Rod Blagojevich is an Elvis man, but it’s a Tom Petty tune that probably best captures what the former governor is feeling as the jury deliberates in his federal corruption retrial.
The waiting is the hardest part. For Blagojevich, deliberations enter their fourth day Wednesday.
Anyone who has endured a serpentine airport security line or sat beside a silent phone knows the truth of that lyric. An entire industry exists to ease the tedium of long waits — theme parks employ some of the wiliest techniques, distracting patrons with video screens as they queue up for rides — but even the canniest industrial psychologist probably couldn’t alleviate the anticipation and dread of a criminal defendant awaiting a verdict.
“It’s extremely frustrating and nerve-racking,” said attorney Sam Adam Jr., who represented Blagojevich in his first trial. “All you can do is spend as much time as you can with your friends and family. Sit around, talk with them, be with them. Stay away from the TV and the news. It could be a thousand people who say you’re gonna win, but you’ll focus on the one person who says you’re gonna lose.”
Joseph Lopez, whose client list has included reputed mobsters, said that with so little under their control, waiting defendants have to find hope where they can. Lopez recalled one nervous client whose horoscope said, “You will win in court today” — and sure enough, he did. Since then, Lopez said, he has advised the impatient to consult the stars.
“It could be good news,” he said.
Criminal defendants are usually on their own to deal with the stress of waiting, aside from any comfort their families or spiritual advisers might offer. But in medicine, where patients must bear similarly agonizing waits for test results and diagnoses, experts have come up with a palette of strategies to lessen the strain.
Julie Dalla Rosa, a social worker who helps cancer patients at the University of Chicago Medical Center, said those include talking with loved ones, reserving time for fun activities or, for the particularly anxious, getting short-term medication to help with eating or sleeping problems.
But for patients and defendants alike, only so much can be done to make the wait better.
“It is what it is,” Dalla Rosa said. “There’s a chance you’re going to be getting really bad news, and there’s nothing anyone can do to erase that fact. It’s really a question of how you’re going to manage that instead of making it go away.”
