"The problem I find is the lynch mob mentality that says he **must** be guilty, simply because he admitted to reading to young boys in bed."
Nathan - that ALONE should be enough to convict him. His public admittance that he sleeps with young boys in his own bed should be enough to convict him. He's not just reading to them. THat is simply absurd. You'd have to be crazy or an idiot to actually believe that. That is the kind of nonsense any pervert is going to say. A middle aged man does not (and SHOULD NOT) have unrelated young boys in his bed. This man does this on a regular basis and he should be STOPPED. PERIOD. His admittance of doing this is ENOUGH to convict him.
The DA's case was adequate. He has said that he had to put the mother on the stand anyway (which is probably why he came up with the conspiracy charges, after the fact) because she was a loose cannon he was trying to control, and he knew the defense was going to call her anyway. She was going to end up there one way or another. There was nothing the DA could do but try to control the damage. This is the case the DA got, he had to use the people he had.
The DA did a perfectly adequate job with this case. There was more than enough evidence for an unbiased jury of reasonable intelligence to convict Jackson of at least some of the charges. That they did not do so, is not the DA's fault. Pedophile priests have been convicted on far LESS evidence. It is the JURY'S fault this man is now free as they didn't regard the evidence and the majority of them were biased in favor of Jackson from the beginning. Moreover, they are simply STUPID people. That is abundantly clear from listening to them yesterday.
I feel sorry for the victim in this case who has been disrespected both by this terrible jury and by the media. This young cancer survivor, who has turned his life around and has become a youth minister after surviving an obviously traumatic childhood on many levels, is a man to admire. And he was treated like dirt by this jury and by the pro-Jackson media. I am disgusted by it. I hope they all rot in hell.
What makes you think, that I think that Michael is actually innocent??? I ONLY think that the DA did poor job of trying this case. Not only did he fail during jury selection, (one idiot juror thinks that Michael did nothing wrong.) but by calling the mother as a witness (in the unnecessary and confusing conspiracy case) he opened the door for the defending consul to impeach his whole case. If the opposing consul had called her, whole lines of questioning would probably have been ruled out, and the fact that she is a grifter who has lied under oath before, would have been inadmissible. FWIW "Sleep with" does not always mean "have sex with".
The DA's case was just fine. No case, no amount of evidence would have convinced this jury, not even videotapes of molestation. After watching some of these jurors, I'm convinced they mistook the jury instructions to mean "any doubt whatsoever" instead of "all reasonable doubt."