US: The public-relations experts have been tsk-ing for months now. Put it this way: Martha Stewart's people didn't let her dance on an SUV.
The historians say the Lindbergh baby kidnapping trial was more compelling. The media restrictions have been Watergate-esque, journalists say.
Legally, well, it's no OJ - one veteran attorney compared it to "those paintings of dogs playing poker".
Ten years after the OJ Simpson case was declared to be the "Trial of the Century", trials of the century are turning out to be nearly as plentiful as musicals on Broadway, and almost as critiqued.
Martha Stewart, Robert Blake, Kobe Bryant, the upcoming murder trial of Phil Spector, Russell Crowe's recent arrest for hurling a phone at a hotel employee - so much publicity has accrued in so few years to so many well-known defendants that celebrity proceedings have come to resemble a genre unto themselves.
The stakes may be life-and-death, the legal issues may be far-reaching, "(but) people don't just talk about the trial anymore - they talk about the impact of the trial, the partisans, the crowd, the ancillary issues, the paraphernalia of fame," said University of Southern California professor Leo Braudy, author of The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History.
Conventions have evolved: The celebrity mug shot. The celebrity heart-to-heart with the celebrity network reporter (or late night's Jay Leno or David Letterman, for lesser offences). The revolving-door legal "Dream Teams", the sign-toting mobs at the courthouse, the ready-for-prime-time jurors, the legal analysts. The jury consultants and publicists with their celebrity-damage-control voodoo. The good guys. The bad guys. The whodunit. The innocents.
Trial watching is an age-old impulse, particularly with big-name cases, but the focus on the spectacle rather than the case is a function of the media age, historians and legal scholars say. Celebrity trials and their hoopla are now national, even global, events that come and go far more quickly than they used to.
"What's changed is the magnitude," says Neal Gabler, senior fellow at the Norman Lear Center for the Study of Entertainment and Society at USC. "And the change in magnitude is because of the change in technology."
In the 1920s it was silent-film comedian Fatty Arbuckle, who was charged with murdering an aspiring actress, and the Chicago White Sox accused of throwing the World Series.
The trial after the 1932 kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby was covered by radio and five newsreel companies and drew a mob of 10,000 who waited for the verdict into the night.
"If you look at the history of celebrity trials, they've always been the trial of the decade. But what's really relevant are the stories," said Gabler. "The fact that they're trials is almost incidental. They're stories of sex and violence and mystery and famous and beautiful people and we love that stuff - that's why we read novels and watch Law & Order and go to the movies. These are narratives."
By this measure, Gabler said, the Jackson trial has been less compelling than its predecessors, and not just because there's no camera in the courtroom. "The sex (is) . . . icky rather than exciting and there's no one with whom to identify," he said. "There's no definite good or evil. People think he's a freak, but the boy isn't sympathetic either."
Rather, it's the sideshow that has captured the spotlight with this trial - the SUV dance, the media hordes, Jackson's umbrella bearers and Sgt Pepper regalia, the blue pyjamas, Jay Leno being forced as a potential witness to outsource the Jackson jokes in his Tonight Show monologue.
Also front and centre in this trial has been the cut-throat competition for celebrity headlines.
Jonathan Turley, a criminal-defence lawyer and George Washington University School of Law professor, said a study he did of the most famous trials of the 20th century found that the invention of television didn't increase the actual number of high-profile trials - it just heightened the coverage and shortened their half-lives.
"It's just easier now to inject these cases directly into the veins of the body politic," he said.
Demand, however, has increased exponentially for news of famous people in legal trouble, as cable and the internet have exploded, because it involves two surefire audience magnets: court proceedings and celebrities.
Associated Press correspondent Linda Deutsch, who has been covering high-profile trials since the Charles Manson case and who has been camped for the past five months at the Jackson trial in Santa Maria, California, marvelled last week at her competition - 2,000-plus accredited reporters from 34 countries. "During OJ the only real players (besides the print media) were Court TV and CNN," she said.
Saturation, however, has engendered backlash both from celebrity defendants and judges. Since the Simpson case, for example, most judges won't allow cameras in the courtroom in high-profile cases. And repeated appeals have been filed by news organisations covering the Jackson case regarding Judge Rodney S Melville's decisions to withhold records that typically are open to the public and to close legal proceedings that, by precedent, are matters for open court
"This case has been a nightmare from a First Amendment standpoint," Deutsch said. All the search warrants have been sealed, all the pleadings, everything that would normally be open. There was even something called a decorum order - the media can only speak to each other, we can't interview spectators, we're not allowed to talk to the Jackson family. It's as if in this trial there is a celebrity exception to freedom of the press."
Now too, opining lawyers, including novices, populate the airwaves and trawl the courthouse plaza in Santa Maria like cabbies at an international airport.
Last week's line-up included a former San Francisco prosecutor who's entertaining the idea of running for district attorney, an ex-sheriff friend of the prosecution and a lawyer friend of Jackson's defence team, a Washington prosecutor who flies down from her Seattle office to give her opinion in the makeshift courthouse "green room" and a Connecticut prosecutor who quit when her boss wouldn't grant her a Jackson-trial leave of absence. She recently got a contract with MSNBC.
Nor has the Jackson case skimped on other fixtures of celebrity justice:
- The Dream Team Merry-Go-Round: One lawyer isn't enough. Celebrities must have teams of lawyers. Jackson has had a couple now.
- The Wattage: Jay Leno, Macaulay Culkin, George Lopez - the Jackson trial hasn't lacked for ancillary celebrities. But not all of them offered testimony wholly pleasing to the defence.
"Martha Stewart brought in a parade of celebrities who sat in the courtroom and showed their support," Turley said, "and it made her look like some detached prima donna who lived in her own upper world."
- The Fans: Simpson had his demonstrators outside the courthouse. But nothing by comparison. At this trial, fans have come from all parts of the globe, some for weeks, some for months. A Los Angeles kindergarten teacher quit her job so she could demonstrate her support for him full time.
- The Spin: Gabler believes Jackson has intentionally sought to turn the trial into a circus so the jury will see it as he does - a kangaroo court set up by a district attorney on a crusade.
- The Deeper Meaning: Simpson's trial spoke to race and sex and class and police corruption. After the Lindbergh trial, kidnapping was made a federal offence carrying the death penalty and cameras were banned from courtrooms for decades.
The Jackson case?
"Pure celebrity," says Charles Lindner, a past president of the Los Angeles Criminal Bar Association who co-wrote the closing arguments for the defence in the Simpson trial and who compared the trial to those paintings of dogs playing poker.
"As much as I like Michael's music," he said, "this trial doesn't captivate me." - (LA Times/ Washington Post Service)