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Blogging SpectorOur revels now are ended.

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

(Continued from page 7)

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Spector Speaks!
May 17, 2:45 ET

A genre is born: Boomer Gothic.

How else to describe a 2005 video of Phil Spector that turned up May 16 on Inside Edition? In the video, Spector looks exactly like somebody's Great Aunt Tillie, but on closer inspection that's a Hawaiian shirt he's wearing, not a print dress, and his necklace is not a string of pearls. Spector denounces the women now testifying against him in his murder trial. "They just want to get on Inside Edition, they just want to testify at the trial, and they just want to make money," Spector says. He then offers them $100,000 apiece if they'll take lie-detector tests.

Spector also says that he's too short to have killed Clarkson. "The deceased, who was standing when she took her own life and she was 5-11," Spector rambles, "and she would have been 6 feet 2 with heels on, which she was wearing at the time of her death, and that the gun was in a downward position." He continues: "I am 5 foot 5. It would have been physically impossible for me to have administered the death wound to her in any shape, way or form."

According to Inside Edition, the video is from an interview Spector gave Michelle Blaine, his former personal assistant. Blaine told Inside Edition that Spector offered to marry her so that she couldn't be compelled to testify against him.

Spector Defense: Deport Star Prosecution Witness!
May 16, 2007, 5:50 ET

On May 15, the trial's most important witness, Adriano DeSouza, took the stand. DeSouza was Spector's chauffeur on the night Lana Clarkson was killed. In the May 16 Los Angeles Times, Peter Y. Hong reports that DeSouza told the jury that he dropped Spector and Clarkson off at Spector's house and then waited in Spector's Mercedes. Around 5 a.m., DeSouza continued, he heard a gunshot and then saw Spector appear in the doorway with a gun in his hand and blood on his fingers. "I think I killed somebody," Spector said, according to DeSouza. Not a lot of ambiguity there.

"I was afraid," DeSouza testified. "He could have shot me or something like that, I wasn't sure." DeSouza said that he ran from Spector and called 911 on his cell phone. A tape of that conversation was played today in court:

"I think my boss killed somebody. Please can you send [unintelligible]?"
"You think your boss killed somebody?"
"Yes."
[…]
"Why do you believe he may have killed somebody?"
"Because you have a lady on the floor, and you have a gun in his hand."
"OK, Stay on the line. Do not hang up."
[…]
"Did you hear him shoot or anything?"
"Yeah, I heard like a noise and, yeah, he opened the door and 'I think he--"I"-- killed her'"
"OK, stay on the line. Do not hang up."

[Note, May 19, 2007: An earlier version of this item contained a less accurate and complete transcription derived from a story and blog item in the Los Angeles Times. I have now replaced that with the above transcription derived from a Court TV video clip of the 911 tape being played in the courtroom.]

In response, Spector defense lawyer Bradley Brunon asked DeSouza whether he had ever misunderstood Spector. DeSouza said he had. (In his opening statement, defense layer Bruce Cutler emphasized that DeSouza was "a substitute driver with a language problem," and could easily have confused the statement "I think I killed somebody" with "I think somebody is killed.") Although DeSouza speaks "in a thick Brazilian accent," according to Court TV's Spector blog, he testified that he took advanced English classes when he was a teenager. Brunon also griped that the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services haven't deported DeSouza, even though his student visa has expired, and requested immigration documents concerning DeSouza. I'm not an experienced legal observer, but it seems to me that when the defense team wants to ship the key witness for the prosecution out of the country, the jury is at some risk of concluding that his testimony is extremely damaging.

To be fair, I don't think that Brunon was trying to persuade the judge to deport DeSouza. Rather, he was trying to establish that the prosecution has considerable leverage over what DeSouza says on the witness stand because, as an illegal alien, DeSouza remains in the United States at the pleasure of the government. If he doesn't say Spector is guilty, guilty, guilty, then Deputy District Attorney Alan Jackson just might have to phone Citizen and Immigration Services and tell them it's time to put DeSouza on a flight to Rio. The obvious and devastating flaw in this argument is that DeSouza has been saying on the witness stand pretty much what he said to the 911 operator on the night of Clarkson's death, well before he had any conversations with police or prosecutors.

In the afternoon, the jury was dismissed and the Fingernail Wars resumed. Henry Lee, a forensics expert working for Spector's defense, was summoned to the stand. Did he, as was alleged last week, pick up an acrylic fake fingernail, or possibly a tooth, from the crime scene? (The prosecution suspects that Spector's defense team is hiding Clarkson's acrylic thumbnail.) "Definitely not," Lee replied. "I never put that biohazard material in my handkerchief … whatever we found, I reported it."

For Want Of A Nail
May 11, 2007 10:30 ET

In a May 2 blog item titled "Spatter Wars," I speculated that a forthcoming courtroom hearing with the jury not present would concern the admissibility of expert testimony about how far blood can spatter from a gunshot wound. In fact, the hearing was about not the Spatter Wars, but the Fingernail Wars. The Los Angeles Times has been all over this story in both the newspaper and its Spector trial blog, and with the court today in recess, now is as good a time as any to explain what the Fingernail Wars are all about.

For three years, prosecutors in the Spector case have suspected that shortly after the police searched Spector's house and carted off its evidence, the defense team found and hid an object that had eluded the cops—a piece of Lana Clarkson's acrylic thumbnail blackened with gunpowder residue. According to a medical examiner, when he looked at Clarkson's body, her right hand was missing a piece of an acrylic nail.

Whether a blackened fake thumbnail would indicate that Clarkson pulled the trigger herself or that Clarkson grabbed hold of the gun barrel when Spector threatened her is a matter of some dispute, one that obviously is impossible to resolve without the nail itself, which Spector's defense says it never had. Gregory Diamond, a former clerk to Robert Shapiro, who was representing Spector for a while, testified that on the day in question, he saw Sara Caplan, a lawyer working with Shapiro, pick up something small and white and give it to Michael Baden, a forensics expert employed by Spector's legal team. But according to Diamond, Baden identified this object as a tooth, not a nail. Baden testified that none of this happened. Caplan did, too, but she and another former member of Spector's defense team named Stanley White said that Henry Lee, another member of Spector's legal team, did find a small white object. White recalled that he told Lee he thought it was a fingernail and that Lee answered that it wasn't.

It was White who first raised the issue of the missing fingernail back in 2004. At the time, Shapiro refused to say whether the defense team had possession of any such nail or not. White testified that when Leslie Abramson, then a Spector defense lawyer, found out White had told the cops about the nail, she threw a hissy fit.

With the matter unresolved, the judge said he would bring Lee into the courtroom when he returns from a trip to China.

The Bar Tab
May 10, 6:05 p.m. ET

Today the prosecution's goal is to establish that Phil Spector was schnockered the night Lana Clarkson died. Rommie Davis, a high-school friend of Spector's, says she had dinner with Spector earlier that evening at the Grill on the Alley in Beverly Hills. (Local color: Davis' occupation is "shopping expert.") Davis says it worried her that night that Spector was mixing alcohol with his meds. Kathy Sullivan, a waitress at the Grill who was friends with Spector, then takes the stand. Deputy District Attorney Alan Jackson has her review Spector's receipt from the grill, and then Spector's receipts from Trader Vic's, Dan Tana's, and the House of Blues, where Sullivan accompanied Spector after Spector and his chauffeur drove Davis home. I count at least four daiquiris, one Navy grog, a glass of rum, and three trips to the men's room.

Yes, Spector was schnockered.

At the House of Blues, Sullivan says, she ordered a glass of water, which apparently irritated Spector. He commanded Lana Clarkson, the hostess at the House of Blues' VIP lounge, to escort the unforgivably sober Sullivan to his car. Spector's chauffeur then drove Sullivan home. Even though Sullivan wanted to go home, she tells the court that she felt insulted by Spector's showy dismissal. But being traded for Clarkson was a lucky break. That glass of water may have saved Sullivan's life.