SANTA BARBARA COURT DOCUMENTS 2005 (selection)

The archive of Santa Barbara Court documents on the 2005 trial was taken down several years ago, alas.

The case was called “The People of the State of California vs. Michael Joe Jackson, Superior Court Case No. 1133603, and it covered not only the allegations of the Arvizo family but also the prior 1993-1994 police investigation regarding the Chandlers.

More than ten years after those events the prosecutors finally used their chance to summon the hostile witnesses from the earlier period and present to the jury the documents gathered by them during their year-long investigation at that time.

The problem is that back in 1994 the prosecutors from Los Angeles and Santa Barbara were not a success. The two grand juries convened by them in LA and SB, examined all the evidence collected by the investigators but didn’t find it worthy of bringing an indictment, so the prior case ended with no charges against Michael Jackson.

But in 2004 the Santa Barbara District Attorney Tom Sneddon, his deputies Gordon Auchincloss and Ron Zonen, as well as the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s department did manage to have MJ indicted, which led to a trial that lasted from January 2005 to June 13, 2005 and ended with full Michael Jackson’s acquittal.

The biggest value of the Santa Barbara archive was that it contained thousands of documents that covered the period far exceeding the trial itself.

It spanned the period from December 4, 2003 to March 8, 2006 and preserved the numerous motions and requests from both sides, objections to them, the minutes of hearings in courts during the pre-trial proceedings, the judge’s orders as to what evidence was admissible in court and what wasn’t, and much more.

In other words if you had access to this archive you could check which side requested what, what was the scope of the prosecutors’ search, what witnesses were blocked by the judge from testifying at trial and who were not, what evidence was admitted and what was suppressed, for what reasons, and all the rest of it.

But if the archive is absent anyone can tell the media and public bald face lies about “the trove of evidence not admitted at trial” (for example), and Michael Jackson’s detractors have already begun their speculations in this respect.

In these circumstances it is extremely important to restore the archive to the best of our abilities. To tell you the truth the task in nearly impossible as a sheer enumeration of the documents’ titles takes more than 80 pages of written text.

However the main documents concerning the most sensitive issues (suppression of evidence and the like) can be restored and put together for everyone to see, and this work will be hopefully done on this special page of this blog.

The first entry to this list is a highly interesting find buried in the depths of the lost archive which tells us that the Santa Barbara District Attorney Tom Sneddon refused for months to provide Michael Jackson’s defense team with any documents from the earlier 1993-94 investigation, claiming that they were “irrelevant for the new case”.

The public heard a different version of course, alleging that the prosecution was in possession of “damning evidence” against MJ, however the archive cites Tom Sneddon stating to court that the reality was exactly the opposite of his public claims.

All links in the post will take you directly to the respective documents retrieved from the Santa Barbara court archive which will thus form a mini-collection of authentic documents regarding this issue.

D.A. Tom Sneddon: The results of the 1993-1994 investigation are IRRELEVANT