A Tyco juror yesterday said Ruth Jordan played the panel “like a fiddle” during deliberations, since she now says she intended to hold out for an acquittal.
In remarks published yesterday, Jordan said that “at best, it was going to be a hung jury” and that “I don’t think I would have voted guilty on any count.”
After the judge declared a mistrial Friday, some jurors said they were close to a unanimous verdict on several counts.
But Jordan, according to The New York Times, said in an interview Tuesday that she cast guilty votes in certain jury-room straw polls, “but I didn’t feel it.”
Fellow juror Parker Bosworth, a 38-year-old nurse, was not surprised by what Jordan said.
He said he felt all along that once Jordan, 79, made up her mind, she wouldn’t change it, but that other jurors “didn’t believe that they couldn’t change her verdict.
“She wasn’t gonna change her verdict,” he said. “She played them like a fiddle.”
Earlier this week, former jurors Bosworth, Glenn Andrews and Bill Johnson sat down with a Post reporter to talk about the jury’s mood and method and how all the panelists made a conscious effort to form a unit – including going shopping for a microwave oven.
“That was one of the things we did when we bonded – we went to J&R Music World to buy a microwave,” Johnson said. “We realized we needed one because our food was getting cold.”
Andrews, the father of two, said he and Jordan chatted about their kids and “we got along.” But he said the atmosphere in the jury room as a whole shifted once deliberations got under way.
“That’s when we disappeared and it was just our egos and our ideas,” he said.
* The judge who declared a mistrial in the case of the “Tyco two” wants the company’s former chief legal officer to start his trial before the end of the month – despite pleas from prosecutors to wait for the “publicity storm” to die down.
“As far as the publicity is concerned . . . I don’t think there will be any difference between now, two weeks from now and five weeks,” Justice Michael Obus told Assistant DA John Moscow when the prosecutor asked that Mark Belnick’s trial be put off until the end of the May.