Peterson trial a huge mess
REDWOOD CITY, Calif. – Even before the start of the jury’s tumultuous deliberations in the Scott Peterson murder trial, San Mateo County Superior Court Judge Alfred Delucchi was worried. “I feel like I’m sitting on a powder keg,” he said.
Some would call that an understatement.
In the week and a half since they started, deliberations have become so contentious that two jurors, including the foreman, have been booted off the panel, and the entire group has been scolded by the judge for experimenting with evidence and reminded not to let biases get in the way of their deliberations.
On Wednesday, the county’s chief investigator was called in to deal with some additional but unspecified problems involving the jury.
That same day, the tumult in the courtroom cascaded out onto a Redwood City street where someone had parked a boat a block away from the courthouse that was similar to the one allegedly used by Peterson to dispose of his pregnant wife’s corpse. Sprawled on the boat’s bottom was a headless dummy clad in overalls and attached to concrete anchors.
Before the craft was towed away Wednesday night, it had been covered with flowers and candles left by locals in memory of Laci Peterson, whose body washed up on shore in April near where Peterson said he’d been fishing on the day she disappeared.
Today, the jury resumes sequestered deliberations at a downtown hotel, some legal experts are wondering whether a panel that appears, at least from the outside, so divided and surrounded by controversy can reach a unanimous verdict. The stakes could not be higher for Peterson, who could face the death penalty if convicted.
“It all puts a really terrible face on our legal system and the way it handles high-profile cases,” former San Mateo County prosecutor Chuck Smith said. “And if the jury arrives at a verdict, one way or the other, it is going to be tainted by all these episodes of chaos.”
Delucchi’s courtroom continues to be bombarded with telephone calls and faxes from mysterious tipsters claiming to know “who really killed Laci.”
Like “Nicole and O.J.,” “Monica and Bill” and “Chandra and Gary” before them, the everyday Petersons, “Laci and Scott,” have engaged the sordid side of the American imagination, becoming standard conversational fare in households across the nation. Many of the same celebrity lawyers, former federal prosecutors and talk-show hosts who popped up regularly during the O.J. Simpson trial have returned to analyze the Peterson case each night on cable TV, with some of them even becoming main players in the unfolding drama.
Mark Geragos, who appeared more than once on “Larry King Live” excoriating Scott Peterson, later became the fertilizer salesman’s lead attorney.
Lawyer Gloria Allred, who represented the family of Nicole Brown Simpson, landed her own prize. Scott Peterson, it turned out, had been hiding a lover – massage therapist Amber Frey – in Fresno, and Frey chose Allred to bring her out of the shadows.
Now Allred and consultants with ties to Geragos, along with an army of criminal-trial experts, take to the airwaves day and night, offering instant analyses of everything that happens inside and outside the courtroom.
“This case wants to be another O.J. in that it tries to generate as much publicity as it can,” said Laurie Levenson, a law professor at Loyola Law School.
Robert Pugsley, professor of criminal law at Southwestern University School of Law, was more blunt: “The ability to spin is rapidly becoming another tool in the advocate’s arsenal, and this is to the law’s shame.”
“The media has become an intruder in legal processes, and explodes public awareness – and lurid interest – in trials that should be settled in courtrooms, not television studios, or the streets of the city in which the case is being held.”
“We should care because it corrupts justice,” he said, “by turning trials into TV game shows or reality television, when in fact, they involve life-and-death matters being decided by ordinary people doing their best to reach a verdict without being influenced.”
The basic prosecution case is not all that complicated. Peterson allegedly killed his 27-year-old wife and used a new 14-foot-long aluminum fishing boat to dump her body into the San Francisco Bay on Christmas Eve 2002. Prosecutors say he began plotting to kill his wife a month earlier, after starting an affair with Frey.
The defense alleges that Peterson had nothing to do with his wife’s death. His attorney claims she was kidnapped by strangers, perhaps members of a satanic cult or homeless people from a local park, who framed his client.
The jury has the option of acquitting Peterson, 32, or finding him guilty of first- or second-degree murder. Anything short of a unanimous verdict will result in a mistrial and, perhaps, a second trial.
The big question now is this: Will this jury get it right?
Some criminal trial analysts speculate that the dismissed jurors may have been standing in the way of a verdict, and that without them a decision could be imminent. Others, however, shake their heads in dismay over the fact that the jury has lost three members since June – two of them this week.
With three alternates left, and rumors flying that yet another juror wants off the panel, legal analyst Paula Canny was only half joking when she said, “At this rate, the jury will run out of alternates by Tuesday.”