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June 13, 2005---The day your Innocence won...
We were there for you then...we shall be there for you forever...
Thank you Michael...for being such Light and L.O.V.E in this dark and desolate world...and for continuing to show us the way still...miss you angel...
Michael Jackson Is Acquitted on All Counts in Molestation Case
By JOHN M. BRODER
Published: June 13, 2005
SANTA MARIA, Calif., June 13 - Michael Jackson was acquitted today of all charges in connection with accusations that he molested a 13-year-old boy he had befriended as the youth was recovering from cancer in 2003.
Enlarge This Image
Monica Almeida/The New York Times
Michael Jackson leaving the courthouse on Monday after learning that he had been acquitted of all charges. Mr. Jackson then paused to blow kisses to his many fans outside before returning to his estate.
Mr. Jackson's complete acquittal - a stinging defeat for a retiring prosecutor who had spent more than a decade pursuing the singer on pedophilia accusations - ends a nearly four-month trial that featured 140 witnesses who painted clashing portraits of the 46-year-old international pop star as either pedophile or Peter Pan.
"Mr. Jackson, your bail is exonerated and you are released," Judge Rodney S. Melville said after the string of not-guilty verdicts were read.
Mr. Jackson stood for the verdicts and later embraced his chief lawyer, Thomas A. Mesereau Jr. One of Mr. Mesereau's assistants had quietly started sobbing as the first "not guilty" verdicts were read out in court.
Along with the verdict, the jury gave a note for the judge to read out in court. In it, they said they felt "the weight of the world's eyes upon us all" and that they had "thoroughly and meticulously" studied all the evidence. The note concluded with a plea "we would like the public to allow us to return to our lives as anonymously as we came."
The jury of eight women and four men delivered the verdict in California Superior Court here on their seventh day of deliberations, which began June 3. The jury was not sequestered and took weekends off.
Despite their written plea to be left alone, the jurors and alternates gathered for an hourlong news conference in which they were identified only by juror number, though offering a few personal details about themselves in the process of discussing the case with reporters.
"We expected better evidence, something that was a little more convincing," a female juror said, adding she is a mother herself. "It just wasn't there."
Other jurors expressed irritation with the demeanor of the mother of Mr. Jackson's accuser, noting that she had stared at jurors throughout most of her sometimes bizarre testimony and once snapping her finger at them.
Asked about Michael Jackson's celebrity, the jurors said that it had little effect on them, though one juror said the case had "made him real in my eyes" and another said she came to view the somewhat eccentric entertainer as simply an ordinary person.
A middle-aged man said that although he held personal opinions about Mr. Jackson, which he declined to divulge, he sometimes forgot that Mr. Jackson was even in the courtroom. "We're basing our verdict on the 10 counts we were asked to look at," he said, not a particular view of Mr. Jackson.
Mr. Jackson, wearing tinted aviator glasses, a dark blazer, black tie and white wing-collar shirt, looked tense and somber as he emerged from the courthouse with his family and entourage shortly after the verdict was read, and he walked quickly to a waiting sport utility vehicle. Shielded from the bright sun by an umbrella tended by an aide, Mr. Jackson held up one hand in acknowledgement of the ecstatic fans outside cheering his acquittal.
Television helicopters chronicled his caravan's departure for his nearby Neverland ranch under police escort.
When news of the verdict spread through the crowd, a huge roar erupted among his fans, while those who had been hoping for a conviction booed. His fans, many who have maintained that the charges were part of a vast conspiracy, hugged each other, danced and threw confetti.
"Victory! Victory!" shouted Omar Reece, 25, who traveled to Santa Maria from Belleville, Ill. "He's proven himself. People have been trying to stop him for 20 years, to destroy his character, his name. And each time he's come back better, stronger, unbreakable."
Earlier, not long after it was made public that a verdict had been reached, television helicopters arrived over Mr. Jackson's Neverland ranch near here. Cable news channels broadcast a nearly constant stream of images showing Mr. Jackson's small convoy of sport utility vehicles en route to the courthouse for the reading of the verdict. At the courthouse, crowds hastily gathered outside awaiting his arrival as the police ranks swelled as well.
Mr. Jackson was accompanied to the courtroom by several members of his family, including his father and mother, Joe and Katherine Jackson, two brothers, Randy and Jermaine Jackson, and two sisters, LaToya and Rebbie Jackson. He stopped briefly as he walked toward the courthouse lobby to wave to the throngs of fans calling out to him.
Mr. Jackson was prosecuted on 10 felony counts - four of child molesting, one of attempted child molesting, four of administering alcohol to aid in the commission of a felony, and conspiracy to commit child abduction, false imprisonment and extortion. Together, the charges carried a maximum possible sentence of more than 18 years in prison.
Mr. Jackson was accused of molesting the boy in February or March 2003 at his 2,700-acre Neverland Valley ranch. Prosecutors said the singer had plied the youth with alcohol in order to abuse him and had later conspired to intimidate and restrict the freedom of the boy, who is now 15, and his mother to keep them away from the news media.
But the verdict clearly showed that the jury had found the testimony of the accuser's family - the boy, his mother and his brother - to be not credible.
At a news conference afterward, Thomas W. Sneddon Jr., the district attorney of Santa Barbara County, said that "obviously, we're disappointed in the verdict," but "in 37 years, I've never quarreled with jury's verdict and I'm not going to today."
Asked whether the prosecution's case had been undermined because it depended on testimony from the "wrong family," he replied, "We don't select our victims and we don't select the families they come from."
"When a victim comes in and tells you they've been victimized and you believe that, you don't look at their pedigree," he added. "We look at what we think is the right thing, the right reason."
As the trial progressed and testimony grew more graphic, Mr. Jackson appeared more weary and worn out. On June 5, just two days after the jury got the case, he went to a hospital seeking treatment for back pain.
Shortly after the jury got the case, Mr. Jackson's brother Jermaine Jackson said on CNN that Michael Jackson was "1,000 percent innocent." Asked whether Michael would change his ways if acquitted, Jermaine Jackson said, "He'll become a complete recluse if found not guilty," adding, "He won't be able to deal with anyone because he can't trust anyone."
The case arose from the February 2003 broadcast of "Living with Michael Jackson," a British documentary in which Mr. Jackson admitted sharing his bed with young boys, calling it a loving act unrelated to sex. The boy who later became the accuser was shown holding hands with the singer and resting his head affectionately on his shoulder. He was described as a 13-year-old cancer patient whom Mr. Jackson had decided to help.
The documentary provoked a sensation, reinforcing years of rumor and speculation that Mr. Jackson was unnaturally fond of young boys. It also led Mr. Sneddon, the district attorney for Santa Barbara County, where Neverland is located, to open a criminal investigation, reprising a similar, though unsuccessful, effort in 1993 to prosecute Mr. Jackson on pedophilia charges.
People around Mr. Jackson saw the 2003 documentary as a public relations disaster and sought to isolate the boy and his family. They also made plans for a rebuttal video to undo some of the damage and, not incidentally, make some money.
Their efforts to persuade the family to participate in the rebuttal video and to keep them away from the press, first with a flight to Florida and then several extended stays at Neverland, formed the basis of the prosecution's later charge of conspiracy to commit extortion, child abduction and false imprisonment. It was toward the end of a stay at Neverland, in late February and early March, prosecutors said, that Mr. Jackson molested the boy on several occasions.
Nearly nine months into Mr. Sneddon's investigation, on Nov. 18, 2003, a small army of sheriff's deputies and district attorney investigators descended on Neverland with a search warrant. They spent about 11 hours there, videotaping every corner of the estate and seizing hundreds of items, which they said included pornographic magazines, bedding and a lifelike doll that had been lewdly defaced.
A day later, Mr. Sneddon announced that Mr. Jackson would be charged with multiple counts of committing a lewd act upon a child. He urged other parents whose children had spent the night with Mr. Jackson to come forward to assist investigators; none did.
Thus began 20 months of a sometimes bizarre spectacle that included Mr. Jackson's choreographed airport arrest in November 2003, and his dancing atop an S.U.V. in January 2004 after his arraignment on nine felony charges, as hundreds of fans screamed outside the courthouse. He entered and left accompanied by his brothers Tito and Jermaine and a phalanx of guards from the Nation of Islam.
His lawyer at the time, Mark Geragos, dismissed the charges as nonsense, driven by the vindictiveness of Mr. Sneddon, whose 1993 prosecution fell apart when the accuser in that case withdrew his complaint after reaching a $20 million settlement with Mr. Jackson.
Legal analysts said Mr. Mesereau, , a high-profile defense lawyer from Los Angeles, outargued the prosecution team, but they were less certain that he had made a strong connection with the jurors, who were drawn from the largely conservative area around Santa Maria, a farming community of 90,000.
The jury, selected in less than a week in late February, was an eclectic lot, ranging in age from 20 to 79. Seven are white, three are Latino and one is Asian; the 12th juror declined to define his ethnicity. The only black to sit in the jury box was a young man who served as an alternate and did not participate in the deliberations.
Eight jurors are parents and six said they were fans of Mr. Jackson's music. One had been to Neverland, a 21-year-old man who uses a wheelchair. He said during jury selection that he had visited with a group of others with cerebral palsy. All but two jurors have some college education; three have graduate degrees.
The trial was marked by moments of bathos and melodrama and genuine tension, particularly when the accuser and his mother were on the stand. The prosecution saved perhaps its strongest evidence for last, a videotape of the boy being interviewed by a sheriff's detective. The boy, who was 13 at the time, appeared shy and reluctant to discuss the matter as the officer elicited his account.
The strain on Mr. Jackson throughout the proceedings was evident and no doubt figured in his twice seeking medical attention at a hospital, for flulike symptoms and back pain.
At one point, on a day that Mr. Jackson's accuser was testifying, Judge Melville threatened to revoke the singer's $3 million bail and lock him up for the rest of the trial after a pajama-clad Mr. Jackson shuffled in weakly more than an hour late. The defense said he had been seeking medical treatment at a hospital for a back injury.
The case appeared to take a toll on Mr. Sneddon, as well. The 64-year-old prosecutor had viewed the trial as a means to vindicate his lengthy quest to put Mr. Jackson behind bars. But several star witnesses faltered under withering cross-examination by Mr. Mesereau, and Mr. Sneddon occasionally buried his head in his hands in seeming despair.
The testimony itself often verged on the incredible. The accuser's mother harangued Mr. Mesereau and lectured the jury as she wove a strange tale of being kidnapped by Mr. Jackson's henchmen even as she was spending his money on restaurants, clothes and beauty treatments. She also spoke of a plot by Mr. Jackson's aides to have her and her family disappear in a hot-air balloon.
Mr. Jackson, who did not take the stand, was shown in a videotaped interview talking about how much he loved children and his plans to throw a birthday party for his chimp Bubbles, with a guest list of famous show-business animals like Benji, Lassie and Cheetah from the Tarzan movies.
Testimony laid bare the hidden life of one of the world's best-known entertainers, revealing, for example, that Mr. Jackson called wine "Jesus juice," which he drank from ostensibly soft-drink cans.
Experts also told of the perilous state of Mr. Jackson's finances, saying he was spending $20 million to $30 million a year more than he was making.
Prosecutors painted a dark portrait of Neverland as the lair of a serial pedophile, not a magical place of innocence to compensate for the childhood Mr. Jackson claimed he was deprived of as young performer.
Prosecutors also made use of a California law that permits the introduction in sex cases of evidence of "prior bad acts" or a propensity to commit sex crimes, even if the offenses were never reported or prosecuted.
The defense's chief contention was that the accuser and his family had set up Mr. Jackson for an elaborate scheme, using the boy's illness as a hook. In his summation, Mr. Mesereau repeatedly called the family "con artists, actors and liars" who had pressed numerous celebrities for money, committed welfare fraud and leveled a phony assault charge against J.C. Penney.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/13/national/12cnd-jackson.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
We were there for you then...we shall be there for you forever...
Thank you Michael...for being such Light and L.O.V.E in this dark and desolate world...and for continuing to show us the way still...miss you angel...
Michael Jackson Is Acquitted on All Counts in Molestation Case
By JOHN M. BRODER
Published: June 13, 2005
SANTA MARIA, Calif., June 13 - Michael Jackson was acquitted today of all charges in connection with accusations that he molested a 13-year-old boy he had befriended as the youth was recovering from cancer in 2003.
Enlarge This Image
Michael Jackson leaving the courthouse on Monday after learning that he had been acquitted of all charges. Mr. Jackson then paused to blow kisses to his many fans outside before returning to his estate.
Mr. Jackson's complete acquittal - a stinging defeat for a retiring prosecutor who had spent more than a decade pursuing the singer on pedophilia accusations - ends a nearly four-month trial that featured 140 witnesses who painted clashing portraits of the 46-year-old international pop star as either pedophile or Peter Pan.
"Mr. Jackson, your bail is exonerated and you are released," Judge Rodney S. Melville said after the string of not-guilty verdicts were read.
Mr. Jackson stood for the verdicts and later embraced his chief lawyer, Thomas A. Mesereau Jr. One of Mr. Mesereau's assistants had quietly started sobbing as the first "not guilty" verdicts were read out in court.
Along with the verdict, the jury gave a note for the judge to read out in court. In it, they said they felt "the weight of the world's eyes upon us all" and that they had "thoroughly and meticulously" studied all the evidence. The note concluded with a plea "we would like the public to allow us to return to our lives as anonymously as we came."
The jury of eight women and four men delivered the verdict in California Superior Court here on their seventh day of deliberations, which began June 3. The jury was not sequestered and took weekends off.
Despite their written plea to be left alone, the jurors and alternates gathered for an hourlong news conference in which they were identified only by juror number, though offering a few personal details about themselves in the process of discussing the case with reporters.
"We expected better evidence, something that was a little more convincing," a female juror said, adding she is a mother herself. "It just wasn't there."
Other jurors expressed irritation with the demeanor of the mother of Mr. Jackson's accuser, noting that she had stared at jurors throughout most of her sometimes bizarre testimony and once snapping her finger at them.
Asked about Michael Jackson's celebrity, the jurors said that it had little effect on them, though one juror said the case had "made him real in my eyes" and another said she came to view the somewhat eccentric entertainer as simply an ordinary person.
A middle-aged man said that although he held personal opinions about Mr. Jackson, which he declined to divulge, he sometimes forgot that Mr. Jackson was even in the courtroom. "We're basing our verdict on the 10 counts we were asked to look at," he said, not a particular view of Mr. Jackson.
Mr. Jackson, wearing tinted aviator glasses, a dark blazer, black tie and white wing-collar shirt, looked tense and somber as he emerged from the courthouse with his family and entourage shortly after the verdict was read, and he walked quickly to a waiting sport utility vehicle. Shielded from the bright sun by an umbrella tended by an aide, Mr. Jackson held up one hand in acknowledgement of the ecstatic fans outside cheering his acquittal.
Television helicopters chronicled his caravan's departure for his nearby Neverland ranch under police escort.
When news of the verdict spread through the crowd, a huge roar erupted among his fans, while those who had been hoping for a conviction booed. His fans, many who have maintained that the charges were part of a vast conspiracy, hugged each other, danced and threw confetti.
"Victory! Victory!" shouted Omar Reece, 25, who traveled to Santa Maria from Belleville, Ill. "He's proven himself. People have been trying to stop him for 20 years, to destroy his character, his name. And each time he's come back better, stronger, unbreakable."
Earlier, not long after it was made public that a verdict had been reached, television helicopters arrived over Mr. Jackson's Neverland ranch near here. Cable news channels broadcast a nearly constant stream of images showing Mr. Jackson's small convoy of sport utility vehicles en route to the courthouse for the reading of the verdict. At the courthouse, crowds hastily gathered outside awaiting his arrival as the police ranks swelled as well.
Mr. Jackson was accompanied to the courtroom by several members of his family, including his father and mother, Joe and Katherine Jackson, two brothers, Randy and Jermaine Jackson, and two sisters, LaToya and Rebbie Jackson. He stopped briefly as he walked toward the courthouse lobby to wave to the throngs of fans calling out to him.
Mr. Jackson was prosecuted on 10 felony counts - four of child molesting, one of attempted child molesting, four of administering alcohol to aid in the commission of a felony, and conspiracy to commit child abduction, false imprisonment and extortion. Together, the charges carried a maximum possible sentence of more than 18 years in prison.
Mr. Jackson was accused of molesting the boy in February or March 2003 at his 2,700-acre Neverland Valley ranch. Prosecutors said the singer had plied the youth with alcohol in order to abuse him and had later conspired to intimidate and restrict the freedom of the boy, who is now 15, and his mother to keep them away from the news media.
But the verdict clearly showed that the jury had found the testimony of the accuser's family - the boy, his mother and his brother - to be not credible.
At a news conference afterward, Thomas W. Sneddon Jr., the district attorney of Santa Barbara County, said that "obviously, we're disappointed in the verdict," but "in 37 years, I've never quarreled with jury's verdict and I'm not going to today."
Asked whether the prosecution's case had been undermined because it depended on testimony from the "wrong family," he replied, "We don't select our victims and we don't select the families they come from."
"When a victim comes in and tells you they've been victimized and you believe that, you don't look at their pedigree," he added. "We look at what we think is the right thing, the right reason."
As the trial progressed and testimony grew more graphic, Mr. Jackson appeared more weary and worn out. On June 5, just two days after the jury got the case, he went to a hospital seeking treatment for back pain.
Shortly after the jury got the case, Mr. Jackson's brother Jermaine Jackson said on CNN that Michael Jackson was "1,000 percent innocent." Asked whether Michael would change his ways if acquitted, Jermaine Jackson said, "He'll become a complete recluse if found not guilty," adding, "He won't be able to deal with anyone because he can't trust anyone."
The case arose from the February 2003 broadcast of "Living with Michael Jackson," a British documentary in which Mr. Jackson admitted sharing his bed with young boys, calling it a loving act unrelated to sex. The boy who later became the accuser was shown holding hands with the singer and resting his head affectionately on his shoulder. He was described as a 13-year-old cancer patient whom Mr. Jackson had decided to help.
The documentary provoked a sensation, reinforcing years of rumor and speculation that Mr. Jackson was unnaturally fond of young boys. It also led Mr. Sneddon, the district attorney for Santa Barbara County, where Neverland is located, to open a criminal investigation, reprising a similar, though unsuccessful, effort in 1993 to prosecute Mr. Jackson on pedophilia charges.
People around Mr. Jackson saw the 2003 documentary as a public relations disaster and sought to isolate the boy and his family. They also made plans for a rebuttal video to undo some of the damage and, not incidentally, make some money.
Their efforts to persuade the family to participate in the rebuttal video and to keep them away from the press, first with a flight to Florida and then several extended stays at Neverland, formed the basis of the prosecution's later charge of conspiracy to commit extortion, child abduction and false imprisonment. It was toward the end of a stay at Neverland, in late February and early March, prosecutors said, that Mr. Jackson molested the boy on several occasions.
Nearly nine months into Mr. Sneddon's investigation, on Nov. 18, 2003, a small army of sheriff's deputies and district attorney investigators descended on Neverland with a search warrant. They spent about 11 hours there, videotaping every corner of the estate and seizing hundreds of items, which they said included pornographic magazines, bedding and a lifelike doll that had been lewdly defaced.
A day later, Mr. Sneddon announced that Mr. Jackson would be charged with multiple counts of committing a lewd act upon a child. He urged other parents whose children had spent the night with Mr. Jackson to come forward to assist investigators; none did.
Thus began 20 months of a sometimes bizarre spectacle that included Mr. Jackson's choreographed airport arrest in November 2003, and his dancing atop an S.U.V. in January 2004 after his arraignment on nine felony charges, as hundreds of fans screamed outside the courthouse. He entered and left accompanied by his brothers Tito and Jermaine and a phalanx of guards from the Nation of Islam.
His lawyer at the time, Mark Geragos, dismissed the charges as nonsense, driven by the vindictiveness of Mr. Sneddon, whose 1993 prosecution fell apart when the accuser in that case withdrew his complaint after reaching a $20 million settlement with Mr. Jackson.
Legal analysts said Mr. Mesereau, , a high-profile defense lawyer from Los Angeles, outargued the prosecution team, but they were less certain that he had made a strong connection with the jurors, who were drawn from the largely conservative area around Santa Maria, a farming community of 90,000.
The jury, selected in less than a week in late February, was an eclectic lot, ranging in age from 20 to 79. Seven are white, three are Latino and one is Asian; the 12th juror declined to define his ethnicity. The only black to sit in the jury box was a young man who served as an alternate and did not participate in the deliberations.
Eight jurors are parents and six said they were fans of Mr. Jackson's music. One had been to Neverland, a 21-year-old man who uses a wheelchair. He said during jury selection that he had visited with a group of others with cerebral palsy. All but two jurors have some college education; three have graduate degrees.
The trial was marked by moments of bathos and melodrama and genuine tension, particularly when the accuser and his mother were on the stand. The prosecution saved perhaps its strongest evidence for last, a videotape of the boy being interviewed by a sheriff's detective. The boy, who was 13 at the time, appeared shy and reluctant to discuss the matter as the officer elicited his account.
The strain on Mr. Jackson throughout the proceedings was evident and no doubt figured in his twice seeking medical attention at a hospital, for flulike symptoms and back pain.
At one point, on a day that Mr. Jackson's accuser was testifying, Judge Melville threatened to revoke the singer's $3 million bail and lock him up for the rest of the trial after a pajama-clad Mr. Jackson shuffled in weakly more than an hour late. The defense said he had been seeking medical treatment at a hospital for a back injury.
The case appeared to take a toll on Mr. Sneddon, as well. The 64-year-old prosecutor had viewed the trial as a means to vindicate his lengthy quest to put Mr. Jackson behind bars. But several star witnesses faltered under withering cross-examination by Mr. Mesereau, and Mr. Sneddon occasionally buried his head in his hands in seeming despair.
The testimony itself often verged on the incredible. The accuser's mother harangued Mr. Mesereau and lectured the jury as she wove a strange tale of being kidnapped by Mr. Jackson's henchmen even as she was spending his money on restaurants, clothes and beauty treatments. She also spoke of a plot by Mr. Jackson's aides to have her and her family disappear in a hot-air balloon.
Mr. Jackson, who did not take the stand, was shown in a videotaped interview talking about how much he loved children and his plans to throw a birthday party for his chimp Bubbles, with a guest list of famous show-business animals like Benji, Lassie and Cheetah from the Tarzan movies.
Testimony laid bare the hidden life of one of the world's best-known entertainers, revealing, for example, that Mr. Jackson called wine "Jesus juice," which he drank from ostensibly soft-drink cans.
Experts also told of the perilous state of Mr. Jackson's finances, saying he was spending $20 million to $30 million a year more than he was making.
Prosecutors painted a dark portrait of Neverland as the lair of a serial pedophile, not a magical place of innocence to compensate for the childhood Mr. Jackson claimed he was deprived of as young performer.
Prosecutors also made use of a California law that permits the introduction in sex cases of evidence of "prior bad acts" or a propensity to commit sex crimes, even if the offenses were never reported or prosecuted.
The defense's chief contention was that the accuser and his family had set up Mr. Jackson for an elaborate scheme, using the boy's illness as a hook. In his summation, Mr. Mesereau repeatedly called the family "con artists, actors and liars" who had pressed numerous celebrities for money, committed welfare fraud and leveled a phony assault charge against J.C. Penney.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/13/national/12cnd-jackson.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
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