Oliver North's jury

Does anybody remember the second weekend in April 1961? Not, of course, as such, unless the 12th of April was the day you got married or fell down the stairs, but I'm sure there are lots of listeners with the sharpest memory of what happened then if I pronounce – I think pronounce is the word – a name, Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin.

Within a day or two, somebody called him the Columbus of Interplanetary Space and this rather clumsy title rumbled around the world. He was launched on that date in a four and three-quarter ton spaceship Vostok, circled the earth in one hour and 48 minutes at a maximum speed of 18,000 miles an hour, a 170 miles above the earth and he landed at a predetermined spot without, the Russian radio reported, ill effects.

We had no notice of this new amazing feat. There was no to-do, no promotional build-up, such as was given to John Glenn, the American marine colonel, the following February, so that all the world tracked his three orbits and, at one point, for two and a half dreadful minutes, we thought he'd been burnt to a cinder. Because so many millions of people watched television or heard the radio during those almost unbearable five hours, I suppose that many more of us today, except the Russians, remember Glenn and have forgotten Gagarin.

I think of Gagarin today not because I'm going to talk about the latest space launch, but because whenever a big event falls on the cusp of the weekend, the memory of Gagarin is always there to chide me. Let me briefly explain!

On that weekend in April 1961, so help us, 28 years ago, I could find absolutely nothing of any consequence to talk about. Mercifully, understandably, I have forgotten that talk. But I gave it and it was heard as usual in Britain on Friday evening. Fine. And then, as usual, it was repeated on Sunday morning. Not so fine. Gagarin had the bad taste to perform his wizardry on Saturday. By Sunday morning, it could accurately be said to be the talk of the world, except on 'Letter From America'.

The radio critic of The Listener, of course, through Friday and Saturday had, like the rest of us, never heard of Gagarin, but Sunday morning, ah, he knew. He listened to whatever trivia I had to offer and he wrote for publication four days later, 'One thing you must say for Cooke, when the last, the final bomb has dropped on us all, he'll be there in New York waffling away'.

Well, I faced a similar embarrassment last weekend and very nearly did today. Some of you may recall my saying a week ago that I would not talk about the fate of another marine colonel, Mr Oliver North, because after five days the jury was still out while I was talking, though there was the possibility, indeed, the strong probability, that by Saturday noon – they work through the morning – they'd have reached a verdict. Well, they went on into the third week and were into their 13th day of what can be well described as their deliberations when they finally emerged.

Let's look back. On Wednesday, the lawyers for both sides, for the government and for the defence, sent letters to the judge expressing, we're told, anxiety over the tardy progress of a jury that had been at work for over 60 hours, broken only by their isolation in a hotel where they were allowed to see no news, no current affairs, only movies edited to omit any references, however sidelong, to Colonel North or Iran-Contra or any other topic that might reflect on the subject of the 12 criminal charges which Mr North faced.

Just to remind you, they arose from the former colonel's underground efforts to help the Nicaraguan rebels fighting the Sandinista government.

'What did the lawyers want?' the judge asked them. 'Did they want him to tell the jury to get a move on?' Heaven's no! The lawyers realised soon enough the effect on the jury of either side's showing displeasure. They decided an expression of anxiety would be enough. The judge was little help. 'It doesn't seem to me,' he said, 'there's any problem at all.' He then offered the lawyers no consolation at all by recalling a case two years ago in which a religious sect had been charged with running a corrupt organisation. 'Just to think,' the judge mused, 'that jury sat for 36 days and took over 200 hours to reach a verdict.'

Mr North's lawyer asked the judge why he'd moved the jury out of his courtroom where they'd been able to deliberate at leisure into a jury room that is a mere 12 feet by 18. The judge said he needed the courtroom for other pending cases and he made the jury room a little, shall we say, roomier by taking out a row of extra chairs which had made their confinement even more pinched. He had, also, he told the lawyers, abandoned the 'No Smoking' rule to, quote, 'accommodate the jurors' preferences' – the preference that is of the ones who smoked.

Well, finally, as we heard on Thursday, the verdict was given. Guilty of three of the 12 counts, falsifying government documents, accepting an illegal gratuity and assisting in obstructing the truth before the congressional hearing. In the next few days, many ramifications will flow from this selective verdict and next week will be time enough to comment on the whole case.

For now, I should like to talk about the jury of Mr North's peers. It consisted of nine black women and three black men. This suggested to onlookers, but from all accounts not to the lawyers in court, a rather broad interpretation of peers. The population of Washington – the city – is 74 per cent black. Mr North's jury was 100 per cent black and it was stipulated at the beginning, during the always-tedious process of selecting the jury, that no one would be called for service who had read about Colonel North, Iran-Contra, arms for hostages, the diversion of funds to the Contras from the sale of arms to Iran. This jury was recruited, in plainer words, on their pledged word that they had read nothing, seen nothing on television, heard nothing on the radio, knew absolutely nothing about a case that rocked the republic for the past two or three years.

I don't believe I've run into anybody, from a bus driver to a doctor, a fishmonger to a professional golfer who has said, 'I haven't been following that case'. To find 12 citizens, especially living in Washington where it all happened, who knew nothing, read nothing, heard nothing, saw nothing about the thundering Iran-Contra scandal, you would think it would have turned into a search for 12 civic vegetables. But evidently not.

The nine women and three men were judged to be without knowledge but without prejudice and mentally equipped to deal with a case of extreme complexity – 363 interminable documents – in which the vital question of criminal intent turned on a very fine point, namely, to broaden the point as simply as I can, whether the law passed by Congress, the so-called Boland Amendment, which prohibited all further military aid to the Contras, and included in that prohibition the intelligence services of the United States, such as the CIA, whether that prohibition applied also to the National Security Council – a body of presidential advisers which does not collect intelligence, but recommends policy on the basis of collected intelligence. That is as simple an issue of law, the breaking of it therefore leading to the criminal charges as this case contained.

It seems to me that however this case eventually comes out, whether after this verdict or on appeal, sooner or later the courts are going to have to face the existence of television, the blanketing of public and private life by the box. Time and again, in current American trials, an almost automatic motion is made to have the trial moved away from the scene of the crime, if any, to another city, another jurisdiction where you can find jurors less prejudiced. But in the television age, a retired rancher in Thunderbird, Arizona, or a housewife in Anchorage, Alaska, could know more about the North case than a lawyer in Washington DC who was too busy to read the papers.

As it is, you're going to get more and more mistrials declared, more and more appeals from a primary verdict on the plea that any jurors living within a few miles of the alleged crime are prejudiced from the start. We shall see.

The judges relaxing, he called it, of the 'No Smoking' rule for the poor wretched smokers penned up in that 18 by 12 foot hole – this rule applies now in many cities to public places, as also in some towns, to hotels. You can ask for a smoke-free room – this brings up the well-nigh incredible protest of a new group, just formed, to assert their rights under the First Amendment to the constitution.

A little background. In the summer of 1899, three virtuous commercial travellers in Wisconsin who felt much abused by the commercial travellers' reputation for being a sexual fly-by-night, formed themselves into the Christian Commercial Men's Association of America. They called themselves the Gideons after, see the Book of Judges, Chapter 7, Gideon's victory over the Midianites. As their logo, they took a torch and a two-handed pitcher – a jug, not a baseball player.

Nine years later, after raising a fund of voluntary subscriptions, they began placing copies of the Bible in hotel rooms and, by now, by long before now, every hotel and motel room in the United States has in the drawer of the bedside table a Bible.

Well, now a new group has been formed, mainly of agnostics and atheists citing the First Amendment to the constitution, 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion', and claiming to have to sleep in room containing a Bible violates the constitutional separation of church and state, they are demanding that Holiday Inns must set aside for them rooms that do not contain a Bible.

Aren't you glad sometimes that you don't have a written constitution?

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.