Celebrity

Two judicial decisions were announced yesterday which confirm the importance of celebrity in our society and contradiction in the criminal-justice system. The first was the rather surprising (to me) acquittal of Robert Blake for the likely murder of his wife; the second was the confirmation of the death penalty recommended by jurors against the loathesome but telegenic Scott Peterson.

Blake's guilt had seemed obvious to me based on the scant evidence I'd heard on morning newsradio; I hadn't exactly obsessed on the details. And I hadn't factored in the historical truth that no Hollywood celebrity has ever been convicted of a capital offense. OJ is the obvious reference point, but we can go back to Fatty Arbuckle, Claudine Longet and Lana Turner's daughter for further precedent. The conventional wisdom is that fame and its attendant wealth enables the defense to buy the best lawyers possible; Blake's team was able to persuade the jury that Blake's actions, which constituted returning to the restaurant to "retrieve his gun," then coming out to his car to "discover his wife's head had been shot," were disconnected events. Why? Because there was no forensic evidence connecting Blake's hand and the supposed residue from such a shooting. Fuck, hadn't the jury ever heard of Handiwipes?
But that minor evidentiary gap was enough to establish reasonable doubt, though the Elephant in the Room is the matter of who-the-hell-else could have done it.

Jurors interviewed afterward seemed to imply they thought Blake had pulled the trigger but were stymied by the lack of concrete evidence. Yet this same reasoning didn't seem to apply to Scott Peterson's conviction. In that case everything was circumstantial; Peterson was found guilty because of the persuasive coincidence of his fishing near where the bodies were dredged up, and because he was such a major lying shit. No fingerprints, no smoking gun, nothing but a smirking asshole. He was really convicted of being a cad, and his boorish attitudes in court subjectively offended the jury. Enough so that they want him to die. (I am a not a proponent of the Death Penalty, whose application puts us in league with China and all those Mideast countries Dubya would otherwise characterize as Evildoers, but that's for another blog.)

It's interesting to speculate what would have happened to these two trials if 1) Scott Peterson had been the actor who was the lead on a TV detective show, or 2) Robert Blake were not a celebrity. Joe Shmoe (the hypothetic nobody, not the guy on the reality-show satire) would have been cooling his heels in the cooler for life with the same alibi as Robert Blake. Peterson would probably have received the benefit of the doubt from the jury enamored of his credits and with fond memories of his pet cockatoo Fred. As it was, Peterson did manage to solicit a high-profile defense lawyer, but only because the media took to his physical appearance (he was portrayed by Superman, for goodness sake), and that of his pretty but clueless wife. That high-profile managed to entice Mark Geragos, but clearly this superlawyer was overextended, at the time trying to double as Michael Jackson's defender, and didn't work hard enough at modifying his sociopathic client's courtroom demeanor.

If the Petersons resembled Dan and Roseanne Connor--or even Robert Blake and Bonnie Lee Bakely-- rather than Ken and Barbie, we never would have heard of them. But whoever said Justice was Blind?