TV REVIEW : Trials of a Trial by Jury in ‘Innocence Lost’ Update

As the four grueling, tension-filled hours of producer Ofra Bikel’s “Innocence Lost: The Verdict” unfold, it may or may not change your opinions about child abuse cases, but it almost certainly will make you very, very uneasy.

Not about child abusers. The massive three-years-and-counting multiple trials involving Bob and Betsy Kelly and their assistants who ran the Edenton, N.C.-based child-care center, Little Rascals, raise far more questions than they answer about alleged abuses.

No, what Bikel’s remarkably human and provocative work makes you queasy about is the ability of today’s citizens to function on a jury.

The first two hours of this “Frontline” report air tonight, at 9 p.m. on KCET-TV Channel 28 and at 8 p.m. on KPBS-TV Channel 15 and KVCR-TV Channel 24. The concluding two hours air Wednesday night at the same times.

Bikel’s investigation--begun as a 1991 “Frontline” report titled “Innocence Lost”--now proceeds through Bob Kelly’s trial on 240 counts, including extreme child sexual abuse, and, in the final hour, chronicles the drama surrounding Little Rascals assistant Dawn Wilson.

Where “Innocence Lost” became an examination of a small, idyllic town seemingly eating itself alive with rumors, rivalries, suspicions and possibly mass hysteria, “Innocence Lost: The Verdict” becomes a kind of study of Americans trying--and apparently failing--to be Americans.

In “Twilight: Los Angeles 1992,” which just closed at the Mark Taper Forum, Anna Deavere Smith included the astounding revelations of a juror in the Rodney King federal civil rights trial who recounted the strange behavior of her fellow jurors.

What Smith uncovered was a bad-enough indication that some jurors just aren’t up to the task, indulging in a sorry parody of some 1970s psychodrama session. What Bikel uncovers in interviews with jury members in Kelly’s trial is something much worse: charges of such flagrant violations of juror instructions that, had they been reported at the time, a mistrial would have been declared.

Testimony during the Kelly trial is shown to be burdened with questionable legal points, from the lack of witnesses corroborating the charges to the frequently fanciful statements of the children, triggered by the leading questions of child psychologists.

Shades of the flaws in the McMartin child abuse case, but the Little Rascals turmoil contains some important differences. Unlike the South Bay area where the McMartin preschool was located, Edenton is a place where everyone knows each other, and a place where the trial split the town in two amid persistent charges that personal vendettas began the whole affair.

And while no charges of jury misbehavior were raised after the McMartin verdicts (which rejected allegations of abuse), the Kelly jury is a surreal joke of jurisprudence. Juror Roswell Streeter embodies this jury’s contradictions: puzzled how it could have found Kelly guilty based on virtually no evidence, puzzled how he could have gone along with the decision.

Jurors relate to Bikel how a jury member revealed to his 11 cohorts that he had been abused as a young boy--information he kept secret during jury selection. Violating their instructions, another juror brought published material to deliberations not included in trial evidence and clearly prejudicial to Kelly’s case.

And on and on. Whether viewers believe the Edenton children--and their parents’ belief is credibly impassioned and deeply held--no one can ignore the deeper problems plaguing the jury system that this case brings to light.

It is equally hard to withstand the tension built around Dawn Wilson’s dilemma, as she decides whether to plea bargain--thus admitting guilt and making things much tougher for future defendants--or insist on her innocence and risk a jury trial.

Wilson’s drama, and its outcome, is the most gut-wrenching on television in a long, long time.