The Nation in the Mirror

And then there was the very key figure in the case, the accuser's mother, who had to plead the Fifth Amendment on the first day of her testimony to avoid cross-examination on a welfare-fraud allegation — a witness so completely full of shit that Sneddon's own assistants cringed openly throughout most of her five days of testimony.

Mom waved her hands wildly, made crass jokes about German people (mocking Jackson's German associates in a Hogan's Heroes accent), violently jabbed fingers in the direction of the defendant and reporters, and even pulled an "I know you are, but what am I?" grade-school shtick with Jackson attorney Tom Mesereau, answering questions on cross-examination in a mock impersonation of Mesereau's own icy Harvard diction. One of the prosecution assistants, Ronald Zonen, even resorted to objecting to his own witness' testimony as nonresponsive, just to get her to shut the fuck up during the cross.

Sneddon did manage to elicit testimony from the alleged victim's brother that Jackson had plied his sibling with liquor and stuck his hands down his "underwears." But that was about all his case accomplished, and that accomplishment was confined to the first two weeks.

In the next six weeks, virtually every piece of his case imploded in open court, and the chief drama of the trial quickly turned into a race to see if the DA could manage to put all of his witnesses on the stand without getting any of them removed from the courthouse in manacles.

Sneddon's hard-on for Jackson was a faith-based vengeance grab every bit as blind and desperate as George Bush's "case" against Saddam Hussein. If Ahmad Chalabi had ever been to Neverland, Sneddon would have put him on the stand too.

By the end of the prosecution's case, Sneddon was behaving like a lunatic, shouting at his witnesses in ungrammatical English, publicly insulting his own team members (at one point, Sneddon told Judge Rodney Melville that his deputy, Gerald Franklin, is "here to carry my briefcase, Your Honor"), and unilaterally declaring victory every time one of his disastrous examinations ended abruptly in uncomfortable silence.

Sneddon's grammar departed him whenever he got angry, which by the second month was almost all the time. "You know no role what he played in the family!" he barked at Connie Keenan, the editor of the tiny Mid Valley News, which had run an article about the accuser's battle with cancer. He went on to berate this witness for not knowing that the accuser needed a special humidifier, and then, when he was finished, slammed his file folder shut, roaring at the jury, "I'll quit while I'm ahead!"

Any beginner prosecutor closes his case with a bang. Sneddon began his wrap-up with a day and a half of excruciating testimony about Michael Jackson's telephone records. Apparently, Jackson's aides made thirty-eight phone calls in the course of one day, the same day the family "escaped" (in a Rolls-Royce, incidentally) from Neverland. Obviously they were up to something. When the prosecution rested, two jurors were asleep in the jury box.

Sneddon was the perfect protagonist for this trial. For two months, he was President of the United States of Get Those Fuckers. He was a vengeful, half-literate moron, bent on wasting every last public dollar he could get his hands on, and everyone hated him — but he was in charge, and no one could stop him. A situation we're all quite used to these days, after all. His only saving grace, if you could call it that, was that everyone else in the courtroom deserved him.

Late in the trial. We are deep into the defense's case by now. Fatigue has set in all around; the journalists in the press listening room (a heavily guarded separate trailer where the hacks can watch the trial on closed-circuit TV) have taken to chirping and bitching like prison inmates from sunup to sundown. Most of the media personnel stopped listening to the testimony weeks ago and spend their days reading books or doing crossword puzzles. A British TV journalist next to me is drawing, in ballpoint, a picture of a human hand plunging a knife into a dog's head.