US: Eight months ago defence lawyer Thomas Mesereau made a strategic move that may have provided the key to Michael Jackson's court victory: he hired a new private investigator and told him to focus relentlessly on the accuser's mother.
Scott Ross had worked on the defence of actor Robert Blake, successfully digging up unsavoury items about his murdered wife. The information he dug up allowed defence lawyers to argue that someone other than Blake, who was charged with killing her, had a motive for murder. And the unsavoury details gave jurors a reason to dislike the dead woman.
Mesereau wanted a repeat performance. On Monday, as the Jackson jurors talked about their deliberations, they made clear how much Mesereau's strategy had succeeded. "What mother in her right mind would . . . just freely volunteer your child to sleep with someone, and not so much just Michael Jackson, but anyone for that matter? That is something mothers are naturally concerned with," juror No 10, a mother of three, said at a post-trial news conference.
Juror No 5, an elderly woman, spoke of her distaste for the mother's demeanour. The juror "disliked it intensely when she snapped her fingers at us," she said. "I thought, 'Don't snap your fingers at me, lady'."
Juror No 4 said she was "very uncomfortable" with the way the mother kept staring at jurors as she testified.
Mesereau's strategy triumphed. But, ironically, it was a decision by prosecutors that made it possible. Analysts called the decision by Santa Barbara District Attorney Tom Sneddon a fundamental miscalculation.
Rather than file a narrow case against Jackson that would have turned only on the testimony of Jackson's youthful accuser, Sneddon gambled that a broader indictment would succeed better. The indictment included a conspiracy charge centring on accusations that Jackson's aides had conspired to kidnap the mother and keep her at Neverland.
"By doing that he made the mother the focus of the case, and it backfired on him," said Prof Laurie Levenson of Loyola Law School.
Because Sneddon put the mother on the stand, Mesereau was able to give the jury the allegations that Ross and his investigators had dug up: that the mother had committed welfare fraud, that she had lied in a previous civil suit, that she had left Neverland to get her legs waxed at precisely the time she later claimed she was being held at the ranch against her will.
In a news conference after the verdict, Sneddon declined to comment on the conspiracy charge or discuss the way his case was structured. "I'm not going to look back and apologise for anything that we've done," he said.
Sneddon mentioned only "the celebrity factor", Jackson's fame, saying "it seems to us . . . played a key part here. But maybe we're just looking for explanations in the wrong places," he said.
Several analysts suggested he was. While Jackson's celebrity - and his money - clearly helped, the prosecution's conspiracy charge was a critical weak link in the case, they said.
"If your case is about an adult male molesting a male child, you put on that case," said Michael Brennan, a clinical law professor and a former criminal defence lawyer. "The conspiracy case was not necessary, and what it did was force the prosecution to put on the mother, who in turn was a disaster," he said.
Mesereau and his colleagues continually attacked the credibility of the accuser and his mother. They hammered home a picture of the accusers as a money-hungry family who were counting on Jackson to pay them a large settlement. At least one juror said that that image stuck with her during deliberations.
In what trial experts described as an unusually aggressive defence tactic, Jackson's side also presented evidence about the mother outside court. A lawyer hired by Jackson sent a thick dossier to Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley's office, calling for the mother to be prosecuted for allegedly cheating the welfare system. The mother had concealed a $150,000 court settlement, Capozzola alleged.
When the mother took the stand, the presence of that dossier caused her to say in court that she would invoke her 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination if asked any questions about welfare fraud.
Nevertheless, lawyers who followed the case closely said the prosecution's gamble might still have paid off if other aspects of their case had held up. Instead, several witnesses the prosecution had counted on wound up helping Jackson.
For example, Debbie Rowe, Jackson's ex-wife, turned out to be "the best character witness" for the defendant, noted Levenson.
And the prosecution got at most a mixed effect from its effort to let jurors know of past allegations that Jackson had molested young boys. Under a California law, prosecutors were able to present to the jury testimony about the past allegations even though they had never come to trial.
But one alleged victim who won a multi-million-dollar settlement from Jackson a decade ago did not testify. Other young men, including the actor Macaulay Culkin, said Jackson had never molested them. Culkin's testimony was also central to one of the main tasks the defence succeeded at, said Cassman: making the jury accept that Jackson "was a bizarre person, and he did things like sleeping in bed with a young kid."
Defence lawyers did that by not shying away from the fact that Jackson slept with boys. Instead, they presented testimony from boys who shared his bed and swore no molestation had occurred.
"I think it was a brilliant manoeuvre," Cassman said. The defence convinced jurors that it "is possible to sleep with boys and have nothing sexual happen".
In the end, said USC law professor Jean Rosenbluth, "not only was the credibility of the main accuser and his family tested at every turn, so was the credibility of almost every prosecution witness."
The jury could have believed at least some of what Jackson's accuser had to say. But when "you put it in context with the nutty family and delinquent brother and all the problems of a lot of the prosecution witnesses, 'beyond a reasonable doubt' was just too high a hurdle." - (LA Times-Washington Post Service)