Yahoo news



The post-verdict spectacle of the Michael Jackson jurors is shameful. On this, the ex-jurists seem to agree.

The dispute lies in who should be feel the shame.


According more than one ex-Jackson juror, the humiliation should be assigned to Eleanor Cook and Ray Hultman, the book-writing, ex-Jackson jurors who now say the entertainer is guilty as charged of child molestation.


"They should be ashamed of themselves," Susan Rentschler said of Cook and Hultman to Reuters. "They are giving juries a bad name."


According to Cook, it's jurors such as Rentschler who should be mortified.


"They ought to be ashamed," Cook told MSNBC this week. "They're the ones who let a pedophile go."


"They" is a pronoun referring to a group of people. In June, a group of people in a Santa Maria, California, courtroom known as the Michael Jackson jurors, of which Cook was one, and Hultman was another, unanimously voted to acquit the pop star of every single count--from molestation to conspiracy--with which he had been charged.


Jackson defense attorney Thomas Mesereau Jr. called Cook's and Hultman's reversals "laughable."


"They're embarrassing themselves. They're embarrassing the system," Mesereau said on MSNBC.


In the U.S. court of law, a juror who thinks a defendant is guilty, even if his or her fellow jurors are convinced the defendant is not guilty, may in theory cast a guilty vote until 12 Angry Men starts looking like a carefree children's tale by comparison. To the outside world, deliberations in the Jackson trial appeared to proceed relatively swiftly, and without much rancor. There were few notes or questions dispatched from the jury to the judge.


But behind closed doors, Cook and Hultman told MSNBC, the jury room was a pressure cooker.


In an initial vote, Cook, Hultman and a third juror voted to convict Jackson. "They came after me with a vengeance," Cook told MSNBC's Rita Crosby of the not-guilty camp.


Jury foreman Paul Rodriguez threatened to have Cook removed from the panel if she didn't go along with the majority, she said. "I just felt like they could turn on me at any minute, and there was nothing I could do about it," Cook said on the news network.


And so, even though there was "no doubt in my mind whatsoever that the boy was molested," Cook said, "I caved."


To MSNBC, Hultman seemed to explain his change of heart, and change of vote, as being a reluctance to see his five months' in the courtroom spent in vain, an exercise that might only produce a hung jury.


In the New York Daily News, other ex-Jackson jurors spoke of being "stunned" by Cook's and Hultman's soundbites. Michael Stevens called the two "traitors." And while Rodriguez has not responded to the charge he was an intimidator, another unidentified juror told the paper that it was "ridiculous" to suggest that "anyone could tell Elly what to do."


Cook's book is to be titled, Guilty as Sin, Free as a Bird; Hultman's tome, The Deliberator. No publishers have yet been announced; the fledgling author's deals are with a Hollywood production company that's also talking up a TV-movie on the Jackson juror experience.


The former star defendant, meanwhile, is "relaxing" and "doing well" in Bahrain, Jackson's recently resurfaced spokeswoman Raymone K. Bain told the Associated Press.

Mesereau, for one, doesn't think there's much reason to fuss over Cook's and Hultman's statements, which come two months after they voted to acquit his client.

"The bottom line," the attorney told the A.P., "is that it makes no difference what they're saying."

What can I say? If a former Jackson juror wrote a book about Jackson's innocence it wouldn't be very likely to sell books, would it?

Although I didn't follow the Jackson trial very closely, I do recall the defense doing a fine job impeaching the credibility of just about every prosecution witness. That could have a lot to do with the acquittal.

To tell you the truth, I don't really know if Michael Jackson is a paedophile. I am certain that he is as strange as they come, but that is certainly his right. Frankly, I think that he is so strange that he probably does enjoy sleeping with children without touching them sexually. Then again, that doesn't sound all that strange except when the kids aren't your own. We do know that some of those ex-Jackson sleeping mates are now grown and they say nothing happened. In any case, the jury did the right thing. While a couple of them having buyers remorse in the face of making money selling their story is not surprising, it is sad.

BTW, a former juror is not the same as an ex-jurist as mentioned at the top of the article. A jurist is a lawyer, or usually a judge. Most of the time I don't point out such mistakes, but think it is really bad when someone who writes on the legal beat doesn't know the difference. The quality of news reporting these days seems to be going from bad to worse.