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 News from Around the Americas | June 2005 
Michael Jackson Cleared After 14-Week Child Molesting Trial
 John M. Broder & Nick Madigan - NYTimes
| | Michael Jackson leaving the courthouse on Monday after learning that he had been acquitted of all charges. Mr. Jackson then paused to blow kisses to his many fans outside before returning to his estate. (Photo: Monica Almeida/The New York Times) |
Santa Maria, Calif. - Michael Jackson was acquitted on Monday of all charges against him by a jury that absorbed three months of often lurid testimony about his life and relationships with young boys but rejected a teenager's claim that Mr. Jackson plied him with liquor and sexually molested him.
Mr. Jackson walked free after a Santa Maria jury found him not guilty of four charges of child molesting, one charge of attempted child molesting, one conspiracy charge and eight possible counts of providing alcohol to minors.
Together, the charges could have brought 20 years in prison. Instead, Mr. Jackson is free to try to reclaim a career that has been in decline for a decade as he seemed to retreat more into his own private world with each passing year.
The eight women and four men of the jury deliberated for about 30 hours over seven days before saying shortly after noon that they had reached a decision.
The courtroom was silent and tense as the court clerk began to read the verdicts at 2:13 p.m. When it became clear that the jury had found that prosecutors had not proved their case against him, Mr. Jackson dabbed at his eyes with a tissue, and one of his lawyers, Susan C. Yu, began sobbing quietly.
Mr. Jackson's parents, Katherine and Joe, who had sat through almost every day of the 14-week trial, showed no emotion. Nor did his brothers Randy and Jermaine and his sisters LaToya and Rebbie, who were seated directly behind him. Another sister, Janet, waited outside because there were only six seats for family inside.
The family left the courtroom without speaking to the hundreds of reporters from around the world who had converged on this small Central Coast city to cover the latest of California's celebrity trials.
When word of the verdict spread, several hundred Jackson fans who were gathered outside the courthouse screamed in approval, embraced one another and threw confetti. A woman released one white dove for each count on which Mr. Jackson was acquitted. When Mr. Jackson emerged a half hour later, he quietly blew kisses to the fans and then disappeared into a black S.U.V. for the trip to his storybook Neverland estate.
Across the country, people paused to hear the outcome of the trial. Hundreds gathered in Times Square, where a giant screen heralded Mr. Jackson's acquittal, and a pilot broke in on a New York-to-California flight shortly before landing to relay the news to passengers.
The courtroom drama had profound implications for Mr. Jackson's life and career but did not rise to the level of legal spectacle offered by the O. J. Simpson double-murder trial a decade ago. The nature of the crime was different, Mr. Jackson's career was already in decline and the judge in this case, Rodney S. Melville, barred cameras from the courtroom and imposed a gag order on all participants.
The verdict was a devastating disappointment for Thomas W. Sneddon Jr., the Santa Barbara County district attorney, who has pursued Mr. Jackson for 12 years, since the time another boy made similar accusation.
Mr. Sneddon tried to bring a criminal case involving that boy, but was thwarted when the witness and his family reached a $20 million civil settlement with Mr. Jackson and refused to cooperate in a criminal investigation.
When Mr. Sneddon brought the new charges in late 2003, Mr. Jackson and his supporters accused him of pursuing a vendetta and a trophy case to cap his long career. Mr. Sneddon adamantly denied that at a news conference Monday afternoon.
"My past history with Mr. Jackson absolutely, unequivocally has nothing to do with this case," he said. "I thought we had a good case this time."
Asked if he thought a child molester had gone free, Mr. Sneddon snapped, "No comment."
The 12 members of the jury and 8 alternates appeared at a news conference after the verdict and said they had tried to weigh the evidence as if Mr. Jackson were not a global superstar. None of the jurors gave their names, and Judge Melville ordered their files sealed indefinitely.
The jury foreman, a 63-year-old retired high school guidance counselor, said, "We looked at all the evidence and we looked at Michael Jackson, and one of the first things we decided was we had to look at him just as another person and not a celebrity." In a later interview on CNN, the foreman identified himself as Paul Rodriguez.
Another juror, a 62-year-old civil engineer, said there was no defining moment in the trial, but rather an accumulation of evidence that undercut the prosecution's case.
"We considered all the evidence," he said "and since this was a criminal trial, it had to be beyond a reasonable doubt. And looking at all the evidence this was the conclusion we all came to."
The case ultimately turned on the credibility of Mr. Jackson's accuser, a 15-year-old cancer survivor who said the defendant had gotten him drunk and molested him several times two years ago. The boy's younger brother testified that he had seen Mr. Jackson fondling his brother on two other occasions.
Their mother, a difficult witness for the prosecution, testified that Mr. Jackson had held the family captive and that he had forced them to make a video testimonial to rebut a documentary in which he had acknowledged sleeping with young boys.
The mother appeared to lose the jury with her rambling, incoherent and at times combative testimony. She argued with Mr. Jackson's lawyer and delivered lectures to the jury, even as she wove a tale of mistreatment at the hands of Mr. Jackson's minions.
"I disliked it intensely when she snapped her fingers at us," one female juror said. "I thought, 'Don't snap your fingers at me, lady.' "
From the opening statements in late February to the closing arguments two weeks ago, the jury heard two sharply different descriptions of an entertainer who once reigned over the world of pop music and who made hundreds of millions of dollars in a career that began when he was a 6-year-old singing phenomenon in the family group, the Jackson Five.
Prosecutors painted him as a serial pedophile who got young boys into his bed using Neverland as a lure. They portrayed the singer's estate near here as a no-rules fantasy kingdom that lowered children's inhibitions and made them ready for Mr. Jackson's sexual advances. The accuser in the case was just the latest in a long list of Mr. Jackson's "special friends," they said, at least two of whom were silenced with large payments.
The defense responded that the boy at the heart of this case was a cunning liar who had begged money from numerous celebrities by playing off his serious bout with cancer when he was 10. Thomas A. Mesereau Jr., Mr. Jackson's lead lawyer, called the family "con artists, actors and liars" repeatedly in his closing statement.
Another juror said she believed the mother had taught her children to lie to gain money or favors from celebrities.
"As a mother, the values she has taught them, it's hard for me to comprehend," the juror said. "I wouldn't want any of my children to lie for their own gain."
The current case against Mr. Jackson erupted in February 2003, with the broadcast of "Living With Michael Jackson," a British documentary in which Mr. Jackson talked about sharing his bed with young boys, calling it a loving act and insisting it had nothing to do with sex. The accuser in this case, then 13, was shown holding hands with the singer and resting his head affectionately on his shoulder.
The documentary provoked an international sensation, seeming to confirm years of rumors that Mr. Jackson was overly fond of young boys. Mr. Sneddon, hearing what he had long suspected, immediately began a criminal investigation.
The charges led to 20 months of bizarre spectacle that included Mr. Jackson dancing to his own music atop an S.U.V. just after his arraignment in January 2004, as hundreds of fans screamed in the street outside the courthouse. (Over the course of the trial, however, Mr. Jackson appeared more pale and gaunt with each passing week and was briefly hospitalized several times.)The prosecutor's case had problems from the beginning. The timeline of the accusations, for example, was problematic, because the molesting was said to have taken place after the broadcast of the documentary, when the world's attention was focused on Mr. Jackson and the boy.
In the end, jurors found the prosecution's case had come up short. They were not willing to put Mr. Jackson in jail on the basis of testimony from the accuser's family. One juror, asked if she thought the mother was a scam artist, replied, "The thought was definitely there."
Another juror said: "In a case like this, you're hoping that maybe you can find a smoking gun or something that you can grab onto that says absolutely one way or another. In this case, we had difficulty in finding that."
The prosecutor, Mr. Sneddon, tried to put a brave face on defeat.
"I'm not going to look back and apologize for anything we've done," he said. "You never have a case where you don't have some surprises." |
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