A juror who befriended James “Whitey” Bulger — after she helped send him to the slammer — is broken up over the notorious Boston mobster’s death inside a maximum-security lockup.
“I was deeply saddened, shocked. I felt bad for his family … and for myself. I have enjoyed his correspondence,” Janet Uhlar told the Cape Cod Times.
Uhlar served on the panel that in 2013 convicted Bulger of racketeering, conspiracy and multiple acts of murder, extortion, narcotics distribution, money laundering and possession of firearms.
The nurse from Eastham, Mass., who became his pen pal, has said she believed the infamous gangster didn’t get a fair shake during his trial and that law enforcement should be investigated, according to Boston’s WGBH-TV.
“I believe that a lot of things were kept from the jury, and we’re supposed to base our decision on facts and I don’t think we got a lot of the facts,” Uhlar said earlier this year.
Uhlar — who has penned a book titled “The Truth Be Damned,” a fictionalized account of her experience as a juror — said she was a “blank slate.”
“I never read ‘The Godfather’ or watched the movie,” she told the Cape Cod Times.
“It was a highly orchestrated trial,” she added, saying she was amazed that her fellow jurors displayed no reaction when defense attorney J.W. Carney Jr. opened the trial by describing Bulger as guilty.
“I thought, ‘Then why are we here? Why are we here?’” she said.
While noting that Bulger was a “horrific human being,” Uhlar argued that a fair trial is one of the pillars of the US democracy.
“Taking someone like Bulger, who they can make out to be this monster, and try him in court and not give him a fair trial, most people would say, ‘Who cares?’” Uhlar said.
“Well, you should care. If they can do it to him, make no mistake, they can do it to you.”
Uhlar, who received her last letter from Bulger about 10 days ago, said she visited him three times at a Florida prison before he was transferred to Oklahoma and then West Virginia.
“The bottom line about Bulger is that his mind was altered when he was 26,” she said, referring to treatments he received through a government program called MKUltra in an Atlanta jail after robbing a bank.
“He never used it as a defense,” she said.
Meanwhile, Carney said in a statement Tuesday that Bulger “was sentenced to life in prison, but as a result of decisions by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, that sentence has been changed to the death penalty.”
Officials with the Federal Bureau of Prisons said Bulger was found dead in his Bruceton Mills, W.Va., prison cell Tuesday morning.
A prison union official said the 89-year-old’s death is being investigated as a homicide.