It's a standard line in almost any Hollywood legal drama: A prosecutor tells a herd of reporters he won't answer a question because "I don't want to try this case in the court of public opinion."
In real life, that premise might be changing.
Go to YouTube this week and punch in the words "Orange County District Attorney and Kenneth Clair" and you'll find a legal drama playing out almost exclusively in the court of public opinion.
On one side is the first in a series of short videos from the District Attorney's Office explaining why it thinks there should be no new trial, or any leniency for Clair, who in 1987 was convicted of the murder three years earlier of Linda Faye Rodgers, a Santa Ana nanny.
Note the important distinction that this is a long-ago trial in which the judgment is being collaterally attacked. This is not a case presently going before a jury, and it never will go to a jury again if the DA and AG can help it.
Advocates for death row inmates regularly whip up public opinion on the net with misleading characterizations of the case. When Georgia sought to execute cop-killer Troy Davis, there was a national furor. The U.S. Supreme Court took the extremely rare step of entertaining a habeas corpus petition filed directly in that court and transferring it to a district court for hearing and findings. The district court judge, after hearing the witnesses in person, held that Davis's case was "largely smoke and mirrors" and "not credible or lacking in probative value." The bottom line was, "Mr. Davis is not innocent." Would the case have gotten that far if the PR campaign for Davis had been met with a PR response? Would that be a better result?This blog is one small step in the direction of balance, but we have no illusion that our readership will ever be sufficient to achieve actual balance. I think that prosecutors' offices responding to attacks on individual cases, as Orange County DA is doing, is another step in the right direction.
Regarding the Melendez case from Florida, described in another thread, is a good example. Google Mr Melendez and there are, literally, dozens of entries which simply repeat verbatim the language of the various anti-death penalty sites which ballyhoo Melendez's "exoneration", which was in actuality a granted motion for a new trial, on essentially identical grounds argued in appeals denied multiple times by the Florida Supreme Court. Typically the state was unable to proceed with a new trial because the key government witness was now dead, 18 years or so later.
JCC