JURY'S PRUDENCE

Touchingly, the jurors in the Jackson trial aren't allowed to reveal their names, although they can appear full-faced in a press conference - it's like those TV programmes where families are shown cavorting around outside their house, their town in named, but any number plates are carefully blanked out ("Hang about - KM 52 BCD - is that Joyce who's having trouble keeping her kids in line, then?"). We're not sure that it's a good idea allowing the juries to explain their decisions in public - although it might well make them think twice before relying on scissor, paper, stone if they are called to give an account of their process, and so it's at least instructive to read what the Michael Jackson jury actually thought they were doing.

The first thing that's clear is that the defense team never actually convinced the jury of their client's innocence, but did manage to raise enough reasonable doubts to get him off. In a case with a ham-fisted prosecution and a half-assed defense strategy, good justice does suggest that the defense should take the benefit of the doubt.

A couple of weeks back there was some coverage online of the CSI effect, where juries used to seeing TV crimes convincingly solved through the use of two fibres and a microscope find it hard to believe anyone's guilty unless there's a whole bunch of forensics to prove that they did it. You could probably quite easily get away with murder right now providing you don't spit on the corpse. When you hear the Jackson jurors lamenting the lack of a smoking gun, you have to wonder if Jacko has become the first celeb to be cleared by the CSI Effect:

"In a case like this you are waiting for a smoking gun, something you can grab onto," said a male juror. "In this case we had trouble finding that."

A female juror added: "We expected better evidence, it just wasn't there."

"We had a closet full of evidence that always came back to the same thing - it was not enough," one female juror said.

But surely the point of a trial is not merely to look at stained knickers and photos of bruises; aren't you meant to be weighing if you can believe what you're hearing?

Not that the jurors didn't do that; either - they weighed the characters of those giving evidence, and seem to be a little disappointed they couldn't find Janet Arvizo guilty of something. It looks clear that although Jackson may have been painted as a kid-shagger who got kids drunk and played with their cocks, Arvizo was much worse: she was a bad mother:

A female jury member who had children said she was disturbed by Janet Arvizo's testimony that she allowed her teenage son to share a bed with Jackson.

"Every moment of your day, you're protective over what happens to your children," the juror said.

"What mother in her right mind would allow that to happen? Or just freely volunteer your child, you know, to sleep with someone. And not just so much Michael Jackson, but any person, for that matter."

When asked whether they considered the Arvizo family to be "scam artists who were trying to frame Michael Jackson", one female juror replied: "That thought was there several times."

And what might have swung the entire trial Jackson's way was one small gesture by the mother:

Another female juror "disliked it intensely" when Mrs Arvizo addressed the jury while giving evidence.

"I thought 'don't snap your fingers at me, lady!'" she said.

Thank god someone's finally got to the question at the heart of this story - that Janet Arvizo is just plain rude. Sure, Jackson may have had his cans of Jesus Juice and books about chess with no clothes on, but can you seriously weigh that against a witness who behaves like one of the early-cut wannabes from America's Next Top Model? If you click your fingers at a jury, you bloody well deserve to have your child interfered with.

Some of the jurors had been on this case for nealy half a year, and are probably glad that the celebpaedo waggon is now packing up and trying to find out George Best's address.

There's some suggestion - although nothing in the initial jury press conference to confirm it - that the suggestions that Jackson was on the point of physical or mental collapse may have helped swing the jury round to acquitting him. The defence had been bristling at the TV crews being shown round the cell that Jacko would have been having to call home while Big Ron from Block B was calling him Janet; they said it was intimidating. Actually, it might have helped them - in a case where neither side was convincing, would you want to send a man visibly crumbling to a place that would clearly kill him unless you were absolutely certain?

Perhaps the saddest little facet of their work is, in all that time spent listening to testimony:

When asked who they regarded as "credible" witnesses, jurors only named ex-Neverland housekeeper Kiki Fournier.

Six months, and they could only believe one of the witnesses.

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