A member of the jury at O.J. Simpson's civil trial says that when Simpson was testifying, she thought to herself: "You dumb jerk. You must think we're fools."
"He was a joke," Virginia Cruse, a 67-year-old retired bank teller, said in Friday's Daily Breeze of Torrance.Like other jurors, Cruse said her decision to find Simpson responsible for the killings of ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman was based on his own words.
For example, Cruse said, she could not believe Simpson's claim that he didn't cause the bruises on Nicole Simpson's face shown so vividly in photographs.
Cruse sat just a few feet from Simpson when he was on the witness stand. "He was highly nervous. The veins on his forehead and the veins in his neck stuck out," she said.
The jury Feb. 4 found Simpson liable for the 1994 slayings. It awarded the victims' families $33.5 million in damages.
During the trial, the jury was shown 31 photos of Simpson wearing a pair of Bruno Magli shoes of the sort that left bloody prints at the crime scene. Simpson has said he never wore such "ugly-ass" shoes.
"We had one of them in the jury room, and they were nice leather shoes. I don't know what was ugly about them," Cruse said.
The only real debate, she said, came over the amount of punitive damages. She thought $50 million would have been fair but later agreed to $25 million. The jury also levied $8.5 million in compensatory damages.
When they weren't in the courtroom, Cruse said, jurors played Yahtzee and Pictionary, told their life stories and ate.