Jurors in the Kastanis case said the minutes ticked by slowly during the first few hours of their deliberation Wednesday morning.
The jury room was filled with emotion. The case was now theirs after 21 days of testimony. Members of the six-woman, six-man panel were able to ask each other questions about elements of the trial for the first time."Being asked to judge in this situation was a very emotional experience," said juror Trent Oliphant. "It wasn't necessarily only glad or sadness, just emotion."
"We went over all of the evidence very, very carefully," said juror Joyce Gardner. "The morning went slowly," she said. "There were a lot of tears, and we started to work through those."
And there were "some things that kept coming up" during the jury's deliberations - things they wanted to know but hadn't been told in court, she said.
Sam Kastanis was the one on trial. But thoughts kept turning to Margaret Kastanis and Sam's claim that his wife killed the couple's three children and then stabbed herself to death. She was mentally ill and had talked of suicide, Sam and Margaret's family members testified.
"We had to keep reminding ourselves that Margaret Kastanis was not on trial," Oliphant said.
Jurors began their deliberations at 9 a.m. and first took positions in the early afternoon. "There were two that were indecisive. All others voted for not guilty," said jury foreman Ross Kirkley.
By a few minutes after 5 p.m., the jurors were back in the courtroom, most of them in tears, announcing their verdict: Sam Kastanis did not kill his wife or his children. The jury believed his testimony that Margaret had done all of the killing.
"We feel that Mr. Kastanis was innocent," the jury foreman said outside the courtroom after the marathon trial ended. "I don't think at any point in the trial they could prove to me otherwise."
Sam never deviated from his story that he had been out in the garage drinking coffee and doodling with numbers on a note pad and then found everyone dead when he returned to the house.
"I looked at Sam eye to eye. We took a very hard look at the evidence . . . There was no evidence to show he was involved in this at all," Kirkley said.
Now that he knows what the work of a juror is like, Oliphant says he will never second-guess the verdict of another jury. "I used to think I could have an opinion," he said of the Rodney King trial. "But I wasn't there. I didn't have all the facts."
The jurors interviewed by the Deseret News said they were impressed with the work of Kastanis' defense attorney, Ron Yengich. And while the jurors were not critical of prosecutors Kent Morgan or John Spikes' handling the case, they were critical of West Jordan police officers who investigated the case and prosecution witnesses who participated in the trial.
"We got disgusted at times. Not with Mr. Morgan himself but with the whole case," Oliphant said.
"The police had their minds pretty much made up from the beginning that Sam had done the killings," Gardner said.
They were also critical of the state's star witness, Oregon blood-spatter expert Rod Englert, and a computer-generated video re-enactment of the crime scene that followed Englert's theory about what happened the day Margaret and her three children died in the family's West Jordan home.
Englert was "too much of a showman," Gardner said. "It bugged us how he kept playing to the jury."
"The personal feelings among the jurors about Mr. Englert was `Give me a break,' " Oliphant said. "He was too confident of himself. He said he was 110 percent sure" of his findings. "All other witnesses opened up for another possibility."
And of the video re-enactment, a first in a Utah criminal case: "Every single juror hated the video," Oliphant said. "It was very dangerous. I'm not ruling it out in all cases but in this case because it was just one person's opinion" of what happened. Oliphant concluded the video added no weight to Englert's testimony from the stand.
"The tape was a waste of taxpayers' money," Kirkley said. "It was all speculative."
Gardner said she is looking forward to having a break from the rigors of the trial but has been saving her newspapers and wants to read back over the stories to see how the media reacted to the testimony each day.
Kirkley and Oliphant said they not only watched Kastanis during the trial but watched the reporters who were in the courtroom each day and are anxious, as well, to see how reporters viewed the proceedings.
Oliphant left the courthouse with two messages. "I would tell Sam that I love you and that I feel for you," he said. "The state will need to change the death certificate for Margaret Kastanis from `homicide' to `suicide'. "
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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Old job and warm welcome await Kastanis
Sam Kastanis will get his old job back with Salt Lake County, "and we're glad to have him," Public Works Director Lonnie Johnson said Thursday.
Johnson said Kastanis has asked for another week or two off to get settled following his long ordeal but then intends to return to work. Johnson and Kastanis met over breakfast Thursday morning to discuss the matter.
Kastanis quit his job after he was charged with the murder of his family in order to draw from his retirement pay to cover legal fees.
Johnson said Kastanis will be reinstated at his old position as heavy equipment operator for the highway department.
According to Johnson, Kastanis is liked and respected by his co-workers and supervisors and will be warmly welcomed. "He has a lot of friends out there, and a lot of support."