Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley said jurors who acquitted actor Robert Blake of the murder of his wife are “incredibly stupid” and insisted his office put on a good case.
Ah, no they didn’t. Most who followed the trial thought the evidence against Blake was flimsy at best. But, as mentioned here before, “the L.A. D.A. always blows the big cases.”
“To hear him say we aren’t a smart jury is sour grapes,” Blake juror Chuck Safko said. “They didn’t have a good case. Their case was built around witnesses who weren’t truthful.”
Added Laurie Levenson, a professor of criminal law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who attended portions of the trial: “To criticize the jurors is unprofessional. It is unbelievable.”
In Orange County though, their D.A. got a conviction on the three alleged human teenage boys who sexually assaulted an unconscious girl, videotaped it, then bragged about it. Even one of the boys wealthy ex-sheriff dad and their lawyers, who tried “to paint the victim as a would-be porn star who pretended to be unconscious in the video for dramatic effect”, couldn’t save them. Sheesh, shouldn’t what lawyers say in court be required to at least have a vague passing acquaintance with reality and to what might have happened?
Lana Clarkson, 40, was found Feb. 3 slumped in a chair in Spector’s hilltop mansion in suburban Alhambra, east of Los Angeles. Her broken teeth were scattered around the foyer and stairway, and a blood-spattered .38-caliber Colt revolver lay under her left leg.
Spector was the only other person in the house. He says she shot herself (after breaking her teeth first and scattering them hither and yon presumably?). Will the L.A. D.A. manage a conviction on this one – or even a competent prosecution? Maybe not
“They think they know these celebrities. They think they know Robert Blake. They think they know Phil Spector,” Cooley said. The jury will hear about Spector’s lifestyle of “sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll,” Cooley said.
Spector’s lifestyle – and even Joey Ramone once said Spector was one strange dude – has little if anything to do with whether he pulled the trigger. One assumes the L.A. D.A. will present actual evidence at the trial, not lifestyle insinuations and smears, but who knows?