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continued....
Many of the jurors told me that when they returned home, family, friends and colleagues at work chastised them for not putting Gross to death. Some of the jurors tried to convey the details of Gross's life, but it sounded like they were making excuses for him and for themselves. One juror would simply tell friends, ''Well, you haven't been where I've been,'' and leave it at that.
One night over dinner, Elizabeth Stone told her sister and brother about Gross's life. ''It didn't seem to impress them at all,'' she said. They said they still believed that Stone should have voted for death. ''We just turned the conversation to other things,'' she told me. They never spoke about the trial again.
One juror sank into a deep depression and missed two months of work. Tuterow talked with her husband about starting a shelter for abandoned and neglected children. For many months after the trial, Garrison told me: ''I found myself going out of my way to listen and watch kids I knew. Just wondering. Hopefully, this isn't the next Jeremy. I guess in the end -- and maybe this is hard to admit -- I had trouble separating the facts of the crime from my sympathy for Jeremy.''
A number of the jurors said they had considered writing Gross, to urge him to tutor and pursue his own education in prison, to take advantage of the chance they'd given him. They exchanged addresses with one another and talked of a reunion, but it never happened. It was, they each told me separately, probably just as well. The memories of the trial are still painful. Even three years later, some of the jurors I spoke with got teary-eyed when recounting some of the testimony.
The trial also had an unexpected effect on Gill, the young prosecutor. ''I was surprised by the feelings of sympathy I had for Jeremy,'' he told me. ''That caught me off guard. You don't learn in law school how to deal with the penalty phase. Nothing prepares you for that.'' I asked Gill whether he thought Gross deserved to die. He reclined in his chair and pondered the question for a minute or two. ''Yes,'' he said. Then he added, ''But I'm not dissatisfied with the jury's decision.''
Twelve jurors -- each of whom was convinced that some people, given the cruelty of their acts, deserve to die -- chose to spare a life. To some, it might seem as if they copped out, that they're hypocritical. To others, their action might appear courageous. What is clear, at least to most of them, is that they no longer feel as certain about the death penalty as they once had.
''It got me thinking that we all have circumstances in our lives that are mitigating, so I don't know how you make that judgment,'' Elizabeth Stone told me over lunch earlier this year. She had initially been reluctant to talk with me, and she was clearly reticent, her voice so soft that it was sometimes difficult to hear her. It was, it turns out, the first time since the dinner with her siblings that she'd spoken with anyone about the trial. She was still wrestling with her decision, she said, and in fact had saved the 42 pages of notes she had taken during the trial, as well as newspaper stories about the case that her sons had clipped for her.
I reminded her at one point that on her questionnaire she indicated that she strongly believed in capital punishment. ''It's a tough issue,'' she said, sounding a tad defensive. ''And until you're put in the hot seat, you don't know how you'll act.''
Alex Kotlowitz is the author of ''There Are No Children Here'' and ''The Other Side of the River.''
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
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