REDWOOD CITY – When the alternate juror first walked into the deliberations room nearly 18 years ago, she blurted out that Scott Peterson, on trial for the killing of his pregnant wife and unborn son, should “pay for killing the little man,” a former juror in the notorious case testified Tuesday.
“We were like, whoa whoa, before you try to give us your opinion, we have a kind of process,” former juror Greg Beratlis testified. “Anyone walking in and saying, hey guilty or not guilty, we gave everyone equal respect to discuss it.”
In an effort to convince a San Mateo County judge to overturn Peterson’s 2004 murder conviction and order a new trial, his lawyers tried to show Tuesday that controversial juror Richelle Nice was biased against him from the start and showed an unusual attachment to the unborn child by calling him “little man.”
Also Tuesday, the judge postponed until March 24 the remainder of the evidentiary hearing that was supposed to end this week, giving Peterson’s lawyers more time to determine whether Nice first discussed a book deal before the trial concluded.
When the hearing concludes, Judge Anne-Christine Massullo will have 90 days to decide whether to grant Peterson a new trial, which would bring renewed attention to a blockbuster case that became a national obsession and drew nearly 1,000 people to the courthouse steps to cheer the verdict.
Nice had sat through the entire seven-month trial as an alternate juror but was called in to replace a dismissed juror after deliberations were under way. The death sentence that Nice helped impose, which put Peterson on San Quentin’s Death Row for 17 years, was overturned last year by the California Supreme Court after determining potential jurors who were personally opposed to the death penalty but said they could impose it anyway were wrongly excluded from the jury pool.
The murder convictions in the deaths of Peterson’s wife, Laci, and unborn son they planned to name Conner were upheld, however. Their bodies washed up separately in April 2003 along the Richmond shoreline, close to where Peterson told police he had been fishing the Christmas Eve his wife had vanished. Peterson is now serving life without parole and is housed in a Redwood City jail during his latest appeal. He has appeared in court wearing a red jail suit and shackles every day this week.
Nice spent Friday and Monday on the witness stand defending herself from accusations that she hid her history of domestic violence issues to get on the trial. Although her then-boyfriend pleaded no contest to domestic abuse charges a couple of years before the Peterson trial, she testified that she was the aggressor and never considered herself a victim.
Nonetheless, Peterson lawyer Pat Harris, who had represented him in the original trial in 2004, tried to show Tuesday that along with hiding her past, Nice – known to journalists as “Strawberry Shortcake” for her bright red dyed hair – sought to get on the trial for “notoriety and financial reasons.”
Under questioning, Beratlis said that Nice seemed to enjoy the attention she received coming and going from the Redwood City courthouse. The seven-month trial had been moved from Modesto where the Petersons lived because of pretrial publicity.
“With the hair color and the fact that she seemed to not try to be discreet,” Beratlis said. “Walking through the rotunda outside, with all the press and everything else going on, it just seemed — I was trying to avoid it, I just didn’t feel she was trying to avoid it.”
As the former juror put it, “I just felt she was pretty strong willed and had her opinion.” Beratlis also described her demeanor during the trial as an “emotional wreck,” and that during the trial she looked “tired, worn out.”
Under cross examination from Dave Harris, Stanislaus County’s senior deputy district attorney, Beratlis acknowledged that a number of jurors were emotional during the trial that involved the killing of a 27-year-old woman who was eight months pregnant.
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