Challenges await Trump jurors after 'surreal experience'

For six weeks, 100 Centre St. - Manhattan’s criminal courthouse - has been the center of the country’s political and media maelstrom. But the storied downtown building has also been a workplace for 12 New Yorkers deciding the fate of former president Donald Trump.

Having delivered their verdict, finding Trump guilty on 34 felony charges of falsifying records to conceal a sex scandal, the jurors will be loosed on Thursday to their homes in Harlem, Hell’s Kitchen and other locations around the city. After dispensing with a civic obligation at once routine and historic - in the first criminal trial of a former president - members of the panel now return to their day jobs in sales, finance, education and health care.

The transition is likely to be a disorienting one, said Marc J. Whiten, a retired New York criminal court judge in Manhattan and the Bronx.

“It’s a surreal experience under ordinary circumstances,” Whiten said. “Most days, you go to work and do your job, then you get home at night and go to bed. Suddenly, you have the power to decide whether someone’s freedom is taken away. Here that someone is a former president. That’s big. That’s surreal. And it’s difficult to put behind you.”

The judge in the case, New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, thanked jurors after polling each on the verdict.

“You were engaged in a very stressful and difficult task,” he said.

Throughout the six-week trial, the names of the jurors were known only to counsel for the opposing sides. Merchan shielded their identities from the media and the public owing to the “likelihood of bribery, jury tampering, or of physical injury or harassment.”

Merchan also instructed reporters not to publicize the employers of prospective jurors during the selection process in April. During that process, known as voir dire, prospective jurors were quizzed on their political beliefs, hobbies and news habits, offering insight into the makeup of the panel that was eventually seated. The panel has seven men and five women. They are Black and White as well as Asian, ranging from young to middle age.

They expressed mixed feelings about Trump, with some offering harsh judgments of his character but others saying they favored certain aspects of his presidency or approach to politics. All said they could be fair and judge Trump only on the evidence entered in court.

During the trial, Merchan admonished jurors not to discuss the case or read about it as part of his routine guidance before dismissing them each day.

After delivering the verdict, the jurors will be free to decide how much to say about their closed-door decision-making - and what it was like to sit in judgment of Trump, an opportunity available to most Americans only at the ballot box.

After they rendered their verdict, Merchan told jurors they could decide whether to discuss the case and their role in it.

“No one can make you do anything you don’t want to do," the judge said. “The choice is yours.”

In past high-profile trials, individual jurors have often opted to pull back the curtain on the private discussions.

The jury foreman in the 1970-1971 trial of the century’s most infamous murderer, Charles Manson, held a news conference within months of the guilty verdict to air his views on the case. Just days after O.J. Simpson was acquitted of murdering his former wife by a Los Angeles jury in 1995, a member of the panel went on ABC’s “Nightline” to reveal that only two of the jurors required persuading to find the former football player not guilty.

In 2018, a month after a Pennsylvania jury found the comedian Bill Cosby guilty of aggravated indecent assault, the judge in the case revealed the names of the jurors who had reached that verdict. The judge, Steven T. O’Neill, pointed to a 2007 Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision affirming that the media had a right to such information in that state.

Already, one juror had spoken about the case on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” And there had been feverish attempts to interview other panel members, who had been sequestered in a hotel during the weeks-long trial.

Dianne Scelza, one of the jurors, recalled receiving texts alerting her that TV cameras were sprouting in her neighborhood before she even returned home after the verdict was announced. She was offered money and given fruit baskets by people hoping to coax her to talk, she said.

“I wanted to give it a lot of thought and reacclimate to being home again,” said Scelza, a health care consultant. She ultimately decided to speak to CBS, she said, to defend the jury’s decision-making and describe how meticulous the process had been. An appellate court later overturned the conviction.

The jurors in the Trump case were not sequestered - now a rare step in New York’s judicial system. And unlike another recent Trump case, their identifies were anonymous only to the public. Their names were shared with the prosecutor and Trump’s lawyers.

That differed from the circumstances of the civil defamation case brought by the writer E. Jean Carroll against Trump earlier this year in federal court in Manhattan, where the rules are more permissive of anonymous juries than in the state system. The judge in that case, Lewis A. Kaplan, kept juror names shielded from the public as well as from parties to the dispute. He told them not to disclose their names even to each other.

At the trial’s close, the judge advised them, “My advice to you is that you never disclose that you were on this jury.”

Scelza, the juror in the Cosby trial, said her advice for jurors in the hush money trial would be different: “Lay low, give yourself time to readjust and then decide what you want to say, if anything.”