Word: bulow
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Nineteen years to the day before the two attorneys made their final pleas to the jury, Claus and Martha ("Sunny") von Bulow were married in a small ceremony in New York City. If the defendant was aware of the irony, he did not show it. While his lawyer depicted him as a callous philanderer but not a murderous one, and the prosecution made him out to be a homicidal schemer, Claus von Bulow, his wedding ring as ever on his left hand, maintained an attitude of intense if slightly distant interest. Afterward, the jury of eight men and four women...
...their summations, the attorneys in the Von Bulow case seemed to have exchanged roles. Defense Counsel Thomas Puccio once again seemed to be the aggressive prosecutor of his Abscam days, assertively addressing the facts of the case, while Prosecutor Marc DeSisto offered a histrionic and impassioned plea, long on emotion, short on detail...
Puccio, standing stiffly behind a wooden lectern ten feet from the jury, relentlessly disputed the central tenet of the prosecution's case: that insulin had been used to cause Mrs. Von Bulow's two comas. With increasing vehemence, he punctuated his argument with the phrase "No insulin injection!" as he recapitulated testimony by the defense's medical experts...
Puccio then set out to discredit the prosecution's witnesses. He insisted that the sparrowlike Maria Schrallhammer, Mrs. Von Bulow's maid of 23 years, viewed Von Bulow as a shadowy interloper who broke up the "fairy tale" romance of Sunny's first marriage, which ended in divorce. About onetime Soap Opera Actress Alexandra Isles, Claus' former lover, Puccio turned sarcastic: "She appeared before you in one of her most dramatic performances." In the end, Puccio asked not for sympathy but justice. "It's not a pretty picture," he said. "Mr. Von Bulow was cheating on his wife...
...Bulow, who appeared nervous and incredulous when Isles was testifying, seemed almost smug once his own witnesses took the stand. During a recess, he declared with a disdainful sweep of his hand, "It's a medical, scientific case. When they start throwing the dirt around, it's really irrelevant." Yet it may be the dirt rather than the science that settles in the minds of the jurors...