Objection! (14 page)

The
Vail Daily News
didn’t have to look far to confirm a story reporting that the young woman had previously sought a doctor’s care for emotional problems. “She did seek some medical help,” another acquaintance blurted out on a network morning show. “She knew she needed it, so she went and got it. She was definitely emotionally fragile, but I don’t think it had anything to do with what happened.” Other

“friends” let it slip that the woman accusing Bryant of rape had attempted suicide twice. The
Orange County Register
also reported she overdosed on drugs a few weeks before the alleged sexual assault. The story was corroborated by several helpful pals. While one friend said she thought “it was just a cry for help,” others blamed the accuser’s bizarre behavior on her being distraught over a tumultuous breakup with a boyfriend and the death of her best friend in an automobile accident.

Who are these people? The whole parade is disturbing.

They’re the same people who disclosed that the alleged victim had unsuccessfully tried out for the talent show
American Idol
, which helped bolster the defense’s claim that she saw Bryant as a ticket to celebrity. These helpful “friends” are the ones who have shown themselves to be in love with the limelight and the perks that come with it.

They might not be paid outright for their interviews, but they’ve been flown to New York City for some of their television appearances, put up in the best hotels, taken to fantastic dinners, and chauffeured to Broadway shows.

Television shows that claim they would never pay for stories get around the literal definition of cash for information by showering guests connected to victims and defendants in high-profile cases with perks that would make a Hollywood celebrity jealous. If people are traveling 9 0

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to New York from Anytown, U.S.A., to make an appearance on a morning show, of course they need a hotel room, but what’s wrong with the Holiday Inn? I’d say a stay at a five-star New York City hotel, complete with the A-list treatment, makes these coveted insiders more inclined to try to “please” their hosts by making headline-grabbing comments on air. Producers know this. It’s a cynical practice by the media that should be reined in. It may be unrealistic to expect the law to set limits on media conglomerates, but, like the unwritten agreement that has until very recently kept outlets from making the names of rape victims public, an agreement to set limits on “perks” is desperately needed now more than ever.

Why? Because every word uttered by these attention-hungry

“friends” is available for the defense in these cases to twist and mis-construe. In the Bryant case, it was impossible to miss them, as these chatty chums were everywhere—on morning talk shows and nighttime news programs. Early in the case, the photo ops on every major news channel became all about them—not about the alleged victim and certainly not the case. What’s next? A spot on
Fear Factor
or
The Bache-lor
? I wouldn’t be surprised.

A L L I N T H E F A M I L Y

Didn’t Martha Stewart have
enough to worry about after she was convicted for lying to investigators last year? Then came the icing on the cake. Shortly after, Stewart’s youngest brother, Frank Kostyra, announced his plans to sell over two hundred items that had once belonged to Stewart on eBay. Among the items up for sale: the Singer sewing machine the embattled domestic diva used to sew her own wedding dress back in 1961. He also hocked the double boiler she once used for melting chocolate, cuttings from the Stewart family fig tree, and an oak rocker that belonged to the family’s grandparents.

Obviously he’s not the sentimental type. At least the money is going to O B J E C T I O N !

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a good cause. Kostyra said proceeds from the sale will go toward his self-published book, entitled
My Life with Martha: The Making of
Martha Stewart
.

Couldn’t he have left the woman alone as she headed off to Alderson Women’s Correctional Facility to deal with her severely damaged reputation and business ventures? Isn’t going to jail and living with the label “convicted felon” enough? Kostyra made no apologies for exploit-ing the most famous member of his family, saying the sale was for “people who want a piece of the Martha legacy.” My sentence for a greedy brother who’s guilty of selling out his own sister in the first degree: a lifetime of shame.

T H E R E ’ S

G O L D I N

T H O S E A R C H E S

Not every instance of
jackpot justice is born out of high-profile cases.

Some cases become infamous because of the outrageous court claims by greedy plaintiffs looking to up their income with frivolous lawsuits.

There are countless stories of physicians who give up the practice of medicine, claiming frivolous lawsuits price medical malpractice insurance out of their reach. What about the zany claims that gun manufacturers are responsible for crimes? But the mother of all laughable lawsuits is the McDonald’s hot coffee case. In 1992, a seventy-nine-year-old New Mexico woman spilled coffee on herself after picking it up at the drive-through window and got burned. The jury awarded her $2.7 million—a judge later reduced it somewhat, and on appeal the case was settled for an undisclosed amount. Ronald McDonald must look like a giant piggy bank to a lot of people. The chain has been a popular target for customers with an appetite for more than fast food. In 2001, a class-action lawsuit was filed by vegans against the restaurant for failing to disclose that McDonald’s fries were made with beef tallow oil. In recent years, the chain has been sued because its customers get 9 2

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fat. They’re fat because they eat too much fast food! It’s deadly to the courts, the way these frivolous lawsuits bloat the system, choking Lady Justice.

A real way to curtail outrageous court claims that suck the system dry is to institute higher standards of proof in personal-injury cases as well as to have trial judges charge the jury in more detail. There is a theory of contributory negligence that should be taken into consideration. Our legislatures must enact more conservative statutes so as to reduce the number of ridiculous claims in which the complainant is actually at fault. If you’re harmed by eating french fries, prove it! Another measure to stop frivolous lawsuits would be to levy a punitive fine against attorneys who encourage money-grabbing clients to file suit. Instituting ethical reprimands isn’t an unreasonable solution either.

Another simple solution would be to allow the jury to consider an alternative within the same trial. If the jury first finds no liability on behalf of the respondent, it should then consider awarding not only attorneys’ fees to the respondent, but punitive damages as well, without needing a separate lawsuit based on the complainant’s bogus claims.

In many jurisdictions, when these shameful lawsuits are filed and the respondent is forced to hire lawyers to defend against the claim, punitive damages can and should be ordered by the court as punishment for the misuse of the system. Those parties who glut the system with false claims should be ready to face the fact that if they are found out, the court will come down on them with major-league punitive awards to the other side—that come out of their own pockets.

C H A P T E R F O U R

B L O O D M O N E Y

AT THE END OF EVERY FELONY TRIAL, WHEN I read out the word “guilty” in open court, I felt no jubilation. But at least I drove home those nights believing, naïvely, that I had helped set things right in some way. I believed that the system had given a small degree of peace to a family torn apart by violent crime. I had no idea that the persecution of innocent victims, once avenged by a jury verdict of guilty, continues on in a very real sense. I was shocked to discover there is a whole new meaning to revictimization—a whole new universe, in fact—in which that same family can be victimized over and over again, and at the moment there is not a darn thing we can do about it.

I’m talking about “murderabilia.” Sold through the Internet.

S I C K N E S S F O R S A L E

Get yourself some ginger
ale and soda crackers, because I predict you’ll soon be as nauseated as I was when I discovered the truth. The marketing of “murderabilia,” as it has been coined, is a business that’s not only alive and well on the Internet, but actually thriving. It’s a 9 4

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marketplace growing fat and happy off the intense pain and suffering of others. On any given day, you can log on and, for the right price, become the owner of disturbing and gruesome mementos from crime scenes. A frightening number of personal items once belonging to evil monsters—many of them convicted killers who are sitting on death row—are for sale.

Items like autographed, killer-owned, prison-issued socks, autographed photos, and letters, as well as other items from California serial killers Lawrence “Pliers” Bittaker, Roy Norris, William Suff, and Charles Manson are hawked online. “Railway Killer” Angel Resendez-Ramirez is believed to have started killing innocent victims while still in his twenties, and at the time of his 1999 arrest, he was a suspect in at least fourteen murders. This monster is so confident of his mar-ketability that he refuses to autograph any item behind bars for less than $25.00.

The online bloodsuckers hawking murderabilia aren’t to be under-estimated. They are not only innovative, but creative as well. As soon as they realized the legal loophole left open by the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of Son of Sam laws, they got busy—but there was a problem. They weren’t smart enough to write a book or a screenplay, which is now allowed thanks to that same Supreme Court. The alternative moneymaking scheme gaining popularity among criminals in recent years is the online sale of articles related in any way to the most disturbing, the goriest, and the most emotionally racking criminal cases on the books. What happens when they run out of variety and the clien-tele wants something more than nail clippings, hair samples, autographs, or photos? An online auction hawking Resendez-Ramirez’s foot scrapings had opening bids that started at $9.99. Visa, MasterCard, and money orders accepted.

The movie
Psycho
has a cultlike following. Now the inspiration for the movie, Wisconsin farmer Ed Gein, is immortalized online through a range of bizarre items such as a wood fragment from his farmhouse and a crucifix Gein made in a mental hospital. A scrapbook of newspaper O B J E C T I O N !

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clippings detailing his murders dating back to 1957 sold online for nearly $200.

In this macabre online shopping mall, one item that stands out in its bizarre nature involves one of the most evil serial killers in U.S. history, the sadistic “Killer Clown.” John Wayne Gacy’s case is disturbing on so many levels. The number of known victims is an astonishing thirty-three. A little-publicized fact is that Gacy “slipped” through the fingers of the justice system shortly before his murder spree began. But for that miscalculation, how many lives would have been saved?

In 1968, Gacy was indicted by a Black Hawk County grand jury for forcible sodomy on a teen, for tying up and violently raping the boy while he was visiting Gacy’s home. Four months later, Gacy was hit with additional charges for hiring a man to beat up the rape victim in retribution for going to police. After court-ordered psychiatric testing, Gacy pled guilty to sodomy and got ten years behind bars at the Iowa State Reformatory for men. Thinking he had put Gacy away for years, the sentencing judge probably rested easy that night. But in a horrific error in judgment, prison and parole authorities overrode the judge’s intentions and paroled Gacy just eighteen short months later.

On June 18, 1970, Gacy walked out of Iowa prison gates a free man and immediately relocated to his hometown of Chicago. By 1976, the first of Gacy’s known murder victims was missing.

Gacy was ultimately convicted on all thirty-three murders after a hard-fought courtroom battle in which he mounted, complete with psychiatric “experts,” a formidable insanity defense. Among the more horrifying facts uncovered during the trial: Many of Gacy’s young victims were found buried beneath the foundation of his home with their underwear stuffed down their throats. Their deaths were due to asphyxiation.

Then to add insult to injury, the very dirt from Gacy’s crawl space was made available for purchase online.

It is inconceivable to me that the dirt purchased online may have come in contact with one of the poor victims—some snatched unaware and then chloroformed once in Gacy’s car. Parents of those who were 9 6

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killed by Gacy were left to wonder who bought the dirt that covered the body of their son.

The “dirt for sale” phenomenon isn’t just an aberrant flash in the pan. As of September 2004, the soil from the deadly disaster at David Koresh’s compound was still being hawked online. The raid on the Waco compound led to a fifty-one-day siege, a fiery inferno, and the deaths of eighty-five people, including four ATF agents and seventeen children. The Branch Davidians believed that God communicated with them through Koresh. In addition to stockpiling an arsenal of weapons and ammunition, Koresh preached that he was the “Lamb of God,” and only his “seed” was pure, meaning that only he could have sex with girls and women in the compound.

Not interested in dirt? How about fingernail clippings from the hands of an honest-to-God serial killer? Nails from the very hands that murdered as their victims begged for their lives. They’re yours if you know how to point and click online at a disgusting array of ghoulishly named sites. California serial killer Lawrence Bittaker is one of the cruelest serial killers ever known. He was ultimately convicted for the abductions, sex tortures, and murders of five known teenage girls. Bittaker and his codefendant, Roy Norris, conspired to outfit the “Murder Mack,” as they called it, a van with tinted windows and devices on board to transform it into a mobile torture chamber. Literally snatching young girls off the street, one en route home from a prayer meeting, Bittaker and Norris delighted in raping, torturing, beating, and attacking their victims with pliers. With the music blaring to muffle any cries for help, the two often videotaped their tortures. Now in line for death by lethal injection, Bittaker spends his time on death row playing bridge and filing hundreds of frivolous lawsuits. One suit complained of cruel treatment because of a broken cookie on his lunch tray—and it wound up costing the state thousands of dollars in legal fees to defend. Bittaker often signs letters to fans with his pseudonym, “Pliers.”