It was looking to be a bad week for Phil Spector, thanks to a coroner more or less saying that Phil Spector must have killed Lana Clarkson, so thank heavens that the coroner doesn't even know who was holding the gun when it killed her.
As everyone suspected, Phil Spector's defence team leapt into action yesterday to try and demolish the earlier claims made by coroner Louis Pena. And it was an impressive showing too – Phil Spector's defence latched onto the fact that nobody knows who shot who and that the coroner's investigation was filled with blunder after blunder that has managed to cloud the evidence with all sorts of confusion. And, to make Phil Spector's day even better, the court was full of people putting things into their mouths to replicate Phil Spector's gun, so the ensuing blowjob jobs would overshadow all that crap about his lesbian wig.
The Phil Spector murder trial is basically made up of indisputable things and things that aren't so clear-cut. In the former category is the fact that Phil Spector looks like Elmer Fudd when he holds a gun, unless he's holding a gun while covered in a woman's blood at 5am and babbling that he might have just killed someone, in which case he looks so little like Elmer Fudd that his driver has to run away. The latter category, on the other hand, contains the question of whether Phil Spector murdered Lana Clarkson in 2003 or not – and nobody can really make up their minds.
First the prosecution brought forward all kinds of women who claimed that Phil Spector pulled guns on them, only for the defence to say that they're criminals and idiots. Then the prosecution said that Phil Spector confessed the murder to his driver, which the defence argued may not have happened because the driver was "a substitute driver with a language problem, who was full of snacks and cookies and water and sound asleep, sitting in a closed car, with the heat on, and the radio on, and the fountain going."
And then earlier this week Deputy Medical Examiner Louis Pena claimed that Lana Clarkson's death was a murder because of the bruising on her tongue, bruising on her wrists, psychological state of mind and the fact she was wearing a handbag. And yesterday, with all the routine you'd expect, Phil Spector's defence started to pull Pena's claims apart. It started by getting Pena to admit that he had no idea who was holding the gun when Lana Clarkson died. And from there it went on, as the San Jose Mercury reports:
The medical examiner also said criminalists made mistakes in evidence collection and handling, including the loss of a piece of one of Clarkson's teeth. The missing tooth fragment was among items in an in-house coroner's office memo about concerns in the case.
Not only was the tooth missing, but a criminologist collected samples from Lana Clarkson's body with lift-off tape that stopped a blood spatter pattern to be properly assessed, and also that someone had moved Lana Clarkson's head by mistake, sending blood gushing out of her mouth, which confused things even further.
So we're back to square one. Nobody really knows if Phil Spector murdered Lana Clarkson or not. Someone should really set up some sort of event in which parties to the dispute present information in a formal setting before a sort of judge in order to achieve a resolution to the dispute, you know.
Read more:
Spector Defence Targets Forensic Errors – San Jose Mercury