Los Angeles – Eight months ago, defense attorney Thomas Mesereau Jr. 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 defense of Robert Blake, successfully digging up unsavory items about the actor’s murdered wife. The information he dug up allowed defense lawyers to argue that someone other than Blake, who was charged with killing her, had a motive for murder. Moreover, the unsavory details gave jurors a reason to dislike the dead woman.
Mesereau wanted a repeat performance, and he gave his investigator a simple, blunt instruction, Ross recalled Monday: “I want you to do to (the mother of the alleged victim) what you did to Bonny Lee Bakley.”
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 demeanor. 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 stared at jurors as she testified.
Mesereau’s strategy triumphed. But it was a decision by prosecutors that made it possible. Analysts on Monday 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 centering on accusations that Jackson’s aides had conspired to kidnap the mother and keep her at the singer’s Neverland Valley Ranch.
“The prosecutor went for every strategic advantage. He thought he could broaden the case with the conspiracy charge,” said Loyola Law School professor Laurie Levenson. “By doing that, he made the mother the focus of the case, and it backfired on him.”
Because Sneddon put the mother on the stand, Mesereau was able to give the jury 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 against J.C. Penney & Co., 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.
“The mother was the weakest link in the case. She was walking, talking reasonable doubt,” said Levenson, a former federal prosecutor who closely followed the case against Jackson.
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 apologize for anything that we’ve done,” he said.
