A juror in the Phillip Spector murder retrial has been excused at his request for reasons of financial hardship after the juror told the court that he is now paying “out of pocket” for his salary during the 5 month old murder retrial. “Juror #5”—a Caucasian man was replaced today (February 23) with an Asian female.
There are now six men and six women on the jury charged with determining whether Spector shot down-on-her-luck actress Lana Clarkson in the mansion’s foyer in the early morning hours of February 3, 2003 or whether a depressed and intoxicated Clarkson took her own life as the defense contends.
The prosecution experts have testified that the medical-forensic evidence fails to explain whether the famed music producer took Clarkson’s life, or whether Clarkson took her own life.
The first trial ended in a hung jury, after an initial jurors’ vote of 4 for guilty and 8 jurors stating that they were either voting not guilty or were at that point unconvinced of Spector’s guilt.
When it became known that the jury was deadlocked, the trial judge engaged in the unprecedented act of changing the jury instruction on the elements of murder—going so far as to tell the jurors that the evidence supported Phil Spector ordering Clarkson to put the gun in her own mouth and to pull the trigger.
Even then, two jurors, including one woman, failed to convict—thereby resulting in the hung jury.
The trial judge gained additional notoriety after the hung jury when an HBO documentary on the Roman Polanski case concluded by asserting (with credible supporting witnesses) that the same trial judge as in the Spector case tried to make a secret deal with the exiled French movie director that he would be granted probation, but only if he agreed to appear at a televised sentencing hearing.
In a further unorthodox move, the same trial judge refused to allow an independent judge to rule on some 40 grounds of bias that Spector’s attorneys claim required his disqualification. Instead, the judge passed on the motion himself.
There are now six men and six women on the jury charged with determining whether Spector shot down-on-her-luck actress Lana Clarkson in the mansion’s foyer in the early morning hours of February 3, 2003 or whether a depressed and intoxicated Clarkson took her own life as the defense contends.
The prosecution experts have testified that the medical-forensic evidence fails to explain whether the famed music producer took Clarkson’s life, or whether Clarkson took her own life.
The first trial ended in a hung jury, after an initial jurors’ vote of 4 for guilty and 8 jurors stating that they were either voting not guilty or were at that point unconvinced of Spector’s guilt.
When it became known that the jury was deadlocked, the trial judge engaged in the unprecedented act of changing the jury instruction on the elements of murder—going so far as to tell the jurors that the evidence supported Phil Spector ordering Clarkson to put the gun in her own mouth and to pull the trigger.
Even then, two jurors, including one woman, failed to convict—thereby resulting in the hung jury.
The trial judge gained additional notoriety after the hung jury when an HBO documentary on the Roman Polanski case concluded by asserting (with credible supporting witnesses) that the same trial judge as in the Spector case tried to make a secret deal with the exiled French movie director that he would be granted probation, but only if he agreed to appear at a televised sentencing hearing.
In a further unorthodox move, the same trial judge refused to allow an independent judge to rule on some 40 grounds of bias that Spector’s attorneys claim required his disqualification. Instead, the judge passed on the motion himself.
5 comments:
My opinion: The trial judge should get down off the bench and sit next to the prosecutor where he belongs.
There is convincing evidence in Lana Clarkson's own words that she was going to commit suicide: "I am sorry not to telephone tonight but this way you cannot hear my tears. I am truly at the end of this whole deal. I am going to TIDY MY AFFAIRS and chuck it. Cuz it’s really all too much for one girl to bear. Don't worry, not before I pay you back."
The recipient of the above quoted email testified that he came forward to police several days after Clarkson’s death to give them this email because he thought it was relevant after hearing the claim Lana killed herself.
Nor could these words be viewed by a reasonable person as referring to a career change as the prosecution contends. No, "tidy up my affairs" and chuck it because the pain is all too much to bear (but not before I pay you back) can ONLY refer to suicide.
The first time Spector ever talked to detectives (the same day Lana died) Spector told a detective that Clarkson killed herself--this is not a claim "manufactured" by highly paid experts or lawyers, as the prosecution has implied.
BEFORE Spector ever talked to an attorney, he told detectives that Lana Clarkson shot herself. Yet the prosecution has requested (and received) and order keeping Spector's jail statement away for the jury!
Why do you think that the first jury vote 5 to acquit and 3 undecided before the trial judge tried to fix the case by changing the jury instructions on murder?
Hint: There is substantial evidence, even without the prosecution suppressed same day statement by Spector, that Lana Clarkson killed herself.
Dear Anon@3:29 pm:
From:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,496505,00.html
Re: Spector trial judge Larry Fidler, secret offer to allow Roman Polanski to return to the US for hearing—but only if the hearing televised—and secret court email public relations campaign to kill HBO expose that exposed the truth:
“More recently, emails that this column has uncovered between the Los Angeles Superior Court’s press office and various media outlets suggest that the court has played an unusually aggressive role in defending itself and attacking Polanski at every turn.
The emails I’ve seen were all generated by the court’s Allan Parachini, the chief press officer, in regards to the June 2008 release of Marina Zenovich’s highly praised HBO documentary, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired.
The emails contain some of the most aggressive flackery seen in some time as the court went into overdrive to protect itself against a perceived threat by Zenovich.
Parachini sent most of the emails in June 2008, right after the documentary debuted at the Cannes Film Festival and just before it was shown on HBO.
At the heart of Parachini’s campaign was an assertion by Zenovich, backed up by Polanski’s lawyer Douglas Dalton and Roger Gunson, a former assistant DA in the Los Angeles Superior Court. That assertion was: in 1997, twenty years after Polanski split for France, Judge Larry Fidler told the two lawyers that Polanski could only return to the U.S. for a hearing if it were televised. Polanski declined the offer.
Zenovich ended her film with this statement. Parachini jumped on it, and demanded it be removed before the HBO airing. He claimed in a media advisory and dozens of emails to media writers that the statement was a "fabrication."
A series of emails sent by him to various media outlets, not only chronicles his efforts to have the statement changed, but his gloating when it was accomplished.
Even more interesting: One recipient of those emails was a correspondent for website TMZ.com, who several months later left that job and went to work for Parachini in his office.
Complicating that scenario: in December, when Polanski’s lawyers filed a motion to dismiss his 32-year-old case, they also filed for access to all of the emails between the court, the D.A.’s office, and media outlets.
Parachini is particularly aggressive about this with the Los Angeles Times, and confides in emails to NPR’s Kim Masters his frustrations about getting the job done. When HBO finally agrees to alter Zenovich's ending, he calls it a "surrender."
In June 2008, when this was happening, Parachini pitched the story of HBO’s surrender to TMZ.com’s Vania Stuelp and her boss, Harvey Levin. On June 9th, he wrote to them:
"I know that Roman Polanski isn't on your normal radar screen, but if you look at recent coverage of the documentary HBO is airing tonight, you might see it a little differently in view of the spurious allegation it makes about Judge Fidler. Let me know if you want to pursue. Thx."
To Stuelp, at TMZ.com, he wrote on June 9th in his pitch:
"HBO has, in fact, altered the text that concludes the film, so what they'll air tonight represents a major editorial change from the version they showed at Sundance and Cannes and have been using for media. Personally, this strikes me as huge, but I'm in the middle of it, I know."
Stuelp responded:
"I agree, I think it's a great story! I'll see if I can get them to record it and maybe we'll do it tomorrow."
In fact, at least checking in TMZ archives, they weren’t interested. No TMZ story ran at that time. But six months later, Stuelp had left TMZ and gone to work for Parachini. After Polanski’s lawyers filed the motion to see his emails, this one turned up from Parachini to Stuelp on December 3, 2008:
"Because we have to assume that our interactions with HBO relating to Polanski could become the subject of a discovery demand, I did a search to identify all of my email that had anything to do with Polanski. There are, of course, a number of emails back and forth between you and me, all to or from your TMZ address. Some of them are responses that actually refer to the position vacancy you eventually filled.
But some of them do address the situation relating to Judge Fidler’s concern about the original version of the documentary ending. There is at least one email from Harvey [Levin] about it, too.
"I think this is extremely unlikely, but it’s not impossible to imagine that Polanski’s lawyers could either make a discovery demand so broad that it would include any email that mentioned his name, in which case our email exchanges would surface.
That, in turn, could lead to the attorney seeing some kind of kind of opportunity in the fact that you and Harvey and I had email correspondence relating to this episode and trying to link your eventual employment here to the court’s concern about Polanski. As bizarre as that might seem, his lawyers must represent their client as aggressively as they can, so anything is possible. If by any chance you still have electronic versions of any email between you and me relating you Polanski, please be sure that you do nothing to damage or delete it.
"For, you, Mary and me this means we need to be especially sensitive to inquires relating to any involvement in Polanski. In your case, I suspect TMZ would raise immediate First Amendment objections to disclosure of anything to or from you, but that would not prevent the court from being subject to a discovery for the same stuff. As you probably know, Mary was the one who initially handled the interactions with HBO and continued to be the primary contact until nearly the very end of the process.
"Should any of this come up as a discovery issue, our response will that discovery matters must be handled by our court counsel’s office and there is nothing we can say about it. Please don’t raise this issue with anyone at TMZ. We’ll cross that bridge if and when we get there, but I think the chances of this occurring are VERY low."
Parachini was so proud of getting HBO to change the ending of the film that he even sent an email to Judge Fidler, who recently presided over the botched Phil Spector murder trial, with a clip from a blog called L.A. Observed.
To most of his other email recipients, Parachini mostly just cannot get over the fact that HBO has "surrendered" without much of a protest, and that the change, he believes, has totally altered Zenovich’s film.
In one email, to the L.A. Times’s Greg Braxton, Parachini writes on June 9, 2008: "I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of a content alteration of this degree of substance in a project like this, especially after it’s already been screened at Sundance and Cannes …"
And Parachini doesn’t even bother trying for a tone of objectivity when the subject of Polanski comes up with the media. He writes to Jack Leonard of the L.A. Times:
"Im not sure I've ever heard of the climactic ending of a documentary being changed under these circumstances before, but then [expletive] can always happen ....”
THIS is the trial judge presiding over the Phil Spector retrial?
If Lana Clarkson threatned to take her own life shortly before she died, and the physical evidence cannot exclude a suicide, then how can there not be reasonable doubt that a suicide and not a murder caused Clrkson's death?
Dear February 24, 2009 4:12 PM:
Because a theoretical jury might believe the chauffeur that despite the fountain noise, the car radio and his poor English, as well as the seven versions of what Spectator said as reported at various time to 911 and law enforcement, and despite problems with his time line, the driver is reliable enough to provide the exclusive basis to convict a man of murder or manslaughter—despite the evidence that Lana Clarkson MIGHT have killed herself.
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