The Haunted Juror

In 1987, Luana Mango Dunn was twenty-six years old and working as a secretary in midtown Manhattan when she received a summons for jury duty. Another person might have tried to wriggle out of it, but she did not. “I believe it’s our civic duty to serve,” she told me. At the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse, at 100 Centre Street, she sat among the prospective jurors, answering questions during the screening process known as voir dire. When asked whether she knew anyone who had been a victim of a crime, she mentioned a relative who had been shot during a robbery in Manhattan a few years earlier. When asked about the recent murder of a French tourist that had made the newspapers, she acknowledged that she had heard about the crime.

She thought that this fact might prevent her from being picked, but it did not, and on July 6, 1987, she was seated in the jury box for the opening of the trial, the People of the State of New York v. Eric Smokes and David Warren. That year, nearly seventeen hundred people were killed in New York City. The murder at the center of this trial had occurred on January 1st, just after the New Year’s Eve celebration in Times Square had ended, when a group of young men approached a French tourist who was walking with his wife on West Fifty-second Street, near Ben Benson’s Steak House. One young man punched him, and one went through his pockets, stealing his wallet. The seventy-one-year-old victim, Jean Casse, was knocked to the sidewalk, hit his head, and died at a hospital later that day. After investigating for seven days, the police arrested Smokes, who was nineteen, and Warren, who was sixteen. The two—best friends who had been near Times Square that night but insisted that they’d been blocks from the crime—were held on Rikers Island, charged with murder and robbery.

Peering at them across the courtroom, Dunn could not stop thinking about how young they looked, especially Warren, who, she recalled, seemed “very scared.” At the trial, twenty-one people testified, including Casse’s widow, two doctors, three employees from Ben Benson’s, five police officers, and seven young men. The only people who said that they had seen Smokes and Warren at the crime scene were four of the young men, ages sixteen to twenty. One testified that he had seen Smokes walk away from the fallen victim and Warren steal the victim’s wallet. Another testified that he had seen Smokes punch the victim and take his wallet. Dunn recalled that these young witnesses were “not looking the defendants in the eye” and seemed as if “they absolutely didn’t want to be there”—but she could not understand why.

The trial’s testimony concluded on July 14, 1987, and the judge, Clifford A. Scott, sent the jurors off to deliberate. Rather than start with a paper-ballot vote, the forewoman conducted an informal poll. Dunn remembered that she was called on first: “I said, ‘Guilty.’ The next seven people around the table said, ‘Not guilty.’ And every time I heard ‘not guilty’ my heart would drop, because I said, ‘Oh, my God, I’m going to be the only “guilty.” ’ And then the last four people said, ‘Guilty.’ ”

The jurors had to be unanimous to avoid a hung jury, so they began discussing the case. “The people who had the not-guilty votes said, ‘There were really no witnesses,’ ” Dunn recalled. “ ‘No witnesses?’ I said. ‘There were five or six or seven of them.’ ” (In addition to the four young men who claimed to have seen the two defendants at the crime scene, there was another who testified that Smokes had confessed to him.) The forewoman requested that all those witnesses’ testimonies be read back to them. Afterward, Dunn said, “three of the four [jurors] immediately changed their vote to guilty.”

Soon the vote was eleven to one, in favor of convicting Smokes and Warren. The one holdout was Latina and seemed to be about thirty, Dunn recalled. The woman kept giving the same reasons for her not-guilty vote: she did not believe the police testimony (because, she insisted, “all cops lie”); she thought that the charges were too severe; and she could not vote to convict Warren “because of his baby face.” Her explanations frustrated Dunn, who could not understand how this woman had made it on to the jury. She remembered telling her, “But that baby face was in the courtroom during the voir dire, when you were being questioned. You should have raised your hand and said, ‘I’m going to have an issue with this. I don’t think I can give a guilty verdict to someone who looks twelve.’ ”

The jurors spent the night in a hotel, and when they still could not reach a consensus they had to stay a second night. Relations in the jury room grew so tense that, Dunn said, a juror shoved a chair so hard that it crashed into a wall. She recalled that all the jurors focussed on the holdout, trying to get her to deliberate on the evidence. In the end, Dunn said, “we verbally pummelled this woman for forty-eight hours until she just threw her hands up in the air and cried.”

The holdout changed her vote, and the jury’s forewoman sent two notes to Scott:

We would like the Court to know that we did not come to a decision
lightly but with great emotional turmoil.

We have reached a verdict.

As the jurors returned to the courtroom, Dunn felt herself becoming emotional. She had no doubt that she had done the right thing by voting to convict, but, she said, “all of a sudden you’re overwhelmed by the unbelievable sensation of their lives being in your hands.” The forewoman announced the verdicts: both Smokes and Warren were guilty.

“Your Honor, I would ask that the jury be polled,” Smokes’s attorney said.

The clerk asked each juror whether they had found Smokes guilty of the charges against him. “Is that your verdict, Madam Forelady?”

“Yes,” she said.

“No. 2 juror, is that your verdict?”

“Yes.”

“Juror No. 3, is that your verdict?”

“Yes.”

Smokes interrupted, “I didn’t even do this!”

The clerk went on: “Juror No. 4, is that your verdict?”

“Yes.”

When the polling had concluded, Smokes shouted out again: “They can kill me right here, man, but I ain’t do it!”

Neither Smokes nor Warren had testified at the trial. “That was literally the first syllable I heard out of him,” Dunn said. “That was really gut-wrenching.” Despite Smokes’s protestations, she did not think that she got the verdict wrong. “I thought he was just some eighteen-year-old saying, ‘I don’t want to go to jail, so I didn’t do it,’ ” she recalled.

The judge ignored Smokes’s outbursts and continued with the proceeding, thanking the jurors. “On behalf of the mayor of the City of New York, we are extremely grateful for citizens such as you who are willing to sit in judgment on two of your fellow-citizens,” he told them. “For all intents and purposes, this case is over for all times.”

This case was not over for all times, however. Dunn’s jury duty had affected her more than she would have expected. In the years after the trial, she made a point of not speaking about her experience to anyone—she did not like to talk about things that upset her—and she avoided those parts of Manhattan that reminded her of the case. She never walked near the courthouse, and, when a friend proposed meeting one night at a restaurant near Ben Benson’s, she insisted that they pick another place. (“I just couldn’t even really go down that block,” she said.)