All Eyes on Court TV

My name is craig, and I am an addict. I'm powerless over my appetite for the endless and sordid drama that plays out 24 hours a day on the cable network called Court TV. I sit like a slug while a spectacle of slime and debauchery, lies and lawyering, murder, rape, torture, butchery, cannibalism and every other wretched thing that can go wrong among God's creatures unfolds before me. The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God. But there is no help. When you're hooked the way that I'm hooked, it's like being on jury duty in hell.

•

I don't think there's a 12-step program for Court TV junkies yet, but if there were I would be there a couple times a week, sitting in one of those folding chairs, drinking bad coffee, smoking cigarettes, waiting my turn to confess the details of an otherwise productive life gone to ruin under the spell of this nasty addiction.

As we speak, I'm trapped in the trial of the Menendez brothers, Lyle and Erik, a couple of tennis-playing rich boys who stormed into the family room of their Beverly Hills mansion and slaughtered their parents, Jose and Kitty, with a pair of Mossburg shotguns. We're somewhere around day 40 or 50 of the case--I'm not sure. I've stopped counting, the way drunks stop counting their drinks.

Lyle is on the stand doing his best to convince the jurors that he and younger brother Erik pumped 16 rounds of buckshot into their parents in self-defense. Never mind that the only weapons found near the bodies were the spoons Mom and Dad had been using to eat berries and cream as they watched television. This was a house of dread, say the brothers, a terrifying realm ruled by a viciously incestuous father whose methods of discipline would have frightened the Marquis de Sade. We lived in terror, goes their story. Finally, it was kill or be killed.

As Lyle testifies, a graphic keeps appearing on the screen under his college-boy face: "The brothers stood to inherit an estate worth $14 million," it says, alluding to the prosecution's theory that greed was the motive for the shootings. Other captions follow in an endless summary for viewers who were just channel-surfing: date of the alleged crime, witness and lawyer IDs, pithy descriptions of what part of the story the witness is being asked about. "Lyle is describing sexual abuse at the hands of his father...."

Oh, God, is he ever. He can barely get the words out. I can barely watch, but I do. If Lyle is telling the truth, Dad deserved to die a lot more slowly and painfully (continued on page 122) (continued from page 100) than he did. The camera in the back of the courtroom has zoomed in on Lyle's face. It is slashed with pain. His voice is out of control over the full range of emotional stutter and fade and sob. "And then ... he'd take ... the toothbrush ... and...."

"Could he be acting?" asks the CTV anchor during a break in the action.

"I don't think anybody's that good an actor," answers the guest analyst, one of three or four lawyers rotated in and out of the New York studios over the course of the day to talk about the offensive and defensive strategies of the case, to critique the demeanor of lawyers and witnesses and explain the legal zigs and zags. They remind me of NFL color commentators, and they come to their work with a bucket of clichés as deep as anything that slops over the stadium TV booths.

Including: Never ask a question you don't know the answer to. You have to have a theory; you have to know where you're going. On defense, you have to humanize your client. If you go too long, you'll lose the jury. We lawyers tend to forget how sophisticated juries are. Most cases are won or lost on voir dire. Of course, it's easy to sit up here and criticize; it's a lot different when you're down there in the pit.

Sometimes, the commentators slip into analogies that obliterate the difference between sports and trial lawyering: "These trials are like a boxing match. Cross-examination is like your jab. You have to continue to punch."

"Did you love your mother?" the prosecutor asks Lyle.

"I loved my mother."

"When you put the shotgun up against her left cheek and pulled the trigger, did you love her?"

"Yes," he says, his voice trembling.

"Was that an act of love?"

Lyle pretty much took a standing eight count on that one, but body punches like that are rare in the live, gavel-to-gavel coverage you get on CTV. The pace of these trials crawls, lurches, stalls and repeats testimony as if the lawyers generally believe justice to be not only blind but deaf, forgetful and stupid as well.

•

"The real thing isn't pretty," says Steven Brill. But, he adds, "It is a system whose values are so special that it's hard not to come away from it all with a proud chill."

Brill's goose bumps are probably augmented by the fact that CTV was his idea. He is a lawyer and a journalist, and he runs the influential legal journal American Lawyer. An articulate and flamboyant 43-year-old, he uses his cigar like a baton as he talks about his vision for a new age of nonfiction courtroom television that will, once and for all, strip the legal profession of its Perry Mason and L.A. Law mythology.

And if the CTV color commentators seem to treat trial lawyering as a game, it's because that's exactly what it is. Brill calls it "a game in which the quality of the players and their strategies counts. A game dramatically at odds with the impression laypeople get from the perfectly scripted, always articulate lawyer heroes of fictional television. A game in which the lawyers are fallible human beings with varying skills and a propensity to cough and shuffle papers and hesitate and misspeak. A game no one should be ashamed of. Yes, a national pastime--that we should cherish and even get a kick out of watching on the tube."

As hard as it may be to try to sell a national pastime slower than baseball, Brill did it. He raised $40 million from Time Warner, NBC and others, and the Courtroom Television Network debuted on July 1, 1991, with coverage of four trials. The channel has been on the air every minute of every day since then, broadcasting trials chosen from the 2 million cases a year that grind their way through the justice system in the 47 states that allow television cameras into the courtroom.

Over its first five months, CTV put the unblinking eye on a wide range of proceedings, about half of them murder or lesser criminal offenses, half civil suits. Viewership built slowly. Then lightning struck: William Kennedy Smith was dragged into the dock in West Palm Beach, Florida on a rape charge. CTV was the pool camera, and though it was not the only network to broadcast the proceedings, its relentless coverage of the trial (and the carnival that surrounded it) tripled its ratings in some markets, and a generation of Court TV junkies was born.

The Smith trial was my first fix of CTV. It started casually enough. I thought I'd tune in here and there for an update or a snippet of testimony. From the newspaper accounts I had read and the gossip I had heard, I had no doubt that he was guilty. The rich are always guilty in my little kangaroo court, and I started watching the trial with the sincere hope that Smith was going to have his privileged ass marched straight through the process and strapped into a dunking stool.

But as witness after witness took the stand and were examined and cross-examined, as the accuser wept through her testimony, as the accused stuck to his version like a man on a ledge, the story itself swept me away. I watched live testimony almost every day, and when my own life tore me away from the tube, I caught up by watching the taped replay CTV ran at night. And somewhere in the course of the testimony, a rare and wonderful thing happened--I changed my mind.

By the time the jury voted, I voted with them: not guilty. Which didn't mean innocent. Smith didn't tell the whole truth, I knew that. But when you've watched as much CTV as I have, what you come to believe is that all accusers, accused and witnesses lie--a little or a lot--the way all offensive linemen use their hands to hold back the pass rush. The verdict comes down to whether or not you can catch them at it.

•

It hasn't been easy to catch the Menendez brothers lying. They've had four years since the killings to prepare their long and twisted story, and during that time they've come up with innocent explanations for most of the details that might otherwise make them look guilty of premeditation. On the stand, Lyle was particularly good at the bob and weave that kept him from being caught flat-footed in a lie.

But here is younger brother Erik, about to wander into an ambush that will leave his credibility badly wounded, maybe dead. This is the shaky brother, the one who allegedly confessed the killings to his shrink, Jerome Oziel, which is the only reason these two were arrested for the crime. The camera has often caught Erik at the witness table gnawing at the last shreds of his fingernails. A recurring caption under his pallid face tells us that he is on Xanax as he testifies.

Under cross-examination, he tries to explain why he and Lyle drove all the way to San Diego and used a false ID to (continued on page 143) Court Tv (Continued on page 122) buy the shotguns. Fear and confusion, he says: They originally tried to buy handguns at a local Big Five sports store. After they had looked at several pistols, the clerk told them there was a two-week waiting period on handgun purchases. And because they were sure their father was going to kill them that weekend, and because they just sort of found themselves in San Diego as they drove, they went ahead and bought the shotguns there, using a driver's license they'd copped from a friend because, well, neither had a valid California license.

Erik's D.A.--one of two prosecutors in the case, which also has two juries and two defense attorneys; each brother gets his own--asks for details about the pistols they looked at. Erik doesn't remember much about them, he says. The D.A. presses, then springs his trap.

"Mr. Menendez," asks the D.A., "did you know that Big Five stopped carrying handguns in March 1986?" This was three years before Erik claimed to have shopped for them at the store.

A small moment, perhaps, but after waiting for more than two months for a clear and damaging ripple in the brothers' story, I felt like I had seen the Loch Ness monster rise up and eat a boat. My excitement was shared by the CTV anchor, courthouse correspondent and studio analyst, all of whom began to refer to the exchange as a Perry Mason moment.

•

Fictionalized courtroom drama became a popular television format with shows such as The Verdict Is Yours and Divorce Court, both of which used actors to simulate real trials. More recently, The People's Court took a step toward realism by installing a dyspeptic retired Los Angeles superior court judge named Joseph Wapner to adjudicate actual small-claims disputes brought by people who had originally filed them in California courts. Dog bites, women whose hair was fried at the beauty parlor and unpaid personal loans predominated. Each case took about ten minutes, and if things threatened to run long, Wapner, who was judge and jury, jumped down the litigants' throats with a lecture on manners, grammar, morals or the law, then gaveled out his decision. During its 12 first-run years on the air, the show was wildly successful. It is, in some ways, the spiritual precursor to CTV.

According to Brill, the inspiration for his channel came as he rode in a New York taxi listening to a radio update on the trial of Joel Steinberg, who was accused of beating his adopted daughter to death. Brill's interest in the trial, and his frustration with media sound bites, gave him the idea for a TV network that would be to the court system what C-Span is to Congress.

Early reviews of CTV were generally good. Most critics liked the strong journalistic approach of the anchors and correspondents, the way that the coverage walked the line between straightforwardness and sensationalism. In the Smith trial, the accuser's name was withheld and her face obscured to protect her identity. The jury was not photographed and profane language was bleeped out.

There were, however, those who reacted to the coverage as if picture windows had been installed in a whorehouse.

"I must tell you I'm worried about it," said President George Bush of the Smith trial. "I'm worried about so much filth and indecent material coming through the airwaves and through these trials into people's homes."

Bush's point hit home a few weeks later, while I was having dinner with the 11-year-old daughter of a friend, who told me proudly, "I learned the word ejaculate from the Smith trial."

I was about to learn a new word from CTV: paraphilia. It means sexually perverted behavior, and I heard it for the first time as I watched lawyers fussing over psychological minutiae in the sanity hearing of Jeffrey Dahmer, a man who had confessed to 17 murders. Day after day, I watched as photos of his savagery were entered as evidence, as lawyers asked and argued what were, for them, crucial questions. Did he drill holes in his victims' skulls before or after he killed them? Did the triple bagging of the bones indicate mental disease, or was it a sign that he was aware, responsible and sane?

And what about me? Glued to this horror show, extending my vocabulary unto nausea. And what about George Bush, if he and Barbara were to tune in accidentally for the reading of Dahmer's cookbook?

•

One of the prosecutors in the Menendez case is referring to the transcript, around page 14,000. I imagine the unseen jurors slumped in their chairs, sighing, fighting the urge to sleep or to run screaming from the courthouse. They have been here for 12 or 13 weeks, and unlike those of us on the CTV jury, they cannot get up to stretch or have coffee, nor can they shout obscenities when the attorneys ask the same question and get the same answer for the 77th time. If I were in the box with them it's likely I would have committed a murder of my own, perpetrated against one of the lawyers; or maybe given the term hung jury a whole new meaning by nailing my belt to the wall and hanging myself.

"Actually," says the CTV commentator, "studies have shown that many jurors pass the time in sexual fantasies."

"Do you think it helps the defense when a trial goes this long?" asks the CTV anchor.

"It's a lot harder to send someone to the gas chamber when you've looked at them for three months," says the commentator.

•

My favorite expert analyst in this trial so far has been Gerry Spence, a defense lawyer from Wyoming who looks and sounds like a cross between Clarence Darrow and Buffalo Bill Cody. Wearing a Western-style jacket, he sat in for an afternoon while a D.A. named Pamela Bozanich cross-examined Erik Menendez. Spence, the spirited old war-horse, didn't like what he saw. Young lawyers have no style, he said. Law schools were breeding it out of them, turning them into dry, plodding technicians. "The music, the sound that carries the emotional content, isn't there," he said, using his big, mellifluous voice to demonstrate what he meant.

When the discussion turned to the Menendez brothers' case, he told an anecdote about a sheriff he had defended who had shot a man between the eyes. Asked why he had done it, the lawman gave Spence an answer that went to the heart of the brothers' defense. "There are just some folks," said the sheriff, "who need killing."

Spence believed, as have all the commentators (including F. Lee Bailey) that such a defense was going to be difficult to mount in this case. Not in regard to Jose Menendez--described by one witness as a man so mean he once made a BMW salesman cry--but in regard to Kitty, their mother. Her killing looks like an attempt to eliminate a witness and to guarantee inheritance.

•

If the Menendez brothers did kill their parents for money, it's working, at least as far as their legal bills are concerned. Gossip has it that they have, with the cooperation of surviving relatives, spent several million dollars assembling the best defense money can buy.

And here comes Erik's attorney to prove that it is money well spent by offering evidence that Big Five was still selling pellet pistols at the time Erik claims to have shopped there, and that his ignorance of firearms led him to believe that they were real guns.

Whether you believe that or not, it's a clever stroke, from one of the cleverest players the game is likely to see. Her name is Leslie Abramson: Brooklyn-born, with wild blonde hair. Sharp, pugnacious and tough, she is defending Erik with the explosive spirit of a 90-pound woman lifting a one-ton automobile off a trapped child. Her record in murder trials is strong, and there are signs that even with this unlikely defense, it may become even better. The brothers are receiving 30 to 50 letters a day in jail from CTV viewers, most of whom believe their story, bleed for them and pray for their acquittal. T-shirts that say Free the Menendez brothers have appeared on the campus of American University in Washington, D.C.

During the CTV segments that invite viewers to call in questions and comments, the vote is split between guilty and not guilty. If anything like that is going on in the minds of the jurors, these boys will once again be out in their Armani suits, buying Porsches and Rolex watches.

Most of the callers begin with such comments as "I can't stop watching," "I should be working," "I'm a Court TV Everybody i know is watching this.

In fact, the viewership of the Menendez trial on CTV has been wide enough to justify the worry, expressed by some early critics, that televised trial coverage would somehow change the process by expanding the gallery to the millions. It was a CTV viewer, after all, who called the Menendez prosecutors to tell them that Big Five had stopped selling handguns three years before the brothers claimed to have looked at them in the Santa Monica store. There is also the worry that prospective witnesses, who would otherwise be barred from the courtroom before their testimony, are watching the proceedings on CTV and, consciously or unconsciously, tailoring their testimony to fit.

There is no doubt that lawyers and defendants are using CTV like game films to hone their cases. During the trial of two men convicted of beating Reginald Denny during the Los Angeles riots, which CTV broadcast in tandem with the Menendez trial, one of the commentators expressed confusion and doubt about the defense strategy. At the next break in the action, Edi Faal, one of the defense attorneys, asked for and got an interview in which he explained to the CTV correspondent on the scene why his defense strategy made perfect legal sense.

•

Terry Moran is CTV's courthouse reporter at the Menendez trial. He stands on the courthouse plaza several times a day to relate trial progress and courthouse gossip and to report on the reactions of the unseen jurors. When he began his stand-ups, it was summer in Los Angeles, and the people strolling past were in shorts. Now, as he speculates on whether Judge Stanley Weisberg will allow an incriminating tape recording to be played for the jurors, autumn leaves are falling behind him and autumn fires are raging in the hills surrounding Los Angeles.

Moran is a smooth-spoken 34-year-old who for five years was a reporter for the Legal Times, a Washington, D.C. magazine also owned by Steven Brill. Moran has the kind of good looks that could have sailed him into the movies if he hadn't fallen into the confluence of show business and law that is CTV. In fact, over the course of this long, bizarre trial, he has attained a kind of matinee-idol status: People stop him in airports and on the street, and callers to CTV praise his command of the details of the case.

"When you live and breathe and dream a case for this long," he says, "you become a sponge."

•

Along with Moran, I, too, have become a sponge, or, better yet, a mollusk. 18,004 of the transcript, and I have sat transfixed through most of those pages with him. I have endured the testimony of the defense's psychological experts, whose hired-gun interpretation of the brothers' traumatic lives makes it sound as if Jose and Kitty should be dug up and killed again. I have heard the disputed tape recording made by their shrink in which Erik admits planning the killings, then listened as defense experts were recalled to muddy those waters. The defense is talking about putting the brothers back on the stand for redirect examination, which will be followed by recross, which will be followed by the prosecution's rebuttal, then a surrebutter by the defense, then maybe someday--perhaps when snow falls on Terry Moran in the courthouse plaza--closing arguments, deliberations, a verdict.

I, however, will not be there for it. Brill may be right about the beauty of this process, but this much exposure is giving me hives, not goose bumps. If I don't go cold turkey now, I may as well go ahead and order the Craftmatic adjustable bed that's advertised on CTV every hour or so and spend eight hours a day watching judges, prosecutors and defense lawyers chase that old whore justice around the courtroom.

I think I can kick the habit. The truth is, I don't care whether the Menendez brothers are found guilty or not guilty. It was the story that captured me, not the attempt to haggle right and wrong out of it. Watching the Menendez brothers suffer this trial, it is clear that real justice is a deeper, more mysterious concept than the crude tools of the legal system will ever discover. The ultimate punishment for killing your mother and father has already been delivered on these pathetic wretches and will ride with them for the rest of their miserable lives whether they go free or are duck-walked into the gas chamber. (Although, if the latter comes to pass, I think we can expect to see ten-foot drifts of snow on the Van Nuys courthouse plaza.)

Whatever happens, I've seen enough. I have a life to lead, flesh-and-blood stories to chase, crimes of my own to commit, perhaps. So I will not watch the trial of the man who supposedly murdered the Florida abortion doctor if CTV covers it. I will not watch the trial of the woman who cut off her husband's penis. And the Palm Beach lawyer and his socialite wife who accuses him of screwing his female clients will have to hammer out their lurid divorce without me.

Of course, I may just dip in to catch Leslie Abramson blowing fire and ice all over the jury in her closing argument. That will be something to see.

Just for an hour or so.

"William Kennedy Smith was dragged into the dock, and a generation of Court TV junkies was born."

"There were those who reacted to the coverage as if picture windows had been installed in a whorehouse."