Chapter One
Hate Sells
Meet Its Prime-time Peddler, Nancy Grace
I can see them now—endless waves of humanoids, one might suppose from another planet; an angry mob stretching from coast to coast; millions of staring, hating voyeurs melded to their screens, watching some bloodthirsty blonde eviscerate whoever has been tabbed as the day's victim. In times past, say, in Rome at the Colosseum, the crowd was enthralled by blood and gore and human entrails torn from the prey of starved beasts. The lionesses then were as vicious as the ripping blondes on our television screens.
Today's worldwide Colosseum is called television. No metaphor is ever perfect, but the similarities are startling; and but for the damage these women wreak on human dignity and truth, perhaps vaguely amusing. CNN, on the cliff's edge of bankruptcy, needed a lioness. Their ratings were headed over the cliff. Then they found Nancy Grace and released her into the arena. Some say she saved the network.
As you remember, the issue in the Michael Jackson case was simple: Did the state prove its case against Jackson as a child molester beyond a reasonable doubt? This is still America. Her ladyship, Ms. Grace, found Michael Jackson guilty from the first day. Maybe he was. Maybe not. But there was no doubt in her mind, although she was never in the courtroom. She didn't observe the witnesses, didn't see their faces, hear their voices, watch the lawyers, or listen to the judge, as did the jury. She sat in her studio a couple of thousand miles away, and before the case took its first judicial breath she found Michael Jackson guilty. Presumably beyond a reasonable doubt. The presumption of innocence, a sacred American right—what has happened to it?
After the verdict, the jury foreman, Mr. Rodriguez, foolishly agreed to jump into the arena with the lioness. The poor man, like the rest of us, had no idea whether or not Mr. Jackson was actually guilty of the charges. He, as we, had his own opinion, but ours and his suspicions are not proof. We do not guess people into the penitentiary in this country. So watch the snarling Grace take after this man, who had been doing his job as a good citizen.
Grace: Yes, Mr. Rodriguez, I understand the theory of reasonable doubt. I was a prosecutor many years. But before I let you go, I've got a question for you. What do you think Jackson, a forty-year-old man, was doing with these little boys all those nights in bed alone?
Rodriguez: Well, that's a personal view that I don't want to talk about right now. . . . We all have our thoughts. [He's saying ‘I may have my own idea about this, but I'm limited to the proof the state presented'—a position that every lawyer should respect, especially Nancy Grace.]
Grace: You tried him for that. You were on the jury. That's what he was accused of. What do you think he was doing? [Again note, the question isn't what did the evidence show. The question is what did the juror think Jackson was doing.]
Rodriguez: We had to just rely on the—I'm not going to stick my neck out there on this. We're just—I'm going to base it again on the testimony that was presented to us. . . . [my italics]
Grace: What do you mean, stick your neck out?
Rodriguez: Well . . .
Grace: You don't want to say what you thought Jackson was doing with those little boys every night?
Rodriguez: Because it's our own personal beliefs and our own thoughts, and that's not what we have to work with. We had to work with the testimony of the witnesses and the credibility of the witnesses, and that's all we can base it on. [still my italics]
Here we see a Grace-mauled jury foreman, one who followed the law, come bleeding out of his experience in the television arena, a man who had the integrity to hold to the Constitution. It's not what we believe. It's what the state proved. After ten years as a prosecutor, Ms. Grace seems unable to grasp that basic idea of American justice. If you can convince a jury that they should convict a person merely on personal belief and the evidence be damned, then, of course, you can win a hundred straight, as is her claimed record.
On the same show, Debra Opri, attorney for Jackson's parents, fared better.
Opri: Well, this is the bitter pill you're going to have to swallow, Nancy. This is the reality, not the reality you have created for the last year. Michael Jackson is not guilty. Let him live his life in peace and stop trying to retry the case, and that's what you're doing.
Grace: [The snarl.] You know what? You're right. So I guess I don't need to hear from the defense, either, and that would be you! What are you doing? Don't you think you're doing a little rehash yourself, Miss Opri?
Opri: No. I just want the world to know that our system works. We had a trial. We had a jury acquit him, and he is innocent. He walked out of that courtroom. To use Mesereau's words, justice was served. . . .
Grace: [The roaring.] Wait a minute! Wait a minute! Wait a minute! We know what happened. Why are you rehashing it?
Opri: Sneddon [the prosecutor] said, I accept the jury's verdict. Why don't you, Nancy?
CNN's gamble on Grace paid off. She hissed and clawed and jumped up CNN's ratings overnight. I tell you, hate sells. And why not? You have a choice between good-old-kind-of-blank-staring Wolf Blitzer and Nancy Grace, a choice between a sing-songy sound, a man droning out the facts as a competent, honest journalist leaving you to make up your own mind, and an honest-to-God ripping-feline hatemonger pounding at the cage, one who attacks and convicts and massages her audience's need to kill. There he is, Mr. Henry Smith, bonded to his TV screen. The boss has kicked him around all day and he can't yell back, and he's fought through an hour of traffic gridlock surrounded by stupid, pushy assholes, and he comes home to a house full of yelling kids and a supper of Campbell's Chunky Chicken Noodle Soup, and what does he want to do? He wants to kill!
This is a little oversimplified, but there's a lot of nasty, unreleased aggression lying out there, and Nancy Grace knows how to tap into it. It's not all bad. By sublimation she helps the viewer get rid of some of his hostility. She's angry just like he is. And she's right, of course. Anyone can see that. They should hang 'em high, all those worthless accuseds, whoever they are, and the lawyers who represent them, and the juries who turn them loose, and the judges who let this happen. If that old rag, the Constitution, gets in the way, well, dump it. It just makes it harder for prosecutors to do their jobs—and to keep us safe. The inquisitors of old weren't held back by such arcane ideas as constitutional rights. Torture the witch until she confesses. Then burn her!
And about the persecution of witches? Michael Jackson was clearly a suspect. A magical warlock, perhaps. So consider the Malleus Maleficarum, better known as "the Witch's Hammer," the bible of the fifteenth-century inquisitors. That tome laid out in detail the method of trying and torturing those accused of witchcraft, and the Malleus "acquired especial weight and dignity" from the famous December 9, 1484, bull of Pope Innocent VIII embracing it. It was said, "The Malleus lay on the bench of every judge, on the desk of every magistrate. It was the ultimate, irrefutable, unarguable authority" on the prosecution of witches.
So what can we learn about the trials of such as Jackson from this ancient, learned treatise? It proclaims, "For common justice demands that a witch should not be condemned to death unless she is convicted by her own confession . . . and in this case she is to be exposed to questions and torture to extort a confession of her crimes." Jackson, the warlock, protected by the Constitution, escaped. Can we understand the frustration of Ms. Grace's failed Inquisition?
Here then is what Grace says about the constitutional process: "There are systems of justice on this planet where both sides seek the truth, but that isn't the case in this country."
What does she mean? We revisit a Larry King Show in which Ms. Grace was Larry's guest. They were discussing the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping case.
Caller: Hi. Is it possible for the FBI or the law officers involved in the case to use sodium pentothal on Mr. Ricci and find out if he has any involvement with this girl's disappearance? Whether or not it can be used against him after? [Ricci was suspected of abducting Elizabeth Smart but later proved innocent. He died in jail but no one, including Nancy Grace, apologized.]
King: Nancy, is that allowed?
Grace: Oh, how I wish, Larry! Unfortunately, it's not allowed under our Constitution. No sodium pentothal, truth serum, no beating, no torture. We have to wait for Ricci to crack. That's right. (my emphasis)
She's tracking pretty well with the Malleus. The format of her tabloid show seems more like a witch hunt than a panel discussion of legal issues. The prosecutorial gene of the Malleus is a stubborn one to eradicate. Ms. Grace said to The New Republic, "Think back to the Salem witch trials. Trials have always been a source of controversy. . . . Trials will always be a spectator sport." Yes, a spectator sport! One may wonder if the witch trials of old are not a part of our genetic memory.
The Malleus admonishes that the witch must "be stripped by honest women of good reputation," the reason being that they must search her clothing for instruments of witchcraft sewn therein, "for they often make such instruments, at the instruction of devils, out of the limbs of unbaptized children. . . . And when such instruments have been disposed of, the Judge shall use his own persuasions and those of other honest men zealous for the faith to induce her to confess the truth voluntarily; and if she will not, let him order the officers to bind her with cords, and apply her to some engine of torture: and then let them obey at once but not joyfully, rather appearing to be disturbed by their duty." (Please. Do not show your glee in your torture of the naked witch!)
Nancy Grace is an angel of justice. And yes, to CNN she was an angel. She boosted ratings in her 8:00 p.m. time slot by 126 percent over the same time slot of a year before through a steady diet of bloody, sensational cases where hate was the principal dessert.
"We're very pleased," Ken Jautz of CNN says. He should be. She saved their corporate fannies. And the way CNN proved their pleasure was for Headline News to reschedule its programming by moving the Nancy Grace replay (previously airing at 11:00 p.m.) to the 10:00 p.m. slot, providing the lady with two full prime-time hours every weeknight. She averaged half a million viewers nightly.
But in the distance we heard a quiet protest (a protest that CNN did not air, of course) from David Allen, a gentle professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He said benignly, "Broadcasters seem to have become far more interested in marketing personalities to consumers than giving citizens information that will help them function in a democracy."
And Jason Zengerle, a senior editor at The New Republic, opined: "She [Grace] has become the leading practitioner of the relatively new and increasingly popular cable news format: the legal shout-fest."
I do not blame Nancy Grace. She is who she is. She's honest about it. She says, "I have never, ever pretended to be impartial, never. Frankly, I have no interest in being a robot that reads a prompter." Truth is, her gimmick is wrath, pure clean merchantable loathing.
I haven't forgotten the story that she claims is the foundation of, not only her judicial philosophy, but her life's work as well. She says that when she lost her betrothed, a young man named Keith Griffin, to a murderer it changed her. She told Larry King that had he lived they would have been married, that she would have been a schoolteacher with a family. After his murder she went to law school and became a prosecutor and, in her mind, her duty was to stand up for the victims of crimes. In part, here's what she told Larry King when he interviewed her:
King: How was he [her boyfriend] killed?
Grace: Keith had a summer job with a friend of his father's. They were out in a remote area in a construction site, building in a very rural area. And he left that day, as a favor, to go get everybody their soft drinks. They were so far away from anything to have with their lunches. And when he came back . . .
King: He was how old?
Grace: Keith was 25. [He was twenty-three.] When he came back, he was basically ambushed and mugged, en route back.
King: For profit, you mean?
Grace: Yes. [The murderer, a marginally retarded black youth, killed Griffin because he'd been fired from his job and, in apparent revenge, he shot the first fellow employee he came upon. It turned out to be Nancy's boyfriend. The defendant was cleared of robbery and at the trial the prosecutor based part of his case on the assailant killing a friend.]
Grace: I think he had $35 and a picture of me in his wallet. And that is one of the ways everyone was identified. The wallet was later discovered in the possession of the man that killed him. [No, Griffin's wallet was found several days after the incident in the Bronco where he was shot, by one Eli Ingram. It was not found in the possession of the killer.] He was shot five times, Larry. And he was still alive when he got to the hospital. And to this day, I just pray that he could not feel . . . [He was pronounced dead at the scene.]
King: Was the killer apprehended quickly?
Grace: Yes. He was caught quickly. And that is one of the many disturbing things. There are so many disturbing things about a short life, a young life being cut down that way. But this perpetrator had been in and out of trouble. And I always wonder, if someone had cared about the case, not necessarily throw him behind bars and toss the key. But to rehab the person, or to throw him behind bars, to get him off the street. [The perpetrator was not on parole and had no record of prior convictions.]
King: How old was he?
Grace: He was—the perp [short for "perpetrator," a common term used by cops] was twenty-four. [Tommy McCoy, the "perp," was nineteen, not twenty-four.]
Ms. Grace told Tim Russert in 2005 that Griffin was "I guess you would say, mugged by someone—he didn't even know him—and shot five times. . . ." She said that the man who killed him was a "repeat offender," and that the law "let him slip through their fingers."
The jury was not out three days but a few hours. Probably the jury did not return the death penalty, as requested by the prosecutor, because the boy was retarded, and not, as Ms. Grace suggests, because she asked that his life be spared.
When the verdict was read, McCoy turned to Billy Prior, his lawyer. "He asked me, ‘What does it mean?' " Prior said. "I told him it meant he was not going to the electric chair."
She claimed to CNN's Art Harris in 1995 that "I am part of the system, and it failed that time, and I hate to see it ever fail again." Of course, if every person charged with a crime is convicted, guilty or not, the criminal will not escape.
After years of painful memories, that Ms. Grace might forget certain of the details of this case is understandable. But Ms. Grace has proven to be a powerful storyteller and, as it is said, every good story is entitled to embellishment.
Copyright 2006 by Gerry Spence. All rights reserved.
