The city attorney's office routinely prosecutes people for driving without a license -- nearly 3,700 this year alone. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the defendant accepts a guilty plea to the misdemeanor or to a traffic infraction. In other cases, the charge is dropped when a defendant obtains a valid license. A trial is virtually unheard of.
The prosecutor said he knew of no other defendants to go before a jury. Spears' attorney was more definitive.
"Nobody has ever gone to trial on it. Never," Flanagan said.
For both sides, the case became a matter of principle. Flanagan, one of the deans of the city's traffic law bar, said the government's treatment of Spears was beyond anything he had seen in his 38 years of practice. Other defendants got a traffic ticket and a fine, not a misdemeanor, he said.
"It was just wrong," he said.
For his part, the prosecutor suggested that it was Spears who sought special treatment. Amerian called her defense "bullying" and said that even public defenders were thanking him for not "caving." He denied that the prosecution had anything to do with his campaign for city attorney.
The prosecutor tried to settle the case in exchange for a guilty plea. Initially, he offered her 12 months' probation and a $150 fine and when her attorney objected to the probation, he said she could avoid probation by paying the maximum fine -- $1,000. Spears' attorney rejected that, saying that his client did not want "to buy her way out of probation."
The upshot was a five-day trial.
"It was multiple thousands of dollars that was wasted in this case," Flanagan said, adding that his own bill to Spears "is probably a world record" for a driving without a license case.
The foreman said that because the jury was in the dark about the events surrounding the charge -- the panelists were told only that Spears had been driving on the day in question -- they doubted the necessity of the trial.
"It's a natural reaction to feel it's a waste of time," said foreman Gary Moy, 45.
He voted for conviction and said others appeared swayed by Spears' fame.
"Many of the jurors have a celebrity complex," he said.
Asked at the close of a news conference if the case would make it hard for him to listen to Spears' music, Amerian said, "You mean harder than it was before?" He then apologized and said he had sympathy for "what she's gone through."
--
harriet.ryan@latimes.com
