Phil Spector Murder Trial

Now that the Phil Spector murder trial has been declared a mistrial, we all know once and for all that Phil Spector definitely didn't kill Lana Clarkson, unless he did, which he might have done for all anyone knows.

Oddly enough, Judge Larry Paul Fidler isn't happy with clear-sighted outcomes like this - he's like a one-man, bald-headed, truth-sniffing bloodhound pushing for a brand new Phil Spector murder trial that'll either a) find Phil Spector guilty of murder and send him to jail for the rest of his life, b) discover that Phil Spector is innocent and that Lana Clarkson killed herself and dig up her body and send that to jail for wasting everyone's time or c) exactly the same as that last one but without the bit about the grave-robbing. But it looks as if Phil Spector's retrial won't take place until at least Spring '08 because all of Phil Spector's lawyers are currently running as far away from him as they possibly can.

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So that's it then. After waiting five long months to see if Phil Spector murdered Lana Clarkson by shooting her in the mouth or not, the Phil Spector murder trial has finally come to an end, and the verdict is a great big mistrial.

Since the jurors in the Phil Spector murder trial spent 12 days failing to reach an unanimous decision about whether Phil Spector angrily murdered Lana Clarkson or if Lana Clarkson angrily murdered herself in front of Phil Spector, Judge Larry Paul Fidler has declared a mistrial on the whole shebang. And while this means that Phil Spector can bask in the glory of not being a murderer but not not being a murderer, it also means that there's going to be a retrial happening very soon. And that means we get to pretend these last five months never happened as we go over every last Phil Spector-related detail all over again. And that must mean that these things coming out of our eyes are tears of happiness, not gut-knotting despair. Right?

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The deliberations in the Phil Spector murder trial have been creaking along for so long now that people are desperate for anything else to talk about - even hokey nondescript deathish threats made against Phil Spector's judge on MySpace.

According to reports, the MySpace page of 'Team Spector' recently contained a message containing the line "The Evil Judge should DIE!!!!" that was signed off with "xoxo Chelle," leading some to believe that the message was written by Phil Spector's wife Rachelle, although she has denied this. That hasn't stopped the message being investigated by authorities, though - although the investigation may take some time to reach a conclusion because the Team Spector MySpace page is set to private, so the investigators will need to set up their own MySpace page in order to access it, and it's currently thought that they're having difficulty deciding whether to have My Humps as their profile song or something by Avril Lavigne - a selection that could take months to make.

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The Phil Spector murder trial jury has now had 15 long days of deliberating Phil Spector's guilt, all to no avail - and 15 days is evidently long enough for the jurors to forget stuff that happened in the actual trial they were jurors on.

With Judge Larry Paul Fidler doing all he can to push Phil Spector's hung jury into making a decision - mostly by widening the goalposts so much that soon Phil Spector will be able to be found guilty of murder just because 'Phil Spector' is an anagram of 'Richest Plop' - the Phil Spector jury has requested a video player so it can watch a police interview with Adriano De Souza, the chauffeur who claims that Phil Spector confessed the murder to him, in the desperate hope that it'll reveal something new to help reach a unanimous verdict at long last. Also, when the jury is through watching Adriano De Souza's interview - Caddyshack!

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With the Phil Spector murder trial jury now chronically unable to decide if Phil Spector murdered Lana Clarkson or not, the judge in charge of things has realised that he needs to mix things up to push for a verdict.

But what the judge won't do is offer the jury the chance to find Phil Spector guilty of manslaughter instead of murder. Although Judge Larry Paul Fidler had been toying with the idea of helping the jury out by reducing the charge against Phil Spector to manslaughter, he's now withdrawn his decision, claiming that he might railroad the jurors into coming to that conclusion. Personally we're hoping that the Phil Spector murder trial jury stays hung for one more week, because that's when the ancient Los Angeles law stating that the result of a murder trial can be decided by a monkey in a fez shooting different-coloured balloons with a bow and arrow comes into play, and that promises to be quite the show.

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The jury in the Phil Spector murder trial still can't reach a unanimous verdict, with either five or seven of the jurors sure that Phil Spector is innocent - beating our estimate of people who think he's innocent by either five or seven. 

Yesterday at the Phil Spector murder trial, the jury showed up in court to admit that - after one week of deliberations and four ballots - they still haven't been able to come to a unanimous decision about whether Phil Spector murdered Lana Clarkson by shooting her in the face or not. Now the judge in charge of the Phil Spector murder trial is toying with the idea of letting the lawyers reargue some of their points, or even letting the jury consider a manslaughter charge to get them to hurry up. But, hey, you fill the deliberation room with all sorts of delicious pastries, you get a hung jury - any old fool knows that.

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You have to hand it to Phil Spector's defence team for really putting the jury together well - somehow it seems to have stumbled upon the only people in the world who aren't convinced of Phil Spector's guilt.

Three days into deliberations and the jurors in the Phil Spector murder trial still haven't reached a decision about how much of a murderer they think he is yet, leading to speculation that the case may not be as open and shut as first anticipated. Although let's remember that the jury does have five solid months of testimony and evidence to comb through before coming to a considered verdict; and don't forget that the jurors may have forgotten huge tracts of what was said in the courtroom because they became bedazzled by the pulsating lustre emanating from Phil Spector's haircut. We know we have - even that picture at the top right of this article zones us out for 20 stone-cold minutes whenever we look at it.

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The Phil Spector murder trial hasn't exactly been the exciting joyride that many assumed it would be, so full marks to Judge Larry Paul Fidler for screaming at Phil Spector and his wife in court like a lunatic yesterday.

Right now the jury is deciding whether Phil Spector is guilty of murdering Lana Clarkson or not, but that apparently didn't stop Phil Spector or his 26-year-old wife Rachelle from yakking to the press about how they don't believe that Judge Larry Paul Fidler has been impartial during the murder trial. And yesterday that resulted in the judge  angrily slapping a gag order on the two of them until the verdict is delivered. The judge's outburst is just another reminder of how horribly the murder trial has gone for Phil Spector so far, but that's not the important point here - the important point is that 67-year-old Phil Spector has a 26-year-old wife. We've got to rush out and get ourselves one of those lesbian wigs if they get results like that. And possibly shoot a minor actress in the face, too, just in case that had anything to do with it.

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Yesterday in the Phil Spector murder trial, Phil Spector's defence took the opportunity to use its closing arguments as a last-ditch effort to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat by claiming that nobody could jolly well prove anything.

Even though the Phil Spector murder trial defence could have only gone worse if Phil Spector had actually shot a female courtroom clerk in the mouth right in front of anyone and then splashed about in the blood like a toddler in a puddle, yesterday was the time for it to put things right. Phil Spector's new lead attorney Linda Kenney-Baden did this by noting the lack of any evidence whatsoever to convict Phil Spector with, the way that the case of the prosecution was mostly anecdotal and by making one crack about a bazooka that made us involuntarily go "ugh." However, commentators are bemoaning Linda Kenney-Baden's lack of references to Phil Spector's lesbian haircut in her closing argument - not because it's important, just because it's funny.

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The Phil Spector murder trial has finally decided to lurch to a conclusion, and the prosecution yesterday got to wheel out its inevitably melodramatic closing statements yesterday - multimedia-style.

Although the last few months have seen the Phil Spector murder trial get bogged down with quarrels over minor scientific theories, the closing statements are the time where the horror of Lana Clarkson's death by a gunshot to the mouth get to be sensationalised as much as possible. And this was the case at the Phil Spector murder trial yesterday where lead prosecutor Alan Jackson basically whispered "Don't go, Lana, don't go" for a few hours. It's all needlessly overdone, of course - the way the Phil Spector murder trial has gone for Phil Spector so far, the prosecution's closing statement could have just consisted of a Russian dancing monkey pointing at Phil Spector and the jury would probably still find him guilty.

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It's coming to the part of the Phil Spector murder trial where the jury will have to stop listening to stories about how Phil Spector hates all women and decide if Phil Spector murdered Lana Clarkson or not - and nothing else.

Phil Spector's defence team has persuaded the court to kill the possibility that Phil Spector could be convicted of a lesser crime, like voluntary or involuntary manslaughter. That means the jury will only be able to consider Phil Spector's guilt of second-degree murder after the trial's closing statements next week. So, is Phil Spector guilty of murder or not? This is all turning out to be a bit like Deal Or No Deal, isn't it? Only a version of Deal Or No Deal where the result is decided by listening to several months of scientific evidence about an old man with lesbian hair instead of the random opening of some boxes as presided over by a beardy bloke who pulls inappropriate spaz-faces a lot and hears voices in his head.

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When his murder case finally went to court, Phil Spector always had an ace up his billowy, slightly effeminate sleeve - Bruce Cutler, his theatrical foghorn of a lead defence attorney; except that's what Bruce Cutler isn't any more.

With testimony in the Phil Spector murder trial in its dying gasps, Bruce Cutler has suddenly decided to quit Phil Spector's defence team. Although the official reasons that have been given include Bruce Cutler disagreeing about Phil Spector's closing argument and Cutler wanting to dedicate more of his time to his new TV show, it's equally likely that Bruce Cutler left Phil Spector's side because he was either burnt up with jealousy over Phil Spector's gloriously Sapphic haircut or because he wanted to get as far away from Phil Spector as humanly possible when Phil invariably gets found guilty of murdering Lana Clarkson so people will still want him to be their lawyer.  One or the other. Possibly.

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