A San Luis Obispo woman who served on the jury that tried Hollywood private detective Anthony Pellicano and three others has gone out of her way and to great lengths to attack the process that resulted in the conviction of retired telephone company technician Rayford Earl Turner.

Elaine Jordison was part of the jury in the 2008 federal court trial that convicted Pellicano, former LAPD Sgt. Mark Arneson, Kevin Kachikian, Abner Nicherie and Turner on wiretapping and racketeering charges and she has been troubled about the experience ever since --- troubled so much, that she has publicly decried the jury’s actions in the case and has given two depositions to attorneys describing wrongdoing on the part of her fellow jurors.

Jordison, who is employed as a medical records keeper for the county of San Luis Obispo, spent 10 weeks in a local hotel while the Pellicano case was being tried in federal court in downtown Los Angeles.

“The jurors had made up their minds that the defendants were guilty after the prosecutor finished presenting his case and before the defense had started his,” Jordison said. “I know, because that’s all they talked about — how ‘guilty’ they were,” Jordison continued. “They told us not to talk about the case until it was time to deliberate, but the jurors talked about it constantly. One juror said: ‘I wouldn’t trust any of them as far as I could throw them.’ And the foreperson, an African-American woman from Los Angeles, said of Turner, ‘Just because he’s Black doesn’t mean I won’t convict him. I would have convicted Michael Vick!’ (The dog-fighting football player). These are the kinds of things the jurors were saying among themselves, especially at lunch.

“I expressed my disapproval of their comments and told them they were violating the rules,” Jordison said. “I tried to get off the jury. I complained about their closed minds to the foreperson and as things got worse, I tried to talk to the judge about the things that were not right, but that only pissed people off,” Jordison said.

And what were the other things that were not right? “Lots of things,” the juror replied. “For example, the foreperson slept throughout the defense’s case. Not only did she sleep, she snored! She had to be poked whenever her snoring became too loud. She would fall so deeply asleep in the jury box that she would fall over or drop her note pad. Everybody saw her! She never heard a word the defense had to say.

“They told us not to have any computers with us — nothing, except the notepad — but one guy had a computer and worked on it all the time for several days before somebody official finally took it from him,” Jordison said.

According to Jordison, the deliberations, the time when the jurors were allowed to talk to each other about the case, were a fiasco. “They hadn’t listened to all the testimony and when told to sit down and deliberate, they didn’t want to focus on the task because they were too busy talking on their cell phones and texting and getting on with their lives,” Jordison continued. “Three of us had a really hard time believing Turner was guilty of anything, but we were pressured by the others to go along with their guilty verdicts for all of them. According to the testimony I heard, four of them were guilty, and Turner was not.

“I did not know that when they polled the jury I could have spoken up and expressed my true opinion about the case, so I was compelled to do it as soon as I left the courtroom,” Jordison continued. “I attended Turner’s sentencing. I wrote to him in prison about the injustice done to him. I’ve been deposed by lawyers seeking justice and I’m cooperating with the attorney handling his appeal,” Jordison said.