Campaign 2008

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Meet the interest groups that will decide the fate of medical insurance.
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Timothy Noah
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chatterbox: Gossip, speculation, and scuttlebutt about politics.

Blogging SpectorOur revels now are ended.

By Timothy Noah
Updated Wednesday, Sept. 26, 2007, at 6:17 PM ET

(Continued from page 9)

1) Clarkson's death was an accident.
2) Clarkson had previously demonstrated she was suicidal.

The Accident Theory is forwarded by Bruce Cutler, Spector's lead attorney:

In the home there was a starter's pistol, a starter's pistol, which resembled the gun that took the life of the decedent. That was a gun found on the same lower floor where the decedent was.

One of the guns (Clarkson's?) had bullets in it; the other (Spector's?) didn't. Presumably Cutler plans to argue that Clarkson picked up the wrong gun, intending merely to pantomime her suicide. A parlor game, if you will, or perhaps (given the setting) we should call it a foyer game. At any rate, Cutler indicated that he will argue Clarkson's death was an accident:

The evidence will show … the decedent fired the gun herself. And I'm not suggesting to you, and I'm not saying, the evidence will indicate to you that that this was a suicide. But a self-inflicted gunshot wound, ladies and gentleman, can be an accidental suicide. And if the evidence, and I submit, the evidence will show you that's the case.

But Linda Kenney Baden, another Spector attorney, emphasized in her opening statement that Clarkson was suicidal:

According to people that knew her, she was depressed over the holidays, the evidence will show. She had a history of depression going back to 1994, of the type where she couldn't stop crying.

Kenney Baden quoted from e-mails Clarkson sent two months before she died, complaining of money problems and feeling depressed. In one of them Clarkson wrote, "I am going to tidy my affairs and chuck it, 'cuz it's really all too much for just a girl to bear anymore." (Of course, the "it" Clarkson referred to could very easily have referred to Hollywood, not to life itself.)

Maybe the two lawyers will flip a coin to see who gets to argue which alibi first.

A key challenge for the defense is what to do about Adriano DeSouza, the chauffeur who told the cops that Spector said, immediately after the shooting, "I think I killed her." Here's what Cutler said about that:

According to Mr. Jackson, DeSouza, a substitute driver with a language problem who was full of snacks and cookies and water and sound asleep sitting in a closed car with the heat on and the radio on and the fountain going, could hear what Mr. Jackson claims he heard [i.e., gunshots]. And that awakening from a deep sleep, which Mr. Jackson apparently did not mention the evidence will show, he was able to be startled enough and to hear those five fatal words:
I think I killed somebody.
I think I killed somebody.
I think somebody is killed.
Well, maybe he didn't hear anything.

Right. And maybe I'm the Aga Khan.

The Monty Python Connection
April 27, 2:30 p.m. ET

The Spector trial is in recess today, so I'm taking another look at the court documents.

In my April 8 "Phil Spector Primer" I mentioned that a police officer named Derek Gilliam told the grand jury that Spector told him that in her last moments of life Lana Clarkson took Spector's gun; waved it over her head like a lariat; sang "Da Doo Ron Ron" and "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin' "; put the gun to her temple; and pulled the trigger. According to Gilliam, Spector then said: "Nobody takes a gun from me." This puzzled me, because Spector's attorneys are expected to argue that the gun that killed Clarkson didn't even belong to Spector. (That, at any rate, is what Bruce Cutler, Spector's lead attorney, has stated in the past.) Yet in this instance Spector seemed to be suggesting to Gilliam that the gun was indeed his.

But Gilliam, I now see, remembered the conversation incorrectly. A little further in the grand jury proceeding, Gilliam was asked to read from his contemporaneous report, which had Spector saying not "Nobody takes a gun from me," but rather, "You don't pull a gun out on me." The latter implied that the gun belonged not to Spector but to Clarkson. Gilliam acknowledged to the grand jury that he'd remembered the conversation imprecisely. Contradiction resolved.

Something else I missed when I initially skimmed Gilliam's grand jury testimony is that Gilliam is the nephew of Terry Gilliam, the noted film director and former member of Monty Python. Gilliam told Spector this after Spector mentioned his association with George Harrison. (Spector produced Harrison's All Things Must Pass and The Concert For Bangladesh.) What followed was a conversation right out of, well, Monty Python. Let's go to the transcript:

Q: How did he respond to your comment that your uncle was a famous person associated with Monty Python?
A: He called me a liar.
Q: And how did you respond to that?
A: I said, "I have no reason to lie to you."
Q: How did he respond when you told him that?
A: He said that he dealt with officers that have made those claims before.

Glad We Got That Straight
April 26, 7 p.m. ET

Further cross-examination by defense attorney Rosen of Melvin concerning the 1993 assault. (Previously I wrote that this incident took place in 1989; that was incorrect, and I've corrected the error in two places below):