Can Spector buy justice?

In his closing argument last week in the murder trial of pop music legend Phil Spector, prosecutor Alan Jackson encouraged jurors to ignore the experts who testified for the defense because, he said, "if you hire enough lawyers who hire enough experts who are paid enough money, you can get them to say anything." He went on to inform the jury that "Phil Spector thinks if he throws enough money at a problem, he can solve the problem."

It was a highly unprofessional argument that encouraged jurors to dismiss the opinions of any experts who appear on behalf of wealthy defendants as, in effect, purchased testimony. Yet the fact is that such witnesses are not only available to the rich; even a public defender is allowed to call such witnesses, at public expense, who would probably have made the same arguments.

There is no question that there are some experts in both civil and criminal trials whose opinions invariably follow the direction of their clients. Moreover, it was fair game for the Spector prosecutors to challenge the objectivity of forensic pathologist Michael Baden, who just happens to be married to Spector's trial counsel, Linda Kenney Baden. It was breathtakingly bad judgment to call a relative to the stand as an expert, and the prosecution scored points on the issue, particularly after Michael Baden said he could not define a "conflict of interest" and prosecutors asked if he would end up "sleeping on the couch" if his testimony did not favor Spector's case.

Still, Jackson's effort to persuade the jury to disregard the defense experts as presumptively tainted was deeply inappropriate and should have resulted in a judicial rebuke in open court.

What is particularly galling about this line of argument is that it should come from a prosecutor after a litany of scandals over the years involving discredited government experts. It is prosecutors who often hire experts to testify that any babbling or barking defendant is demonstrably sane, and experts who will claim to find a virtual portrait of a defendant in blood spatters. These "hired guns" make small fortunes working for the government.

They are so predictable that they are given such nicknames as "Dr. Death" -- the nom de guerre of James Grigson, a psychiatrist who helped prosecutors secure 115 death sentences in 124 capital cases.