officers - The Black Vault

TilE LAST ANGRY wol
The house is a lot like Lindy Miller herself: whos~ big. wid~-
1awed, freckled Irish face is an open book. Every emotion is written
large in her dark eyes. And right now, what Miller feels is anger,
rage and a sense of betrayal.
Several months ago, she says, she quit cigarettes. yet she sits
chain-smoking. On her kitchen counter is a
bottle of tranquilizers. A slender 5 foot 3
inches, she has recently lost se\·en pounds.
She can't sleep, and she's seeing a psychologist.
"I feel as ifl've been raped.'' she says.
r
her voice shaking. "It's worse than a death in
1
~he family-because this is the death of innocence,
of a part of me."
For two months, Miller sat as an alternate
juror in the Rodney King trial. And now her
husband, her family and friends, her physician
and her priest are trying hard to understand
why she is a shadow of her former self.
Sure, she was sucked into the claus-
•
gu~sscd and hm·c their lives and those of their families placed in
jeopardy because somebody doesn't like the outcome. And she
thinks she was set up.
t wasn't supposed to be this way back when Miller first
I
turned up at herlocal Ventura courthouse, virtually a stone's
throw from her comfortable neighborhood, to respond to a
routine jury summons. It was her third, but she confidently
expected to be excused. She was the mother of three schoolage
children, she reasoned, and her husband, a member of
one ofVentura County's original ranching families, was an attorney.
But after a day of-hanging around, she was told: "The good
news is you're not wanted for a jury here. The bad news is you're
to report to the courthouse in Simi Valley on Thursday."
With that, she joined some 250 "finalists" in line to be part
of the Rodney King jury. She was sent home with a 41-pag!!
questionnaire designed to ascertain her habits, attitudes, a little
of her history and her moral and political philosophies. "I
waited until everyone was in bed to fill it out, since they had
hey were squeezed to the point of exhaustion andlhen thrown to the wolves ..
trophobic fish tank-like
world in which all ofthe
jurors were trapped. But
when it came to the last
three yards, she was a
sequestered bystander-safely removed
from the final controversial verdict that
acquitted three of the four LAPD officers
outright. Then why has the experience s~
devastated her?
This is Miller's story. But it could be yours
or mine, as much of what she faced is faced
by anyone who sits as a juror on a iengthy
trial. Of course, Miiler didn't sit on just any
trial. In her case, the verdict reached by her
fellow jutors~with which she agrees-has
been blamed for precipitating four days of violent
insanity not just in L.A. but nationwide.
And perhaps Miller was more vulnerable than most to the
dreadful disiiiusionment that now overwhelms her. She feels she
has been betrayed by a system on which she has based her entire
life. "This has absolutely shattered my foundations. I don't think
I'll ever be the same."
In an age of cynicism, Miller believed in the system, believed
in it unequivocally. As a high school social-studies teacher, she
told her students that the American system of justice was the
finest in the world and the Constitution the greatest written document
in the history of mankind. She also believed that our leaders-be
they mayor, police chief, D.A. or President-supported
the system they represent.
Now she believes that when citizens with a sense of duty put
their life on hold for eight weeks, to be shut up with a bunch of
strangers for $5 a day, they deserve not to be pilloried and second-
stressed how confidential it was."
Back at the Simi Valley courthouse, she
was questioned by the judge on behalf ofboth
the prosecution and defense. The next thing
she knew-to her utter amazement-she was
asked to stand to be sworn in.
As one of six alternates, Miiier would be in
exactly the same situati6n as the acting members
.of the jury until deliberations. She would
sit in the jury box With them all day, every day,
listening to the testimony. She would eat meals
with them and be sequestered with them...She
knew that if a juror dropped out for any reason,
she could be tapped to fill that spot.
From that day, her weekday routine never
varied. She left the house at 7:30 for the 40-
mile trip and returned in rush-hour traffic,
arriving home exhausted. "Most nights, I
was in bed by 7.'' She cut herself off, as instructed, from all outside
sources of information, conscientiously running out of the
·room .if she found the TV on at home, ignoring the newspapers for
the first time in her life and keeping her car radio off. (To this day,
months of newspapers are stiii neatly lined up along one wall of
her dining room, awaiting a time when she feels able to read
them.) She warned her family of what was to come. "I told them
I had to dedicate myself to this 100 percent," she says. "For the
first time, my children (ages 13, 12 and 7) became latchkey kids.
They would tell me about things in their lives, and I couldn't listen
to them. I have great guilt about that now."
Nor was she allowed to discuss the case with her husbandthough
as the weeks went on, there wasn't much else left for them
to talk about. Even after 20 years of marriage, the artificial silence
imposed a wedge between them that they are still struggling to
60 LOS ANGELES MAGAZINE