Since it began, the prosecution in the Phil Spector murder trial has done a tip-top job of painting Phil Spector to be a woman-hating, gun-loving, murder-confessing nut – but not tip-top enough to stop Phil Spector trying to get the case dismissed.
Phil Spector's defence team has been attempting to get the charges against Phil Spector either reduced or dropped completely following the resting of the prosecution. According to the defence, the prosecution had not done a good enough job at proving that Phil Spector had 'implied malice', the mark of a murder charge in California. However, the judge in charge of the Phil Spector murder trial chose to continue with the trial, not because of the implied malice of Phil Spector keeping a number of loaded guns in his house – or the implied malice of Phil Spector's history of angry gunplay around women – but the implied malice of Phil Spector's new wig, which the judge claims has been giving him funny looks for a fortnight.
To try and convince everyone that he didn't murder Lana Clarkson in 2003, Phil Spector's defence has relied on two less than solid pieces of information – that Lana Clarkson was miserable and that Phil Spector was standing too far away from Clarkson to hold a gun into her mouth and shoot. The first one seems to be indisputable – Lana Clarkson's diaries were depressing and Lana Clarkson's friends said she was depressed and someone who's an expert at this sort of thing even though he never met Lana Clarkson said she was depressed. The second one's a bit more up in the air – the prosecution says Phil Spector was two feet from Lana Clarkson when she died and the defence says six feet.
And so, with those two points out of the way, Phil Spector's defence asked the judge if everyone could just go home and get on with their lives. Sort of. The defence has been trying to get the charges against Phil Spector reduced or dropped because it says the prosecution didn't manage to prove implied malice, but the judge isn't having any of it. BBC News reports:
The judge in Phil Spector's trial has rejected a defence bid to have the case dismissed, or the charges reduced. Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Larry Paul Fidler said there was "more than enough" evidence to allow the murder charge to be presented to the jury… Prosecutor Alan Jackson argued that all he needed to show was that the music producer committed an act that was dangerous to Clarkson's life – pointing the gun at her. "He had the gun in his home, loaded with his bullets," Mr Jackson said. "Whether he pulled the trigger, whether he sneezed or she slapped his hand away or there was an earthquake – it doesn't matter. It's implied malice."
Of course, it probably also helps that various people have come forward to claim that Phil Spector tried to rape them at gunpoint, or that Phil Spector had pulled guns at parties and started shrieking that all women were "fucking cunts" who deserved to be shot in the head, or that Phil Spector had told them that he'd murdered someone but, hey, we're no lawyers.
And so, with its plan to have Phil Spector's trial thrown out rejected, the defence yesterday called its latest witness – Dr Werner Spitz, who claimed that, surprise surprise, Lana Clarkson was depressed. Honestly, any more of this and we'll be showing implied malice. To our heads. With our desks.
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