REDWOOD CITY, Calif. — The jury foreman in the Scott Peterson trial was kicked off the panel and replaced with an alternate Wednesday, the second panelist dismissed in as many days.

The removal of the juror, Gregory Jackson, who holds both medical and law degrees and was widely seen as the intellectual on the panel, came after six days of deliberations and over the protests of Peterson's attorneys, who tried to persuade Judge Alfred Delucchi in an hour-long closed-door hearing to keep him on the jury.

"Based on what I have heard, I have had to excuse Juror No. 5 over objection of defense counsel," Delucchi told a stunned courtroom just after 10:30 a.m.

For the second time since they began weighing evidence Nov. 3, the jury was told to scrap its work and start deliberations afresh with a new member.

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The judge did not say why he was removing Jackson.

However, Delucchi reinstructed the jury, as he did Tuesday after dismissing a female panelist, on a specific part of their duties, which suggested the removed juror may have conducted an independent investigation into the case. Personal research by jurors is prohibited.

"I'll remind you again," Delucchi said. "You must decide all questions of fact in this case from the evidence received in this trial and not from any other source."

The new foreperson announced by the judge is a firefighter and paramedic who gained notoriety during the five-month trial for taking few notes and looking bored with the pace of the proceedings.

The alternate who replaced Jackson is a retiree with a personal connection to the defendant. His future son-in-law bought a San Luis Obispo restaurant once owned by Peterson and his wife, Laci, and worked for both for six weeks.

Series of troubles

The foreman's dismissal was the third sign in three days of problems in the jury room.

On Monday, Delucchi summoned the entire panel into his courtroom to admonish them about their duty to deliberate in good faith, prompting speculation that jurors were deadlocked.

The panel went back to work and requested dozens of pieces of evidence, an indication to some legal observers that they were back on track.

Then, on Tuesday morning, Delucchi dismissed Juror No. 7, Frances Gorman, an electric-company worker, and replaced her with an alternate.

Despite the stunning developments, most jurors were expressionless during the short hearing Wednesday about the foreman's dismissal.

Juror No. 11, a middle-aged black woman, smiled at her colleagues and the judge, and Juror No. 8, a stocky white man who is a member of the Teamsters Union, nonchalantly chewed on a mint.

There were rumblings of yet another jury problem late Wednesday. Lawyers were summoned into Delucchi's chambers, and the courtroom filled with reporters. Midway through the private 45-minute hearing, lead investigator Craig Grogan of the Stanislaus County District Attorney's Office escorted Bill Cody, an investigator with the San Mateo District Attorney's Office, into the hearing. It was unclear why Cody, a local detective, attended the hearing.

While the hearing was still going on, the jury left for the evening and the lawyers completed their meeting with the judge soon after.

From white collar to blue

Delucchi instructed the panelists, who have spent close to 40 hours in the deliberation room, to begin the process of weighing evidence anew. Jury consultants, however, said that, in practice, panels rarely do so.

"I like to call it the Reader's Digest condensed version," said Texas jury consultant Robert Hirschhorn, who worked on both the Kobe Bryant and Robert Durst cases.

"What happens is that they do a recap for the new person. Here's our analysis. Tell us if you disagree with any part of it. They're not going to do six days of deliberations," Hirschhorn said.

The "catching up" of the new panelist makes the foreman's job even more significant, and in the Peterson case, the change in leadership in the jury room appears to be a stark one. The dismissed foreperson works as a lawyer for a pharmaceutical company, a career he chose after briefly practicing medicine and then corporate law.

During the five months of testimony, the dismissed foreman seemed to be a loner. While his colleagues left for group lunches on Broadway, talking and laughing, he often ate alone with a book on a bench or under a tree.

He took scrupulous notes and filled at least a dozen spiral-bound pads with the testimony of the 184 witnesses.

By contrast, the new foreman works long shifts as a municipal firefighter. He occasionally wore T-shirts and shorts to the trial, while the man he replaced favored sports jackets and khakis. He rarely took notes and often stared down at his lap or picked his cuticles while witnesses testified. He was often at the center of the juror group lunches, though, and seemed to have formed friendships with some panelists, including Juror No. 11 and the former alternate who became Juror No. 7 upon Gorman's dismissal.

Chicago-based jury consultant Paul Lisnek said he believed Peterson's defense had fought hard to keep the foreman from dismissal because his education and disposition gave him a skepticism that made him "the perfect defense juror."

"This was somebody who was going to put the burden to the prosecution by being meticulous. With this guy as foreman, [defense attorney] Mark Geragos might have believed he was guiding the jury toward a not-guilty verdict or perhaps a hang," Lisnek said.

Such an attitude is especially important to the defense in an entirely circumstantial case like the one against Peterson.

"He's methodical, he's analytical, he's going to look at each individual piece of the puzzle and see if it stands up to proof beyond a reasonable doubt," Lisnek said.

His replacement has also voiced concerns about the prosecution's case. During jury selection, the man said his fire captain believed Peterson was innocent and that he had thought about what it would like to be wrongly accused, even discussing Southern lynchings with his mother.

San Francisco-based jury consultant Richard Matthews, who attended several days of the trial, said it would be wrong to conclude the new foreman was less competent because he earned less money than his predecessor or filled fewer notebooks.

"Whatever attitudes the media were detecting from him — 'Gee, he doesn't pay attention' or 'Gee, he doesn't take notes' ... the truth is that people learn in very different ways and people process information in very different ways," Matthews said.

He noted that some of the skills the new foreman used in his high-stress job would serve him well in the jury room.

"A firefighter-paramedic is used to dealing with very complex scenes and putting things quickly in order in terms of importance," he said.

Both jury consultants said that while the first foreman had been elected before jurors knew how he would perform, the second election was likely based on how he comported himself in the rocky deliberations so far.

"As a paramedic arriving on the scene, you have to be quick, you have to be calm, you have to control panic in others. They may have seen these parts of this guy's personality coming through and may have liked what they saw," Lisnek said.

Peterson, 32, was in court for the hearing to announce the foreman's removal. He has been in the judge's chambers for private hearings and did not appear surprised by the development.

Dressed in a khaki suit, butter-colored shirt and orange-and-green striped tie, the fertilizer salesman listened intently to Delucchi as he reinstructed the jurors. After the jury was dismissed and the judge left the bench, he remained at the defense table laughing with his lawyers.

Editor's Note: The jury foreman's name has been added to this story since it was first posted.