ВУЗ:
Составители:
Рубрика:
43
There are no black jurors, but the Jackson trial may hinge on something
other than race. And we don’t mean the race.
We all know that the American justice system entitles the accused to a
jury of his peers. But, as Beverly Hills jury consultant Marshall Hennington says,
“What does a group of Michael Jackson’s peers look like?” Not much like the one
seated last week in Santa Maria, Calif. – and that may be good news or bad
news. For either side. The accuser is Hispanic, and a white district attorney will
prosecute Jackson before a jury with no blacks. But Hennington (who happens to
be black) says that’s not the real point. “This is not a case of race”, he says, “as
much as it is a case involving child molestation – and the issue of class.”
The jury that will decide whether Jackson molested a 13-year-old boy after
plying him with alcohol consists of seven Anglos, three Latinos, one Asian.
Perhaps more important, they’re mostly middle – class folks, and they may see
Jackson as a remote, impossibly wealthy celebrity who considers himself above
the law. Jackson bought his way out of a previous child-abuse allegation, paying
a multimillion-dollar settlement to a 13-year-old Los Angeles boy in 1993. (Judge
Rodney Melville has yet to decide whether evidence from that civil suit will be
admitted in this criminal case.) And, as happened in Martha Stewart trial, jurors
may be put off by a parade of celebrity character witnesses.
On the other hand, jurors may see the accuser and his family as lowlife con
artists. Jackson’s lawyers are calling the accuser’s 36-year-old mother “a
professional plaintiff”, and they’ve brought up a 1999 civil suit in which the
family got a $150,000 settlement from JCPenney and Tower records after mall
security guards allegedly roughed them up. (The guards claimed the family
shoplifted, though no one was prosecuted.) “What if the boy lied in the past to
help his mother obtain money through the legal process?” one Jackson attorney
has asked the court. (In grand-jury testimony from the current case – leaked to
thesmokinggun.com – the mother denies ever coaching her children to lie.) And
certainly jurors will be asking themselves what kind of a mother would let her kid
have a sleepover at Michael Jackson’s house.
Even the family’s heart-rending string of disasters could ultimately work
against them with jurors who hold such secure and respectable jobs as engineer
and government supervisor. “It’s hard to put yourself in the shoes of people who
are having a medical crisis, a financial crisis and an emotional crisis”, says Loyola
Law School professor Laurie Levenson, a former federal prosecutor. “We don’t
particularly identify with those people.” During the nasty 2001 divorce, the father
Страницы
- « первая
- ‹ предыдущая
- …
- 41
- 42
- 43
- 44
- 45
- …
- следующая ›
- последняя »
