Quite frankly, that 'ghetto paranoia" has done more to inhibit black progress than any real conspiracy would have.
As a mother, if my daughter came home from a friends sleepover and said she had to sleep in bed with Susie’s daddy, I would find a gun. That may sound out there, but there is NOTHING sweet and innocent about sleeping with some random kid in your bed. I wonder about the parents of these kids a great deal and think they should be brought up on child endangerment charges. And I don’t want to here about, " Well, in such-and-such culture in 1850 everyone shared one big ole bed, blah blah blah." I’m sure there were guest quarters at Neverland. Sorry for the emotion, but as has been pointed out, if this were Joe the Accountant, no excuses would be made.
By the way, if you weren’t aware, The Smoking Gun has more information on the case. It’s disturbing, to say the least, but it also points out many of the problems the prosecution is going to have on the case, mainly in the alleged victim’s and his family’s testimony. They are unreliable witnesses, to say the least.
Except it isn’t about what people feel. No one is doubting the ickiness of the situation - what is on trial is whether or not he carried out a criminal act.
True, that’s not proof. THIS is getting much closer to proof. When the police (or FBI) raided his home, they found an “adult” magazine with his and the accuser’s fingerprints on it. I heard it on Fox News, so take that for what it’s worth.
Have you ever looked at a porno mag with your cat? Hm? Hm? Wait, I don’t want to know the answer to that. 
I’m not saying that it’s not icky, or gross, or whatever adjective you want to use. I’m saying it’s not proof that anything criminal happened. I think he probably is guilty as hell, but the fact that kids slept in his bed proves only that kids slept in his bed. It implies that there was something else going on, but you can’t get a valid conviction with implications. Unless the prosecutor can actually prove that MJ was doing anything with those kids that I wouldn’t do with my cats, this case ain’t going anywhere.
Now, see, that is evidence that will actually get you somewhere in court.
Given your user name, it looks like MJ will moonwalk out of court.
Whenever cases such as Jackson’s that have nothing to do with colour come down to colour, I find it so pathetic it’s almost laughable.
How about changing the thread title to just simply, “PEOPLE are stupid?” That, at least, would be accurate.
No, it won’t. Maybe I’ve just watched too many episodes of Law & Order, but the trouble with finger prints is that you can’t prove *when * the prints got there. Jackson looked at the adult magazine and his defense team will doubtless say the kid found it and looked at it on his own. Which is somewhat believable, I remember raiding my father’s stash of Playboys when I was a kid.
Gobear and Guinastasia, as a result of this thread and your derision of my ignorance on the topic of Jackson’s legal difficulties I read as much as I could on the topic last night. I think you both owe me a bottle a brain bleach.
Yeah, sorry about that. The evidence so far looks pretty damning, and we still haven’t gotten to the prosecution’s arguments yet. MJ’s defense attorneys better pray that they can get an ignorant jury or that they can find a way to get the prosecution’s evidence ruled inadmisssible.
And am I the only person who noticed that jury selcection in the MJ trial began at the beginning of February sweeps? Everytime I see news footage of the pre-trial activities on TV, I can hear a circus organ playing doot doot doot dootle doottle doot doot doot.
Otto’s thread title isn’t inaccurate. It’s inflammatory. I know gobear hates it when people do this, but it’s, as astro already pointed out, akin to starting a thread with the title of ‘Gay People are Morons’.
For what it’s worth, I found the thread title amusing, once I saw Otto started it.
I think police, sometimes in cooperation with prosecutors, frame those they believe to be guilty. I think this does happen inordinately to blacks, but it also happens to others. Sometimes those framed are guilty, sometime not. I hope no one has been doing this to Michael Jackson, but I have little doubt they did it to OJ.
This framing can be in the form of encouraging testimony from snitches who will lie conveniently, sometimes it is planting evidence, or falsifying some aspect of the evidence maybe just chain of custody stuff. In some cases it appears that some labs have a habit of getting favorable DNA results that cannot be replicated. Anything that can be done to strengthen the case is in some places. Prosecutors have a duty to the truth, but many forget that. The investigation into the death penalty in my state made that quite clear.
How many times would it take for someone you know, or that a friend knows, to be charged and convicted when either they had not done the crime, or the evidence used to convict them was, to you, obviously faked, for you to become paranoid?
You know, i’d quite like a link to a story about this.
I’m not saying it didn’t happen, but the only place i’ve ever heard it is on message boards like this one. I’ve never managed to find anything about it on a Google search (maybe i’m using the wrong terms), and Snopes has nothing.
Wierddave is probably referring to the incidents referrred to here, though the part about Rev. Jackson’s flying into Chicago and then flying out are not in the story.
I have to agree with some of the previous posters in this thread that the thread title really should be changed.
You’re joking right?
But isn’t the part of Jackson’s flying in and then straight out again the nub of what i was asking?
I found plenty of stories about the Tanya Haggerty and Robert Russ shootings, but not one of them so far has mentioned Jackson’s alleged turnaround.
Personally, i believe that Jackson has over-reacted to incidents in the past, playing the race card in cases where it wasn’t warranted. The Chicago dance club fire of early 2003 was a good example.
But the fact is that police shootings of black citizens have been a problem in many American cities, and i see no problem with Jackson addressing the issue. And saying that he turned around and flew straight out again, leaving the whole issue behind, after hearing that one of the cops was black, is quite a damning assertion, and one that goes straight to the heart of Jackson’s credibility. I’d like to know whether or not it actually happened.
mhendo, I’m not asking this to be snarky, but do you really believe Jackson to be credible?
Well, i said in my previous post that i believe that he has proven himself rather less than credible on quite a few occasions. But i don’t believe that means that he, or the positions he takes, are always wrong or ill-considered. Unfortunately, over the past few years, his problems have tended to outweigh his credibility. I’m still willing to examine his position on each particular issue; i haven’t yet reached the point where i’m willing to reject, out of hand, everything he says and does.
Anyhow, i didn’t enter this thread to defend or castigate Jackson; only to ask whether one particular internet rumor about him is actually true or not. After all, if you like him, then surely you’d want to know whether this stuff actually happened or not. And if you don’t like him, then you should be able to defend that position without resorting to unsubstantiated rumors.
As i also said, i’m not saying that the incident in question didn’t happen, only that i’d like to see some evidence beyond message board anecdotes.
I dunno. I have been looking around and found several articles from the same time period which featured Jackson protesting other black people killed by police officers while remaining strangely mute on the deaths of Haggerty and Russ, and an article that condemns his silence when several black police officers were killed by black thugs, and the failure of the Rainbow Coalition to present the deaths of the afore mentioned Russ and Haggerty as examples of police brutality in a seminar on that subject, but no, I haven’t been able to substantiate the “flew into Chicago and then flew out again” story either. It has been something that I have heard off and on for the past five years or so, but lacking further evidence of the story’s veracity, I shall have to conclude for the moment that at best it may be a distortion of real life events, at worst a complete fabrication that has gained a life of it’s own.
That being said, I still think Jackson is an opportunist, a racist and an exploiter of blacks for his own ends and personal power. He’s a poor, poor representative of the black community, and I honestly believe that he’ll distort facts, manipulate emotions and create outrage out of whole cloth to serve his needs(Hmmm, maybe he should send his resume to the Bush Administration 
), all the while shucking and jiving and playing his “poor, poor pitiful me, I’m so oppressed” role to the hilt.
As to the Michael Jackson trial, if we get a scene from the trial with his lawyers demanding “If the condom doesn’t fit, you must acquit”, along with video of the demonstration, I’m outta here for Canada!