Añadido: Jul 25, 2008
De: BDCFILMZ
Duración: 2:39
Hey, I made it. I'm the world's greatest. When the news came out this past Friday that R. Kelly's jury had found him not guilty on all counts of child pornography, the first person I told about it had this reaction: "What? Really? Awesome! Or, um, I mean, I guess. Maybe not. Fuck. I don't know." I'm paraphrasing here, but I do know that I watched a coworker cycle through about fifteen different reactions in three seconds. The second person I told had the exact same reaction. And if I'm being honest, so did I. For entirely selfish reasons, it's natural enough to feel good when a favorite musician wriggles out of a predicament that would've kept him from making music for a long, long time. Except that I'm pretty sure there's not one person on the face of the earth who honestly believes that some shadowy miscreants digitally altered the famous Kelly sex-tape, putting his face on some random dude's body the way special-effects people put Shawn Wayans's head on a baby in Little Man. It's basically impossible, considering the costs and logistics and the general pointlessness of such an enterprise. And yet that's what Kelly's lawyers claim might've happened. The press even called it the Little Man defense. Reading the daily trial reports, I was totally dumbfounded that Kelly's assuredly very expensive legal team couldn't have come up with anything better than that. Another defense strategy: Claiming that the guy in the tape wasn't Kelly because Kelly has a distinctive mole on his lower back, and that mole wasn't on the guy in the video. But the prosecutors managed to find a digital-video expert who pointed out the the mole actually was on the guy in the video. Even if they defense lawyers later produced another expert, one who testified that the mole was actually just digital noise, the prosecutors still got in a pretty devastating gotcha moment. I was dead certain Kelly was going to prison after reading about that. But no. He's free today, and I only have the vaguest of ideas how that could've happened. Those daily reports of the trial probably didn't quite convey the spell that the Kelly legal team must've been working. A couple of years ago, I covered the Irv and Chris Gotti money-laundering trials for this paper. Most of the people paying attention to the case thought those guys were going to prison. This was a federal case, and the federal conviction rate is somewhere in the upper 90s. Before the verdict came out, when I predicted that the Gotti brothers would be getting off, Doug Simmons, then the Voice's managing editor, told me I was crazy. They got off. And the only way I can really explain it is that there's really no way to explain what, exactly, a high-priced lawyer does. They make motions and argue against evidence being admitted and voice objections every few minutes, or at least they did in the Gotti trial, but that doesn't really cover it. They're hams. They entertain. They willfully make themselves look like absolute asses if it'll maybe make the prosecution's case look a little more ridiculous. They express frustration at prosecution antics in the most overblown, exaggerated ways possible. And I'm guessing jurors appreciate that because trials, even highly-publicized and dramatic trials with lots of big hush-the-crowd moments, are really boring. Most of the time, everyone's waiting around for the lawyers on both sides to argue some arcane point or for some other case to wrap up. So when someone goes the extra mile to hold everyone's attention, jurors are probably that much more likely to get people over to their side. Voice web news editor Mike Clancy, who was covering the Gotti trials for A.M. New York back before he worked here, pretty much walked me through the trial stuff that I didn't understand, and even he's at a loss to describe how exactly these lawyers work. You know when you're watching a great lawyer at work, but that doesn't mean you can explain what makes them great.
Categoría: Entertainment
Tags: bdc life r.kelly real reality recaps show sketch tv verdict
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