Objection!: How High-Priced Defense Attorneys, Celebrity Defendants, and a 24/7 Media Have Hijacked Our Criminal Justice System

by Nancy Grace

  And finally, Congress must put politics aside and pass the Crime Victims’ Rights Act (S.2329). As of this writing, it is being used as a pawn within Senate offices. The bill guarantees that victims be advised of upcoming hearings, court appearances, and the trial of the perpetrator in their case. Victims have a right to be heard. Their voices should matter. Is that too much to ask? I say no.

  C H A P T E R E I G H T

  T H E C E L E B R I T Y FA CTO R

  ZSA ZSA’S HUSBAND SAID IT ALL. AFTER GABOR

  went on trial for slapping a traffic cop square in the face in 1989, her husband, Prince Frederic von Anhalt, actually uttered these words:

  “The rich and famous should be treated differently. They bring the money into Beverly Hills.”

  That kind of talk led to a little thing called the French Revolution back in 1789, and we here in America have never—at least officially—

  condoned a class system. Our government functions under the belief that all people are created equal and are treated equally under the law regardless of their bank accounts. Apparently the judge agreed, and Gabor landed in jail for three days.

  One night on Larry King Live, just as the most recent Michael Jackson child-molestation case exploded, the debate was hot and heavy over the new charges. The legal dueling suddenly went horribly wrong, when the analysis of Jackson’s child-molestation charges quickly turned to banter about how the charges would affect Jackson’s latest CD release, Number Ones. I stayed quiet as long as I could, until I finally went on the attack, reminding the groupies that justice isn’t based on fame, power, and privilege. Justice is blind as to race, creed, gender, wealth, or poverty.

  O B J E C T I O N !

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  No other suspect in a child-molestation case, especially with the specter of additional victims surfacing, would be handled with kid gloves like Jackson. The Jackson case highlights everything that’s wrong with our justice system, one of the most grievous offenses on display: the blatant special treatment the defendant received because of his wealth and celebrity. We have seen the rules bent to accommodate Jackson in a manner unheard of for “regular” defendants. The celebrity factor was clearly at play when he pulled up at the time of his choosing for fingerprints and book-in in a shiny, chauffeured SUV. What other defendant gets to have his hair and makeup perfectly styled (freakish as it may be) for a mug shot? From showing up late for his first court appearance, then holding a “dance-off ” on top of a Jeep outside, to violating gag orders, issuing press releases, and having fans the world over malign the alleged child victim, the celebrity factor is alive and well in this case. The most disturbing aspect of this display of sideshow justice is that it still has the power to skew the outcome of the law.

  History has shown us that when it comes to celebrity, the sword cuts both ways. If he hadn’t been a major silent-screen star back in the 1920s, actor Fatty Arbuckle might not have been prosecuted for the 1921 death of a young actress whom he allegedly crushed during sex.

  On the other hand, if he had not been a star, Arbuckle might never have been acquitted.

  No discussion of celebrity defendants is complete without O. J.

  Simpson. In 1994, after the double murders of his ex-wife and her friend, there is no doubt that the actor and former football star got preferential treatment. It was clear to the world that both the police and the courts brushed off earlier domestic-violence charges against Simpson.

  Then, when two dead bodies were identified as Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, Simpson was again handled with kid gloves. Police interviewed the former NFL star briefly, inconclusively, and gingerly.

  Even after he was charged with double homicide, police worked around his schedule, waiting for him to surrender when he could work it into his DayTimer. Result? The low-speed Bronco chase, threats of suicide, 2 3 2

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  and a public spectacle that turned a double-murder investigation into home entertainment that’s still the butt of jokes years later.

  And the degree of celebrity trumps all the others on the docket at that moment. Kobe Bryant, Martha Stewart, Phil Spector, Robert Blake, Glen Campbell, Courtney Love, and Rush Limbaugh, all stars in their own right, must have danced up and down the halls with glee when the King of Pop, with legions of fans worldwide—some of whom believe he is a deity—caught a hardball: seven counts of child molestation. For a few short moments, all the others were trumped by Jackson’s greater celebrity and were briefly kicked out of the twenty-four-hour news cycle.

  Another thing that distinguishes celebrity cases is that while most people live, eat, and breathe largely unnoticed, everything a celebrity has said or done in the past will be dug up—most likely on video—and reinterpreted. Michael Jackson was in the position of explaining away a documentary in which he admits to sharing his bed with young boys.

  Years of documented bizarre behavior are extremely difficult to surmount. Regular people rarely have those particular worries. But as the saying goes, “Live by the sword, die by the sword.” When it comes to celebrity, truer words were never spoken.

  Once celebrity enters the courtroom and becomes a factor in the process, there is a radical sea change and unequal treatment under the law is the result. From demanding a higher standard of proof for celebrity convictions, outgunning local prosecutors with sheer manpower alone, receiving special treatment by police, and getting lenient sentences handed down by starstruck judges, celebrity casts a long shadow over Lady Justice. In all these and other instances, celebrity threatens to overpower justice.

  B Y I N V I T A T I O N O N L Y

  Michael Jackson. Kobe Bryant. Robert Blake. Winona Ryder.

  Martha Stewart. This is the era of the celebrity trial. It is also the era of O B J E C T I O N !

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  the secret trial. The barriers to an open courtroom are becoming stronger and stronger. What with the exclusion of cameras from the courtroom, sealed documents, gag orders, limited seating, endless “in camera” (behind closed doors) hearings, and secret jury selection, access to the truth is becoming a thing of the past. Do you think if you went on trial for shoplifting, that (a) the press would report on your clothing every single day, right down to the style of your headband? and (b) access to the courtroom would be denied? No way! But for celebrities, trials are now by invitation, and those not invited—the rest of us—can only wonder what’s going on inside. In the process of turning a public trial into an engraved-invitation-only event, celebrity trials held in closed courtrooms, “star”

  defendants and their lawyers—with the judge’s consent—are chipping away at the backbone of our system: the right to a public trial.

  Consider these elements that have been kept secret in the recent spate of high-profile trials: the actual events of preliminary hearings, search warrants used by police to gain evidence, the actual legal briefs, text messages that are likely deemed evidence at trial, results of scientific tests also used at trial by one side or the other, witness lists normally deemed public information and generally listed on the back of the indictment. We’re even kept from seeing the parties involved walk into the courthouse. There is a new privilege in the Celebrity Bill of Rights—the private trial. For celebrity-laden proceedings, the public is held at bay, kept behind the rope like it’s a red-carpet event or a rock concert. The result is that the same public who is served up endless helpings of spoon-fed publicity about these “stars” is being excluded from the guts of the case (who wants the negative publicity?) and the heart of the judicial process.

  The media screams to high heaven, of course, that their “rights”

  are being violated. I know they’re right, but I’m less concerned about their losing a dollar made off tabloid headlines than I am about the disturbing trend developing around celebrity defendants. The star-studded trial has become an exclusive event, with us, the peasants, on the outside trying to look in on a system we built and paid for, many of us with our lives. I
t’s we, the general public, the people who are locked 2 3 4

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  outside our own courtrooms. We have been trumped by celebrity and will be allowed in by invitation only.

  Don’t believe me? Members of the jury, let’s review the evidence.

  M I C H A E L J A C K S O N :

  B E A T I T !

  Even in its beginning stages, the public was left out and lawyers on both sides were barred from talking about this case outside the courtroom. The judge rejected a request by media for live broadcast coverage, a request that included voluntary omission of the young accuser’s name or face. Documents, including search warrants and their returns (records of what was found and taken during the search), were often sealed from the public. Many of the legal arguments have been held in camera, in the judge’s chambers. Other than the lemonade and hot-dog party Jackson threw for his fans after his first court appearance, the public is the odd man out on the real evidence.

  W I N O N A R Y D E R :

  C A R E E R , I N T E R R U P T E D

  This star, loved by millions, went to trial, right or wrong, on a simple shoplifting charge. Shoplifting cases are handled by the thousands every week in this country, so why were cameras, and hence public access, banned from seeing all but the very end of the trial?

  We were shut out of the bulk of Ryder’s trial, left to basing our opinions about fairness in court on secondhand accounts. Various bits of evidence leaked, including a video of Ryder entering the department store with a very thin bag and leaving with a very fat one. The announcement of the guilty verdict, however, was covered live. The reason behind that remains a mystery. In a disturbing trend, courtrooms are either refusing camera access or parsing it into bits and pieces. In Ryder’s case, what many thought should have been a simple plea blossomed into a full-blown trial, complete with defense allegations that members of Saks store security were all in on a conspiracy, a plot O B J E C T I O N !

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  to get Winona. If store security is up to all that, I certainly want to know! Joking aside, this case represented something highly important.

  Unlike murder or sex-assault cases that deal with devastating emotions, sorrow, frequent humiliation, and personal angst, a shoplifting trial is run of the mill, handled by hundreds of prosecutors on a daily basis. In Ryder’s case, even this simple process was hidden from the cameras and kept from the public. There was no real reason other than celebrity to ban the camera during the trial. There were no undercover cops, no sex-attack victims, no disturbing crime-scene photos—

  just a beautiful and gifted young woman on trial with a zany defense.

  Short and simple: In this case, star power trumped the rights of the public.

  M A R T H A S T E W A R T :

  I T ’ S N O T A G O O D T H I N G

  To start with, the public was kicked out of jury selection during the domestic diva’s trial. I don’t just mean photos or live coverage or broadcasting names—the public was completely disallowed. Stewart’s case was over a federal regulation and thus conducted in federal court, where cameras have long been banned. Ultimately a higher court, the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, overruled the trial judge in her decision to bar access, but in the end no cameras were allowed. It was ironic how the jury-selection process was so secretive, because the minute the verdict was in, some of the jurors ran straight to the cameras and talked until, thankfully, there was nothing left to say.

  K O B E B R Y A N T :

  J U S T I C E F O U L S O U T

  Although I agree with the general rule that sex-attack victims not be outed, in so many other aspects this trial was shrouded in secrecy.

  This wasn’t out of concern for the young woman who accused Kobe Bryant of rape. It was all about protecting Bryant, the alleged rapist.

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  The case became an exclusive event before the trial date was ever set, when the trial judge issued a broad order disallowing cell phones and tape recorders inside the courthouse. Normally court watchers are simply asked to turn off their cells in court. This time, their usage was barred from the courthouse. You think a judge would bend over backward like that for the typical rape defendant? No way! Key hearings were kept secret, such as those that dealt with medical records, DNA, and other issues involving the accuser. Still other evidentiary matters were closed to the news media and the public. Surprisingly, a routine motion to suppress Kobe Bryant’s statements to police—standard operating procedure by the defense—was also kept under wraps. What did he say? Why was it kept secret? There was no way for the public to know if justice was being served in the Kobe Bryant case—because we can’t see in the dark.

  R O B E R T B L A K E :

  I N C O L D B L O O D

  The public’s access to jury selection was short-circuited when it started a month earlier than originally announced. Jurors’ identities were kept secret; they were identified only by number. Live coverage of testimony was disallowed. In my view, this is an incredibly important trial, in that it goes to the core of the matter of just how much we as a people punish victims for their lifestyles. I want to know. I want to see how Bonny Lee Bakley is treated in that courtroom. I want to know and see for myself whether a star can buy his way out of murder in an American courtroom.

  A N D R E A Y A T E S :

  A M A T T E R O F L I F E A N D D E A T H

  I was dismayed when the judge in Andrea Yates’s 2002 trial disallowed live trial coverage. This case centered on two bedrock concerns of our justice system: the abuse of children and issues surrounding the insanity defense. At the heart of the case was what role an alleged mental illness played in the murders of an entire family of children—the O B J E C T I O N !

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  true victims in the case. We were left no real answers. Instead the public heard a lot of secondhand speculation in a case that will set precedent from now on. Not only did the issues of helpless child victims and the insanity defense come into play, but this was a death-penalty case.

  Because of the potential that the most serious punishment existed here, I believe it was even more important that the public have access to the trial, to ensure that the proceedings were fair and to uncover any wrongdoing that might have taken place.

  In an unusual turn of events that stunned child advocates and em-boldened Yates’s supporters, it was announced in December 2004 that the Texas appeals court had reversed her conviction based on a comment made by the state’s expert, renowned psychiatrist Park Deitz.

  When asked on cross-examination by the defense if a Law and Order episode prior to the tragic drownings dealt with a mother accused of killing her children and pleading insanity, Deitz recalled such an episode on the stand. It was implied that Yates had seen the episode, murdered her children, and used the insanity defense as a ruse. Yates’s conviction was reversed and a retrial is now necessary.

  L I S A M O N T G O M E R Y

  Then, just before the 2004 holidays, more violence toward children surfaced, and in a gruesome manner. An expectant mother, Bobbie Jo Stinnett, twenty-three, was found murdered in her Skidmore, Missouri, home. Her unborn baby girl had been cut from Stinnett’s body and taken. Police promptly searched her computer and discovered e-mail messages leading them to Lisa Montgomery, thirty-six, of Melvern, Kansas. An anonymous tip from North Carolina bolstered the e-mails as well. Sworn affidavits reveal a web of deceit and premeditation on the part of Montgomery, who contacted Stinnett through a chat room, asking to take a look at some puppies that she had raised. The two met at Stinnett’s home. Ironically, Montgomery’s Internet computer name 2 3 8

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  was “fisher for kids.” Adding insult to injury, the suspect dressed the baby she had cut from her mother’s womb in pale pink and proceeded to show it off around her hometown. The baby, Victoria Jo Stinnett, now re-united with her grieving dad, has a heavy burden to bear the rest of her life, a life des
tined to be lived without her mother.

  S C O T T P E T E R S O N :

  T H E N O T - S O - P E R F E C T H U S B A N D

  In the Peterson trial, the public’s access to court was blocked at every turn. The judge banned cameras in the courtroom; witness lists and names of jurors were kept secret. And, as I mentioned in a previous chapter, city officials’ failed moneymaking scheme to charge the media $51,000 for each tent pitched outside the Redwood City courthouse and $7,500 for each truck certainly had the potential to keep out those that couldn’t ante up the larcenous fee. Gag orders were handed down so parties involved couldn’t speak openly about the case. Multiple search warrants and their returns were kept confidential and sealed, and the same went for a myriad of legal arguments held behind closed doors. Why? There’s no reasonable answer.

  Why are high-profile defendants granted exclusive trials? Of course jurors must be protected. No one wants a tainted jury pool that has already formed an opinion, but there are alternatives to avoid that problem, other than excluding the public from key evidence and hearings, much less the trial itself. Making the trial exclusive is not the answer. And when the public forms an opinion, what bearing does that have on the verdict? None. All that matters is the true verdict. It is essential that the jury be fair and impartial, but keeping the rest of us in the dark does not serve a purpose toward fairness.

  The rulings in these and other high-profile trials are chiseling away at the public’s constitutional guarantee to observe the legal process.

  Leaks will continue regardless, and without full access they may likely O B J E C T I O N !

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  be incorrect. The truth of what actually happens in court in many celebrity trials is simply not made available to the public. In fact, celebrity trials should be even more accessible, so the taxpaying citizens of this country can be reassured that the select and privileged few—our celebrities—are not bestowed special treatment because of their status. Celebrity seems to guarantee that trial is by invitation only.