"It's not your fault."
With those words, Common Pleas Judge Lynne M. Abraham consoled distraught jurors moments after a man the jury had just convicted of rape dived through a
closed courtroom window to his death on the bricks of a courtyard six stories below.
Some jurors - men and women - wept openly as a court officer quickly led them from the City Hall courtroom. Their shrieks and cries could be heard even after the door of the jury room closed behind them, witnesses said.
Abraham, who said she normally doesn't address jurors after verdicts, knew this case would have to be an exception.
"Those people were stunned out of their socks," she said in an interview yesterday.
"I told the jury that this man was not a newcomer, that he had been convicted of rape before," she said.
"It was something he did," she said she told jurors. "The worst that would have happened to him is he would have gone to jail. But he would have gotten out. They should not feel this was their personal fault. They did what they felt was right based on the evidence."
The defendant, Robert McPeake, 39, a crane operator who lived in the Fox Chase section, was found guilty of rape, burglary and involuntary deviate sexual intercourse in an Oct. 26, 1984, attack on a 15-year-old girl. The conviction carried a maximum sentence of 30 to 60 years in prison.
But McPeake did not survive to be sentenced.
One juror said last night he and the other panelists were anguished at the thought they were "sitting in the jury room . . . and the man was lying right below us, six floors. We were all hoping somehow or other he survived."
The juror, who spoke at length on the condition he not be identified, said that any guilt he and the others felt "was not guilt in the respect we made the wrong decision." He added the jury reached its verdict, "never expecting a life would end."
Nonetheless, the juror said, he and the others have "no reservations" about the guilty verdict. He said he later prayed for McPeake.
"I just think it really hit him in the face and he realized what he had done and what he was facing. I guess he figured death" was preferable to prison. The juror said McPeake's decision to end his life was "his choice."
The suicide occurred about 5:30 p.m. Monday, after the guilty verdict had been announced and the jurors were being asked to voice their verdict individually at the request of the defense. The procedure is routine in
criminal cases.
