WGBH's Adam Reilly recently spoke with Janet Uhlar, Juror No. 12 in the criminal trial of James "Whitey" Bulger, at her home in Eastham on Thursday.
Uhlar said she's still struggling to process everything she saw and heard during the two months Bulger was on trial in Boston.
"In the evening, when you got out of there, you just crashed—you couldn't function," Uhlar said. "You couldn't stop thinking about it, and certainly during deliberations, it was constant, constant. You fell asleep thinking about it; you woke up thinking about it. Some of us had bad dreams, nightmares. Some of us lost quite a bit of weight."
While the horrific crimes committed by Bulger and his associates occasionally haunted her dreams, Uhlar adds, she's more troubled by the government corruption the trial showcased—and by the deals the government made with other heinous criminals in order to put Bulger behind bars.
"How do you justify putting all this effort into going after James Bulger by letting somebody like John Martorano walk the streets?" Uhlar asked. "Twenty cold-blooded murders that he confessed to as if it was swatting a mosquito on your arm--and he got less than a year for each of those murders. What about the families of those victims? Where was justice for them?"
Uhlar is a pediatric nurse who also writes historical fiction focused on the Revolutionary War era. As someone who's long lionized the founding fathers, she said, her protracted look at corruption in and compromises by the federal government was especially troubling.
Watch the full interview:
