Simpson Juror Asks Judge To Release Her From Panel She Wants Out “Because I Can’t Take It Anymore.”

For the first time in the O.J. Simpson case a sitting juror Thursday asked Judge Lance Ito to release her from the panel, saying she “can’t take it anymore.”

Shortly before court resumed after a mid-afternoon break, Ito asked the juror: “You indicated to one of the deputies that you needed to talk? What’s up?”

“I would like to be released,” she said.

“Why?” Ito asked.

“Because I can’t take it anymore.”

“Is it the things that we talked about?”

“It’s just a combination of things throughout the past three months,” the woman replied.

The transcript, released mistakenly by a court reporter, concludes at that point.

Lawyers in the case huddled immediately after the woman made the request in Ito’s chambers, and when court resumed a few moments later, the woman, a 25-year-old black flight attendant, was still in the jury box.

Gone, however, were two sheriff’s deputies, leading to speculation that Ito had replaced them after charges from some jurors that they had fomented racial discord among members of the panel.

Since the Simpson trial got under way in January, Ito has discharged six jurors, including two because they lied on their questionnaires, one because he was writing a book, another because she shared a doctor with Simpson.

But Thursday’s episode apparently marked the first time a juror acknowledged that she is approaching the breaking point because of the strain of the trial.

Legal commentators have long been expressing concern that the stress would take its toll on the jury.

Were her wish granted, only five alternate jurors would remain for what could be several more months of trial.

When testimony began Thursday morning, Andrea Mazzola, the evidence collector whom lawyers for Simpson have labeled a tenderfoot, was reunited with some of the key exhibits she had collected at 875 South Bundy Drive, where prosecutors say Simpson murdered his former wife and her friend on June 12.

The exhibits included a glove, a watch cap and an envelope. But once she took the stand, the most important exhibit was Mazzola herself.

With tweezers, distilled water and cotton swatches, Mazzola retrieved most of the blood evidence that prosecutors say ties Simpson to the murder scene, then leads into his own home two miles away.

Simpson’s lawyers have portrayed Mazzola as a rank amateur, whose inexperience discredits any evidence derived from her samples.

How difficult was it, Deputy District Attorney Hank Goldberg asked Mazzola, to collect blood samples? “It’s not hard at all,” she replied.

Later, donning Latex gloves and placing the leather glove and blue cap on a sheet of butcher paper before her, she demonstrated how to pick up exhibits, pinching each gingerly and placing them into crumpled paper bags.

“That’s it?” Goldberg asked, with a hint of a laugh.

“That’s all there is to it,” she replied.

As important as what the 34-yearold Mazzola said was her appearance and her mien: older, grayer, more precise and less equivocal than her supervisor on June 13, Dennis Fung.

While she may have been the “rookie” the defense lawyers say - she joined the Los Angeles police barely four months before the killings - she nonetheless came across as disciplined and seasoned.

Mazzola’s direct examination lasted about three hours. In the afternoon Peter Neufeld, one of two defense lawyers handling DNA evidence in the case, unleashed a blunt and harsh cross-examination of Mazzola.

He reminded her she was a probationary trainee and suggested she had changed earlier testimony to build up the role taken by the more experienced Fung and to diminish her own.