Something Thoughtful

 

JUSTICE FOR THE RICH

If you don’t mind, I’ll give you a very quick synopsis of a notorious American court case. You might have heard of it as it has been discussed in detail on many platforms, including a long documentary series and now a long fictionalised series.

Michael Peterson was a successful author and journalist, some of whose books had been highly praised. He and his wife Kathleen apparently lived an ideal life in their mansion in North Carolina. Their children (biological and adopted) swore that their parents were very much in love, their marriage was perfect and their father was the ideal father. In 2001 Kathleen Peterson was found dead at the bottom of a staircase, surrounded by pools and splatters of blood. Michael Peterson was the only other person in the house. He rang emergency begging for help as his wife had fallen down the stairs. But first investigators and police were sceptical. The wounds on her head suggested she had been beaten with lethal force. So Michael Peterson stood trial for murder.

Peterson was able to afford a large defence team, headed by a very determined lawyer David Rudolf. Rudolf and his second Tom Maher wanted to focus on the material facts of Kathleen’s death, arguing that Kathleen had died of an accidental fall, and both wounds and blood patterns left on the wall were consistent with this scenario. But prosecution, led by the DA Jim Hardin, were able to bring in their own experts to swear otherwise. And the prosecution had some of their own lethal weapons up their sleeve. One was that some years before, when Michael Peterson was living in Germany, he had been the only person in a house when another woman had, apparently accidentally, fallen down a staircase to her death. The judge allowed this matter to be entered into evidence when characterising Michael Peterson. More sensationally, however, the prosecution were able to prove, from postings on Peterson’s computer, that Peterson had led a double life. He was addicted to very explicit homosexual pornography and he had frequently used the services of male prostitutes. The prosecution’s second Freda Black was able to use this information as evidence that Michael Peterson had a motive to kill his wife. She forcefully presented this secret life to the jury as evidence that all was not well in the Petersons’ marriage.

After a very long trial (it lasted over 60 days) the jury found Michael Peterson guilty of murder. He was handed the maximum sentence – basically incarceration for life. But his defence lawyer David Rudolf filed many appeals. After some years, he finally struck gold when he was able to prove that one of the prosecution’s expert witnesses (in the matter of blood-splatter patterns) had falsified evidence. Peterson was not entirely off the hook, however. There were further hurdles to jump before he was free. He pleaded to the lesser charge of manslaughter. In fact he served only eight years in prison, and the rest of his sentence was served as "home detention" meaning he was free to live in his home town and swan around freely, even if he was still officiially a prisoner. 17 years after the death of Kathleen, he was at last cleared of all charges, thanks to his manslaughter plea. Not exactly the harshest of punishments.

How do I know all this? Because I watched on Netflix every episode of the French documentarian Jean-Xavier de Lestrade’s series The Staircase. (It screened in France under the title Soupcons – Suspicions – a nod to the fact that little was certain in this case.) The Staircase was aired in the USA in 2004, after Peterson’s first conviction and the first appeals. It was then screened again in 2018, with additional episodes on later developments after Michael Peterson was released. I suggest that Netflix decided to revive this series now because a rival platform is currently presenting a fictionalised version of the case, also called The Staircase, starring Englishman Colin Firth as Michael Peterson and Australian Toni Collette as Kathleen Peterson, both doing very good American accents.

So why am I banging on about this?

Two things.

First, while watching all of Jean-Xavier de Lestrade’s documentary series, I was aware that the series was almost entirely seen from the defence’s point of view. Jean-Xavier de Lestrade’s crew were embedded with David Rudolf’s team, were allowed to film the deliberations of the defence, including the strategies they deployed and rehearsals of the theories they would present to the court. They were also able to film the reactions and ideas expressed by Michael Peterson’s sons and daughters. (For the record, both of Kathleen’s sisters and one of Peterson’s daughters came to loathe Peterson after they learnt of his “secret life”; but all his other children stood loyally by him.) The only time we saw the prosecution making its case was when they were in the courtroom addressing the jury. This bias meant that it was easier to present the prosecution as playing to prejudice – for in their out-of-court deliberations, the defence frequently expressed the theory that the prosecution was introducing all the details of Peterson’s surreptitious sexual activities simply to prejudice the jury and paper over the otherwise feeble evidence the prosecution had. Maybe they were right in this theory… but maybe not. So I am concerned with the lack of balance that is often seen even in detailed documentaries that purport to be giving us an impartial story. Interesting further note - Jean-Xavier de Lestrade is hopping mad that the fictionalised version of this story reveals that Peterson had a "relationship" with a woman who was one of the documentary crew filming him - a fact not noted in the documentary itself.

Second, and far more important, as I watched the documentary series, I was aware that there were a total of eight people on Michael Peterson’s defence team – researchers and experts as well as the lawyers leading the case. Think carefully about this. There were eight professional people hired, full-time, over a 60-day trial, not to mention all the weeks before the trial when evidence was being gathered and a case was being made. Professionals do not come cheap. To employ such a team, Peterson must have paid not tens of thousands of dollars, but many hundreds of thousands of dollars – and maybe much more than that. Even if his employed team failed to secure an acquittal, the defendant had to be very rich to have them on his side. In fairness, I note that David Rudolf worked pro bono in his later filing and presenting appeals after the first trial was over, showing how concerned he was by the case. I also note that in one point in the documentary, Michael Peterson himself remarked that poor people on trial got a raw deal as they would not be able to hire such a defence team as he hired. By the later years of his incarceration, Peterson himself had no further resouces to pay for a defence. Even so, this does support the theory than in many jurisdictions, only very wealthy defendants can get a dedicated and first class team on their side. This is justice for the rich. I can’t remember the wit who defined a court-case as “a contest to see who has the smarter lawyer”. Maybe it was said by Ambrose Bierce. Anyway, it could just as easily be re-framed as “a court-case is a contest to see who has the deepest pockets.”

 [Photo of Michael Peterson with lawyer David Rudolf at one of the later appeal hearings]