A sorry bunch

By Peter Lemiska

The fate of one of the biggest names in the music industry will soon be in the hands of 12 average citizens, but the array of pathetic characters that has emerged in the Michael Jackson case shows that this defendant and those around him live in a realm vastly different from ours.

He has been accused of sexually molesting a child, a crime in every state in the union and in nearly every civilized country. A crime considered particularly loathsome because it robs the victim of his most precious possession, a possession that can never be recovered — a child's innocence. More than that, all too often it leaves permanent scars — a lifetime of confusion and emotional turmoil.

But is Jackson guilty, or is he the victim of extortion, as his attorneys contend?

Witness after witness, as well as considerable circumstantial and physical evidence, all paint a compelling picture of an enormously wealthy sexual predator who has used his fortune to construct a pedophile's paradise and to silence his accusers.

It certainly looks bad from here.

But as one of the Jackson attorneys gleefully points out, it doesn't matter what the public thinks. It is the jury that will decide his fate. To win this case, the defense team only needs to convince a single juror that the testimony may be tainted or biased, or that the evidence is somehow flawed, or that the police made some procedural error. At some point, they could even deal out the well-worn race card.

The reason most of us find some defense tactics so repugnant is that they go far beyond simply protecting the rights of the accused. Too often, these legal maneuvers are simply intended to distort the truth, cloud the issue, and confuse the jury.

Pricey lawyers know well how to select sympathetic jurors, exclude damaging evidence, manipulate the facts, and exploit the many flaws in our judicial system, with the singular goal of freeing their client. But do they really care whether or not he is guilty?

Does Jackson's defense team care whether their client has ruined countless lives to satisfy his alleged perversions, or he simply enjoys the company of little boys? Those attorneys are focused on just one goal. Plant that seed of doubt, and get him off the hook.

And what about the eyewitnesses — the chef, the maid, the bodyguard, and the other staff members? They now come forward with lurid eyewitness testimony that suggests a pattern of sexual molestation by the defendant. But if they truly witnessed these events, the defense rightly argues, why did they not report them when they occurred? Jackson's lawyers want the jury to believe that the molestation never happened, that one witness after another is fabricating these allegations — willingly exposing himself to charges of perjury — in some conspiratorial vendetta against Jackson.

The jury will ultimately decide if it finds that explanation more credible than the one offered by the staff members, who claim they withheld the information simply because no one would have believed them.

That may be true, but there is another more cynical, yet plausible, explanation for remaining silent all these years. All of these "straphangers" surely relished their proximity to a pop idol, working in jobs that many would envy. Could it be, perhaps, that they concealed these alleged acts of molestation simply because didn't want to kill the golden goose? Did they allow these acts to continue so as not to jeopardize their positions?

So those staff members could be engaging in a conspiracy — perjuring themselves in order to set up their employer, or then again, they may have engaged in a conspiracy of silence to protect their employer. In either case, most would agree that their actions were neither courageous nor honorable.

And there are many questions about the boys' parents, whose primary responsibility is the welfare of their children. The charges in this case involve one victim, but allegations of sexual molestation have swirled around Jackson over the past decade. Why, we wonder, would a loving, responsible parent place his child in the hands of an alleged pedophile, no matter how vague and unsubstantiated those allegations? And just how many families have accepted vast sums of cash in exchange for their silence?

Jackson's attorneys, of course, have wasted no time in attacking the character of those parents, suggesting they are unscrupulous grifters, who fabricated the allegations to extort millions from their client.

If the defense is right, then "unscrupulous" can only begin to describe them.

But the evidence suggests that something did happen to those children, and we ask ourselves why their parents went to an attorney, rather than the police? Why did they seek monetary compensation, rather than justice?

The inhabitants of Michael Jackson's world are indeed different from the rest of us.

Let's hope that each of the jurors in this case is guided by a strong conscience, a sense of conviction, and a healthy dose of common sense.

© Peter Lemiska