all articles from The Daily Beast
I Was an Astor Trial Juror
October 9, 2009
By October 6, just past the six-month anniversary of my jury service in the case of People of the State of New York vs. Anthony Marshall and Francis Morrissey (or, in general parlance, the Astor Trial), I could safely say that I believed Brooke Astor’s son, Tony Marshall, had the right to give himself a raise as the manager of his mother’s estate—in other words, that he had not committed grand larceny as defined by the State.
It was our third week of deliberations, and we the jury had already found the defendants guilty on a number of charges, including that they schemed to defraud the ailing and addled Mrs. Astor. Only a handful of counts remained on which to reach a verdict, including the one of grand larceny.
I remained, at that point, unconvinced that Marshall was guilty of the grand larceny count. The prosecutors noted the rapidity with which Marshall, having just gotten a raise, turned around and bought a $920,000 boat. The yacht purchase looked bad, sure, but maybe he’d been planning to buy one for years. Still, that October morning, the words of one of my fellow jurors came back to me in, of all places, the shower. “But this,” she had argued, “was at the same time that he was stealing from the estate!” True. That nagged.
view full articleclose this
