Jackson Trial Judge Rejects Sidebars and Sideshows

SANTA MARIA, Calif. —  Starting with jury selection tomorrow, Santa Barbara County Superior Court Judge Rodney S. Melville could become known from Santa Maria to Shanghai.

His rulings in the Michael Jackson child-molestation case will be debated in saloons and salons.

At 63, Melville stands to become as instantly famous as Lance Ito, the Los Angeles judge who was at the helm of the O.J. Simpson double-murder trial in 1995.

But like many judges who have heard high-profile cases since that nine-month courtroom extravaganza, Melville is doing all he can to prove that he’s no Ito.

“If there’s one thing the O.J. trial did, it was to create a tremendous fear in the judiciary of not wanting to appear out of control, or otherwise look awkward,” said Gary Hengstler, director of the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for the Courts and Media, which runs classes for judges at the University of Nevada in Reno.

“Now, judges are opting for greater secrecy,” said Hengstler, whose center was founded in the wake of the Simpson trial, which cost the public $8 million and drew an estimated 150 million viewers for the verdict.

“They’re trying much harder to control the flow of information, with gag orders and limits on what people can say. No judge wants to be the subject of continuing legal education seminars where the talk is all about losing control of the courtroom.”

From the start, Melville let it be known that he was in control. To the dismay of media organizations around the world, he banned TV cameras from the courtroom.

While millions were glued to the tube for the Simpson saga, there will be no opportunity in Jackson’s trial for lawyers and witnesses to perform before a vast, unseen audience.

For the six months that the trial is expected to last, the world will be watching.

Bloggers and news websites will be reporting nonstop, and nightly reenactments of each day’s court action will draw legions to cable TV. Nearly 100 media outlets from the U.S. and abroad plan to cover the start of jury selection -- ordinarily the most routine of events.

“It is no exaggeration to say that this may be the most reported criminal trial to occur in our lifetimes,” prosecutors noted in a recent court document. “Allegations of child molestation, false imprisonment, child abduction and extortion will square off against a defense that the child victim and his family are all liars and this is an ill-conceived attempt to make a quick dollar.”

Jackson has appeared in Santa Maria courtrooms before. In a 2002 contract dispute, he wore a surgical mask to the witness stand until a judge ordered him to take it off. The next day, he drowsily came to court four hours late.

When Jackson was 20 minutes late for his arraignment last January, it wasn’t unexpected, but, in a scolding tone, Melville made clear that it was not to happen again.

“Mr. Jackson, you have started out on the wrong foot with me,” the judge told the pop icon. “From now on, I want you to be on time. It is an insult to the court.”

At his handful of subsequent court appearances, Jackson has arrived several minutes early.

Like Ito, Melville is known among his colleagues as a companionable and entertaining man, as well as a dedicated jurist. In court, he can come across as Mr. Rogers in a black robe, speaking in slow cadences and seldom raising his voice.

While Ito, who declined to comment for this article, was criticized for allowing the Simpson trial to drag on and on, Melville has kept attorneys in the Jackson case on a tight schedule. In court, he has repeatedly refused their requests for the kind of sidebar consultations between the judge and the lawyers that interrupted the Simpson trial for hours.

Melville has occasionally been curt. Last August, he fined defense lawyer Brian Oxman $1,000 for asking a witness questions that had already been ruled off-limits.

More recently, the judge pulled the rhetorical rug from beneath another Jackson attorney, Robert M. Sanger.

After Melville had issued a ruling on some procedural point, Sanger, who is partial to long-winded exposition, rose from his seat and was cut off.

“Your honor, for the record ...” Sanger began.

“For the record,” Melville replied, “sit down!”

In the Simpson case, attorneys slammed the opposition in impromptu news conferences on the courthouse steps. Early in the Jackson case, Melville issued a gag order barring the lawyers, law enforcement officials and court personnel, including himself, from speaking publicly about the case.

“Melville is extremely cautious,” said Robert Pugsley, a professor at the Southwestern University Law School in Los Angeles and a frequent commentator on the Simpson trial. “He’s bending over backward to restrict the access of the press to the case.”

In fact, the Jackson case may be the biggest story about which the least is known.

Melville has sealed hundreds of routine documents in the case. Other documents feature page after page of blacked-out paragraphs, interspersed with innocuous phrases and legal citations.

Even the details that led a Santa Barbara County grand jury to indict Jackson in the first place have been kept under wraps. On Friday, Melville announced he would make public the grand jury indictment and the transcripts after the jury is sworn in -- nearly a year after the fact.

“The amount of secrecy in this case is unbelievable,” said Laurie Levenson, a former federal prosecutor who teaches at Loyola Law School. “Melville wants everything done the Melville way; if it happened in O.J., he doesn’t want it happening in his court.”

But some legal scholars and even some of those involved in the Simpson case say Ito has gotten a bad rap.

“He was in charge and in control throughout the trial,” said Gerald Uelmen, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law, who was on the Simpson “dream team.”

Speaking at judges’ conferences, Uelmen urges jurists to follow Ito’s example in dealing with the press.

“My message to them is to put it all out there,” he said, adding that Melville’s attempts to restrict information are counterproductive.

“Gag orders just drive all the information underground,” he said. “They don’t prevent the media from having their frenzy and looking for every morsel about the case and publishing it. The problem is that what gets published is generally less reliable.”

In the last month, ABC News and a website called TheSmokingGun.com have reported details of what appear to be leaked grand jury transcripts in the Jackson case. After receiving Melville’s permission to speak publicly, Santa Barbara County Dist. Atty. Tom Sneddon and Sheriff Jim Anderson said they were investigating the leak.

In the Simpson case, gavel-to-gavel TV coverage helped fuel a national obsession, raising questions about the increasingly blurry line between news and entertainment. Since then, judges have been more reluctant to grant TV access to their courtrooms, even in such closely watched cases as the Scott Peterson murder trial in Redwood City.

In the Jackson case, Melville has barred cameras from the courtroom, as well as cellphones, hand-held computers, laptops and other electronic devices.

A ban on television cameras strikes the Simpson team’s Uelmen as reasonable.

“TV cameras affect what goes on in the courtroom,” he said. “You have lawyers performing for the camera, witnesses performing for the camera, and witnesses who don’t want to appear because they don’t want the exposure. It’s generally a mistake.”

In court, Melville softens his judicial bearing with wry humor and self-deprecating asides.

When pondering a decision, he is unafraid to pause, stroke his chin and silently gaze into the middle distance -- a rare portrait of thought in the heated give-and-take of a courtroom.

Despite his passion for control, Melville can be a genial host. If audience members have trouble hearing attorneys or witnesses above a noisy air-conditioning system, he has instructed them to raise their hands and wave.

Sometimes, he will interrupt proceedings briefly to explain a point of procedure to spectators. For the benefit of jurors, court will end at 2:30 p.m.

But Melville’s solicitous manner in court belies the demons he has had to face in his own life.

The son of a minister and a teacher, he grew up in San Diego, where he was active in a church youth group and the Boy Scouts. On outings with each, he developed a fondness for alcohol.

In 2001, he related his lifelong struggle with alcoholism on “Faces of Addiction,” a televised panel show sponsored by the Santa Barbara County Education Office.

Starting when he was 11 or 12, he realized that drinking “did something to me that made me feel more important, a nicer person, more acceptable to the people I was with,” he said. “I drank real heavy from the get-go.”

By the time he was a young man, Melville had been a Navy submariner and graduated from San Diego State and UC’s Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco.

He drank sporadically, but later, as an up-and-coming attorney in Santa Maria, he found booze overtaking his life.

“I thought that to be an important person -- which I always wanted to be -- you had to drink and smoke and have cocktail parties,” he said during panel discussions. “That’s where things happened, that’s where deals were made, that’s where you got your clients.”

He told of waking up one morning after a blackout and realizing that his life had careened beyond his control.

“That afternoon, I met with a counselor in Solvang -- so nobody in Santa Maria would know I was an alcoholic,” he said in the broadcast, barely choking back tears.

With the help of Alcoholics Anonymous, Melville quit drinking in 1978, in the week following Christmas.

Melville served brief stints as a prosecutor in both San Bernardino and Santa Barbara counties before partnering with another young Santa Maria attorney, James Iwasko, in 1972.

For the next 15 years, Melville, a Republican active in community affairs, handled a range of civil cases, criminal defense work and family law.

Gov. George Deukmejian named him to the municipal bench in 1987 and three years later tapped him for the Superior Court.

Melville never forgot the pain of his struggle. In the early 1990s, he helped found Santa Barbara County’s drug court, where treatment plays a big part in sentencing. His work with drug and alcohol offenders earned him a Judge of the Year award from a state probation officers group in 2001.

“He’s not a ‘nail-’em-and-jail-’em’ type of judge,” said Susan Gionfriddo, the head of Santa Barbara County’s probation department. “His experience with his own addiction has led him to be very convincing in terms of the efficacy of treatment.”

As a judge in a small city, Melville has presided over his share of murder trials, small-town political dramas, custody disputes and contract conflicts. Last year, he was assigned a lawsuit over alleged discrimination suffered by men on “ladies night” at a local bowling alley.

Until now, none of his cases has generated national headlines.

Ito, on the other hand, presided over the 1992 fraud trial of Charles Keating in a case that came to symbolize the corruption of the savings and loan industry.

Preparing for the Simpson trial, he liked to cite one lesson he learned from his time in the limelight:

“The sirens of mythology pale in comparison to the allure of seeing yourself on CNN,” Ito said. “The results, however, can be about the same.”

Ito was later criticized for ignoring his own advice. Rightly or wrongly, he came to be known as “Judge Ego,” welcoming celebrities such as Richard Dreyfuss, Diane Sawyer and Larry King into his chambers during the trial.

In an unusual move, he gave a Los Angeles TV reporter interviews for five successive nights during sweeps week, though he declined to answer questions about the case.

So far, the biggest show Melville has willingly done is the holiday party for Santa Maria courthouse employees. He emcees each year.

“He realizes that dignity is more than just being stuffy,” said Santa Maria attorney Laurence Scott. “He still acts like a human being. He’s not above wearing a funny hat to get a laugh.”