Question at Murder Trial, ‘Have You Ever Hired a Nanny?’

NEW YORK — Potential juror No. 4 hired nannies to watch his children during the day while he was at work; there were two in all. He was also cared for by a nanny as a child, an experience he described as “indifferent to good.”

Potential juror No. 16 hired six or seven nannies over the years, full and part time. None ever presented a problem.

Potential juror No. 3 did not raise her hand when the group was asked who had experience with a nanny. Only five put their hands up.

So it went this week in a 13th-floor courtroom in Manhattan Supreme Court, where a judge, prosecutors and defense lawyers are questioning New Yorkers to determine if they can serve as jurors in the trial of a nanny charged with fatally stabbing two young children in her charge.

The case has gripped the city, especially a segment of New Yorkers who rely on paid child care for their children. Yoselyn Ortega, 55, is accused of slaughtering a 2-year-old boy and a 6-year-old girl inside their family’s luxury Upper West Side apartment in 2012. Their mother, Marina Krim, returned home from picking up a third child from swimming lessons to find her bloodied children in a bathtub and Ortega plunging a knife into her own neck. She had cared for the children for two years. Ortega faces two counts of first-degree murder and is pleading not guilty by reason of insanity.

The questioning — called voir dire — occurs in all criminal cases heard by a jury, and as in many other cases, the queries this time touch on a person’s relationship to crime, whether he or she has ever been a victim, whether he or she can devote the time necessary for what is expected to be a long criminal trial.

But this is not just any case, and it is turning out not to be just any voir dire, either. Whether potential jurors had a nanny or not, either as a parent or a child; whether they worked as one; and what that experience was like, has become part of the questioning. And the voir dire process itself has become a kind of lens onto the different New Yorks — one inhabited by those who can afford nannies, the other populated by those who cannot, or who might have worked as a nanny themselves, like potential juror No. 18, who spent a summer caring for her nieces and nephews as a full-time job. The varying attitudes of the city are on stark display within the wood-paneled courtroom, as are searing emotions. As potential juror No. 4 answered the judge’s list of questions Tuesday, he stopped at the final one and explained that he could not be fair and impartial.

“I live a few blocks from where the crime allegedly occurred and had kids raised by nannies,” he said.

Judge Gregory Carro asked, “That would affect you?”

“I think so. I can only answer to the best of my conviction,” the man answered. “I can only imagine what it would be like to come home and find,” he said, stopping in midsentence. “I don’t know if I can be fair. Some people can compartmentalize these things; I’m maybe not as capable as others.”

Stuart Silberg, a senior assistant district attorney, handled the questioning for the prosecution that day. He asked the jurors whether they had relatives who suffered from mental illness, had been victims of a crime and what their experience with the criminal justice system was. Then he went on: “Childcare,” he said pointedly.

“You know in this case the judge told you the defendant murdered two children,” he said. “She was responsible, in part, for their care. The people will prove to you that while they were in her care she murdered them. I’d like to know from each one of you if you’ve had any experience hiring anyone to help you with your children?”

A potential juror seated on a crowded courtroom bench whispered: “Damn.” Silberg went on to question each of the jurors who had hired or worked as a nanny about their experience.

Before posing her own questions to the potential jurors, the defense lawyer, Valerie Van Leer-Greenberg, laid out the difficult nature of the case. “We find ourselves dropped into unusual circumstances, and as grown-ups we have to deal with them. It may not be pleasant for us, it may be emotionally charged, publicly regarded, despicable, unacceptable, irrefutable. But they’re the circumstances,” she said.

She explained that the case is about “two beautiful kids that were killed, horribly killed.”

“When this mother, Marina Krim comes in here, I mean, all of us will be affected, not just you, all of you, the world,” she said. Van Leer-Greenberg asked potential Juror No. 9 if he was up to the task of being on the jury. He said he was. Then she asked potential juror No. 4 the same question.

“If you’re asking me if I’m biased, ‘Yes, I am’,” he said. “Look, you said it, it’s an emotionally charged case. I don’t know how many times or how many ways I can say the same thing. Is this something where I feel like I can be 100 percent cold and calculated about? I just don’t know if I can give you the assurance you want.”

He was later excused.

He was not alone. Potential juror No. 10, a mother of three from Harlem, was immediately let go after she said she could not be fair.

Even with a large pool of jurors in a city with more than 8.5 million people, the number of people with some connection to the Krim family was striking. A good portion lived on the Upper West Side. One prospective juror said his family donated to a fund established in the children’s name; another said her daughter worked with their father, Kevin Krim; a third said she knew the family.

A woman who lived across the street from the family’s home said she struggled with the idea of being empaneled.

“Being a mother of two children, I cannot remotely imagine how someone can kill two children with knives,” she said. “I’m prejudging, I know.”

The chosen jurors are expected to listen to at least three months of testimony, including psychiatric experts for the prosecution and the defense. The trial was delayed while Van Leer-Greenberg built a case for an insanity defense and sought to suppress the statements Ortega made to officials while hospitalized and incoherent. Two psychiatrists at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell hospital said she had “major depressive disorder with psychotic features,” court papers said. Several potential jurors who either worked in the mental-health industry or had relatives with a mental illness said they struggled with the idea of participating in a trial that involved an insanity defense.

Juror No. 6, an Inwood resident, told the court that her college roommate was killed by someone who claimed he was insane during trial.

“What I know from personal experience, I don’t feel it’s an appropriate defense,” she said. “It would be difficult to convince me of that.” She was excused.

From the pool of 204 potential jurors that had been convened Tuesday, 12 jurors had been selected by the end of court on Thursday, including the woman who had spent her summer as a nanny, watching her sister’s children. Two of the selected jurors live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

On Oct. 25, the day of the killings, Ortega was supposed to take two of the children — Leo, 2, and Lucia, 6 — to a dance studio, where they were supposed to meet Krim and her third child, Nessie, 3. But they never came.