US: The fact that the jury in the Michael Jackson trial unanimously found the pop singer not guilty on molestation charges did not mean that they all believed he was innocent. One juror said that he thought it improbable that a boy could sleep in Michael Jackson's bedroom for a year without something happening, but, he said, there was no proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
Raymond Hultman, a 62-year-old civil engineer, said he was initially leaning toward conviction, but changed his mind during the 32 hours of deliberations. "I feel that Michael Jackson has probably molested boys," he told CNN. "To be in your bedroom for 365 straight days and not do something more than just watch television and eat popcorn, that doesn't make sense to me. But that doesn't make him guilty of the charges that were presented."
The total failure of prosecutor Tom Sneddon to show that Jackson was guilty beyond reasonable doubt became clear when the 12 jurors and eight alternates held a press conference shortly after their "not-guilty" verdicts were announced in Santa Maria courthouse on Monday evening. The judge ordered that the jurors' names be sealed, and except for a few who made their names known, most asked to be identified only by number. "We have a closet full of evidence that made us always come back to the same thing: it was not enough," said juror No 10, an unemployed woman. Hultman, who was juror No 1, said "You're hoping that you can find a smoking gun, and in this case we had difficulty finding that." During the 64-day trial, the jurors, all white or Hispanic, developed grave doubts about the credibility of the 15-year-old boy whose allegation that in July 2003 when aged 13 Jackson had molested him was at the heart of the case.
There were also doubts about the credibility of the 14-year-old brother and 18-year-old sister. As for their mother, no one on the jury really believed her evidence that Jackson conspired with aides to hold the family hostage and spirit them off to Brazil to force them to rebut damaging allegations on the Martin Bashir TV documentary about the singer's love of children. As the key witness in the conspiracy charge, she was discredited in the jury's eyes by defence evidence that in 2001 she coached her children to lie to obtain $152,500 from JC Penny stores. The defence lawyer told the jury that the family were "con artists, actors and liars" and that the boy was a "cunning" liar who has extracted money from celebrities by playing up his cancer. The mother also antagonized the jury.
Juror No 4, a 51-year-old teacher, said she didn't like the way the accuser's mother looked at the jury. "She didn't take her eyes off us," she said. "So that was a very uncomfortable feeling."
The accuser's mother, who is Hispanic, also irritated jury foreman, Paul Rodriguez, a 63-year-old retired school counsellor and also of Hispanic origin. "The mother when she looked at me and snapped her fingers three times and she says, 'You know what our culture is' and winks at me," he said. "No, that's not the way our culture is."
Rodriguez said they did not believe the stories the family told them of Jackson plying the boy with wine and masturbating him at the Neverland ranch. "They just didn't have the same story," he said.
Juror No 8, a 42-year-old special education worker, suspected that the mother set up the boy and his brother and sister to tell lies. "The values and stuff that she has taught them, that they've learned is something that's really hard for me to comprehend," she said, "because I wouldn't want any of my own children to lie for their own gain."
The defence evidence that the mother was a welfare cheat and an extortionist had a big impact. Juror No 3, a 50-year-old horse trader, said: "You couldn't help but wonder. Things just didn't add up." What appalled them too was the idea that a woman would allow her son to sleep with Michael Jackson over a long period. "What mother in her right mind would allow that to happen?" asked juror No 10. "Just [ to] freely volunteer your child to sleep with someone. Not so much just Michael Jackson but any person for that matter. That's something that mothers are naturally concerned with."
Juror No 8 said she actually felt sorry for the accuser, and found herself coming to have sympathy also for Jackson as a person. The long trial, she said, made him seem more "normal" despite his made-up face and his odd clothes, including his appearance one day in court wearing pyjama bottoms.
"Even though he is a superstar, he's a human," she said. "Watching him during this trial, to me he's just a normal person."
The foreman also dismissed as irrelevant some of the prosecution exhibits. The adult magazines found in Jackson's home were troubling but was not solid evidence, they said. "Anyone can own them; it doesn't prove the charge," said Rodriguez. Sneddon created doubts in their minds about Jackson's behaviour by introducing former Neverland employees who testified to seeing the singer act indecently with small boys. He also produced a young man involved in the 1993 investigation, which Jackson settled with a multi-million payout, to testify that he was molested by the superstar. But they did not dispel the reasonable doubt about the four specific charges of lewd acts on the cancer victim, four of plying him with alcohol in order to commit indecent acts, one charge of conspiracy and one of an attempted lewd act.
The jury members also found a serious problem with the time line of the case. The four alleged lewd acts occurred after the Bashir documentary was shown, when Jackson was under intense media criticism for his admission that he had boys sleep in his bed, and when it made little sense to get the boy drunk and abuse him at the end of a long relationship.
The foreman thought that Jackson's ordeal might make him curb his behaviour in future. "We would hope he doesn't sleep with children anymore," he said.