Expert Witness Blog
Phil Spector’s murder trial will go to the jury on Monday after more than four months. The nine-man, three-woman panel will decide whether to convict him of the single count of murder. Spector, 67, would face a sentence of 15 years to life.
Lots has gone wrong for Spector’s defense team. The lead attorney rubbed the judge and jury the wrong way and then quit on the final day of testimony. The lead forensics and laboratory testing expert witness for the defense, Henry Lee, was not able to testify because the judge accused him of lying about the evidence. Expert witness Lee picked up evidence at the crime scene and did not turn it over immediately. Independent.com also reports:
The prosecution has been led by a masterful deputy district attorney, Alan Jackson, who accused his adversaries of mounting no more than a ‘chequebook defence’, in which expert witnesses were paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to come up with sympathetic interpretations of the facts.
The prosecution team contended that Spector had a long history of threatening women with firearms, calling four powerful witnesses who told harrowing stories of what it was like to date the man who invented the ‘Wall of Sound’. It also called Spector’s driver, Adriano de Souza, who recalled Spector coming out of his house right after the shooting and saying: ‘I think I killed somebody.’