virginia_woolf;3337679 said:
4/11/2011
Michael Jackson Estate vs. Melissa Johnson - Updates
Short update in the above titled case: according to the Judge's today decesion, there will be a non-jury trial as per the MJ Estate required it.
http://lesliemjhu.blogspot.com/2011/04/michael-jackson-estate-vs-melissa_11.html
And let me give you a little more detail about it.
This jury trial - non jury trial issue has been going on for a while.
Estate requests a non-jury trial as they are not asking for any damages and asking only for injunctive relief . In other words they only ask the court to
stop Melissa Johnson and fake HTWF from using Michael's name, image and likeliness and want Michael's trademarks and government records to be corrected.
HTWF lawyer argued that Estate initially wanted a jury trial and later just changed their minds and just did a verbal request on
March 29 for a non-jury trial.
In reality what happened was that some claims was rejected by the court and therefore it became a no damages - injunctive relief type of case. And more importantly (and funnily) Estate and HTWF had filed a joint "proposed pretrial conference order" on
March 7, agreeing to a non-jury trial.
So it looks like either HTWF's lawyer signs and agrees to stuff without reading as he believed the request being done verbally on March 29th or he forgot that he sent a joint written request on March 7th.
and let me tell you something -
When Marc_vivien and I were reading HTWF lawyers claim about "only verbally requested on March 29", we were able to remember that we read "non-jury trial" being mentioned on a document before. More than that we were able to find the document. So you can see that our knowledge of what's happening in the case looks better than HTWF's lawyer.
Furthermore Marc and I speculated that the Estate would mention the signed document in their response and this is how they started their response to HTWF's jury trial "
Defendants’ counsel participated in the preparation of, and signed a pre-trial order that stated that “there are no issues to try to a jury.”
Funny isn't it?