnesses they know who have perjured themselves in other trials.”
The new prosecutor, Joshua Lynn, was beside himself with this latest revelation by the defense, just before trial was to begin. Even Judge Hill seemed none too pleased by this latest development in the proceedings. He did agree, however, that it was a problem that needed to be addressed. Before anything went any further in this area, he said, he had to read statements that Pressley and Rugge had made in those other trials.
When Judge Hill finally ruled on these motions, he told the defense that Joshua Lynn and Hans Almgren were not asking Pressley and Rugge to lie on the stand now. If they had done so in previous trials, that was a different issue. “It does not exclude them from being witnesses now,” Hill declared.
The defense strongly disagreed, and said that it put the defense at a huge disadvantage, knowing that “two liars will be on the stand.” Judge Hill responded, “Even if they lied in some portions of former trials, they didn’t lie throughout.” One thing was for certain, after four years of delays, Judge Hill was not going to let this latest issue derail the trial, which was now set only days away.
Hill said, “Opening statements are going to be on Friday, May fifteenth.” Barring another disastrous fire, flash flood, earthquake, the trial of Jesse James Hollywood was finally going to begin.