You know, there’s a reason that defense attorneys want to weed out “victims of violent crimes” when selecting a jury. Because it’s really, really hard for those people to separate the scum-of-the-earth who victimized them or a member of their family from the ALLEGED scum-of-the-earth who is on trial.
Nowhere does this make itself more evident than in the revenge-riddled ramblings of Dominick Dunne, and it has finally come to bite him in the ass. Fairness.com
My hate-affair with Dunne began during the first trial of the Menendez Brothers. As sick/sad/pathetic as it may sound, I was so fascinated with that trial that I taped the Court TV proceedings every day and watched all 7 hours or so every night. It was, oddly enough, the first time in my life that I really understood the cliché “Don’t believe everything you read.” I’d watch the trial and then read some newspaper’s recounting of the proceedings the following day and think, “What the fuck trial were you watching?” After witnessing the entire thing…and we are talking weeks and weeks of testimony…I would have acquitted the Menendez guys. No question. I watched prosecution witnesses lie on the stand and be CAUGHT, dead to rights CAUGHT, in their lies. One after another. Jamie Pisarchik, a former girlfriend of Lyle, testified that Lyle sent her to a law library to look up cases of kids who killed their parents and got away with it. She claimed that she found these cases and delivered the information. WRONG. The defense attorney (not Leslie Abramson, the other one) pointed out that if these “kids” had been found not guilty their cases wouldn’t EXIST in a law library.
Anyway, I could go on and on about that trial…it was a travesty, wound up in a hung jury, and the guys went on to be convicted in subsequent trials that were bullshit too. My point is that Dominick Dunne was a vulture about that case. He wrote a piece of crap article in Vanity Fair that skewed the facts beyond belief. And now, it turns out he smeared the name of Gary Condit based on the “facts” provided to him by a Horse Whisperer??
Yes, I feel sorry for Dunne’s personal tragedy (his daughter was killed by an ex-boyfriend, if you don’t’ already know that). But that does not give him the right to go around verbally convicting everyone that he believes is guilty. If he were a mere blogger it wouldn’t be so harmful. But the guy is a “respected” journalist and with the exception of those those who taped every hour of the Menendez trial, people do believe what they read.
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