Show Business: We, the Jury

Combining Greek tragedy and judicial farce, a federal court jury last week re-enacted for a Baltimore television audience just how it had decided to convict a man of murder and kidnaping.

“An unprecedented public revelation of jury room activity,” crowed a handout by WBAL-TV, an NBC affiliate owned by the Hearst Corp. Raptured the Hearst-owned Baltimore News-Post: “A reportorial breakthrough of the traditional silence of the jury room.” It sure was.

The nine men, including the foreman —who later asserted that they had received assurances that their appearance had been okayed by federal authorities (it was not)—were seated around a long table at the WBAL studio. Also present (offstage) was a narrator who bridged awkward conversational gaps by making “clarifying” allusions for dramatic purposes of the hour-long taped show. The program was unsponsored, but the volunteer actors received $1 each for their ad-libbed efforts. “It was like a dream,” one said, “like walking into a room and knowing what’s going to happen.”

The station’s timing could not have been better—or worse—in airing the show. The verdict had been handed down on Feb. 23, but the television version of their deliberations was beamed the day before Melvin Davis Rees Jr., 32, a Hyattsville, Md., dance band musician, was to appear for sentencing for the crime that could bring him life imprisonment. Appearing before Judge Roszel C. Thomsen, Rees’s lawyers argued that the telecast had portrayed the jurors as discussing issues not raised in the trial, including the question of Rees’s sanity. “We do not know if the defendant’s rights were interfered with or not,” said Defense Attorney William J. O’Donnell. Judge Thomsen agreed and, pending a close look at the tape, put off sentencing indefinitely.

Rees’s crime was shocking—he was convicted in Maryland of murdering a mother and her five-year-old daughter (in Virginia he is charged with killing the same family’s father and a one-and-a-half-year-old daughter). WBAL induced the jurors to enact The Verdict Is Ours after receiving the counsel of its legal advisers, who assured the station that no permission was necessary from Judge Thomsen or anyone else. “If we had felt that it might influence the sentencing, we wouldn’t have done it,” said Promotion Director Henry F. Hines. “We felt that what we were doing was in the public interest. This was to be an exciting and lasting tribute to the American jury system.” Exciting it was, but hardly a tribute.