Word: mistrial
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...nearly six-week trial turned out to be every bit as tangled and outrageous and bizarre as the defendant's coiffure. Last Friday the government announced it was withdrawing its appeal of the mistrial ruling made the day before by U.S. District Judge Lawrence McKenna. The judge had declared the mistrial because the jury informed him it was hopelessly deadlocked--after only five hours of actual deliberation. It seems that one of the jurors had a plane to catch to South Africa on Friday, with a nonrefundable ticket. King, 64, who has survived a 1985 tax-evasion case, three grand...
...good news for embattled boxing promoter Don King is that prosecutors will not appeal a mistrial ruling in his insurance fraud case. The bad news? Federal prosecutors immediately pushed for a retrial. A mistrial was declared Thursday when jurors remained deadlocked over whether King falsified a contract to collect $350,000 from Lloyd's of London if a 1991 fight was canceled. The defense maintains that King, who has survived three grand jury probes and was aquitted of tax evasion in 1985, was the innocent victim of his accountant, the implausibly named Joseph Maffia. King's defense contends that Maffia...
There was high drama again at the endless-and, in recent weeks, tedious-O.J. Simpson murder trial. The possibility of a mistrial was raised when a visibly emotional Judge Lance Ito agreed with the prosecution that he might be unable to act impartially if 11 hours of taped interviews with prosecution witness Detective Mark Fuhrman were introduced as evidence. The interviews allegedly contain derogatory comments about Ito's wife Captain Margaret York, who is the L.A.P.D.'s highest-ranking female officer. (More to the evidentiary point, Simpson defense lawyers contend that the tapes contain passages in which Fuhrman discusses...
...possible mistrial in theSusan Smithmurder trial was thrown out by Circuit Judge William Howard, who ruled that an accidental contact between a juror and a member of the Smith family--apparently in a hotel laundry room--was of no importance. Sara Singleton, grandmother of Susan Smith's ex-husband, said "it was innocent. . . it was stupid," in comments that seemed to confirm she was the family member in question. The sentencing phase of the trial, which began today, could last up to a week. Smith was found guilty of two counts of murder last Saturday...
...accelerating rate of jury attrition has raised the specter of a mistrial. It is unlikely that Simpson can afford to mount such an elaborate defense again (though a celebrity client will never lack for glory-seeking legal help), and that may well affect the outcome. For the Simpson case has demonstrated perhaps more starkly than ever before that in the American justice system, as in so much else in this country, money changes everything -- and huge amounts of money change things almost beyond recognition...