A Hurtful Verdict for a Pained Family

I won’t keep you in suspense. The bad guys won.

On paper, it seemed like a no-brainer: good against evil, ordinary folks and their populist attorney operating on a shoestring against a giant corporation with the money and arsenal to grind them to dust. It was lump-in-the-throat movie time, when music crescendos as bloodied underdogs limp off proudly into the sunset after kicking Goliath’s butt.

Only it didn’t happen that way, Marich vs. MGM Inc. being decided by a legal court instead of a moral court.

Things turned grim when the jury played parsing for dollars. Bill (“It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is”) Clinton could not have done it better.

“What’s holding them back is [the meaning of] intent,” Judge James C. Chalfant said in his courtroom here Monday, when jurors were still deliberating on this lawsuit out of earshot after sending out notes they were deadlocked on whether Robert and Marietta Marich’s privacy had been “intentionally” invaded on Oct. 20, 1996.

Late that evening nearly five years ago, the distant murmur of their anguish and hysteria was recorded without their knowledge during a long-distance call from a TV-miked LAPD officer telling them their 27-year-old son, Michael, had died in Hollywood. The Marichs didn’t know it, but they and Michael had already become slabs of meat on a TV assembly line that was rolling forward irrevocably.

Videotaped in Michael’s apartment, the eavesdropping on his parents’ barely audible voices was aired in 1997, without their consent, on the tawdry, now-defunct syndicated TV series “LAPD: Life on the Beat.” Did the show intend to record the Marichs? That question was central, jurors were told, the first domino that must fall for MGM to be held liable for damages sought by the Marichs in a case made possible under California law allowing media to be sued for newsgathering techniques that invade privacy. Key question: What constitutes an invasion?

“They’re in cement about that,” Chalfant said about the jurors’ thickening dilemma over the meaning of “intent.”

His instincts were accurate, the jury appearing ready to give up and declare itself hung. The meaning of “hung”? A baffled, frustrated, stymied jury. Although a 9-3 vote was required for a verdict either way on “intent,” 8-4 was the best this jury could do, its foreman informed the court Tuesday. As an alternative to a mistrial being declared, the judge and attorneys for MGM and the Marichs agreed to lower the 9-3 bar to 8-4, each side apparently confident it had the eight.

The Marichs didn’t, it turned out, their day in civil court Wednesday ending with them slipping through the cracks of justice and their Houston attorney, Laurence C. Watts, declaring himself “heartsick.” Earlier this week, he had joked that the Western boots he wore came in handy “wading through the bull” coming at him from MGM.

The same MGM that prevailed, even though its role in “Life on the Beat” vis-a-vis the Marichs had earned it a swim in cement shoes.

I don’t pretend to be neutral here, having gotten to know the Marichs personally after first writing about this case. They’re a good and decent Houston couple in their 70s who were grievously wronged by “Life on the Beat,” and along with their daughter, Allison, have suffered terribly because of it. They’re a close, devoted family with no hidden agendas. Despite what an MGM attorney told the jury, they never wanted a scapegoat for the loss of Michael, a promising actor with burgeoning TV and movie credits when he died of a drug overdose in his apartment. Always, they wanted only what was just.

The case’s legal complexities aside, the Marichs were victimized by the arrogance and heartlessness of this TV series--one of those edited-for-drama, camera-on-cops numbers mislabeled “reality”--delivered to America by MGM and Dave Bell’s QRZ Media Inc., with the LAPD as their partner. QRZ was dropped from the Marichs’ lawsuit after declaring bankruptcy, and the LAPD settled with the couple for $100,000.

Using the 1st Amendment’s free speech protection as cover, they preyed upon the Marichs because they could, sacrificing them on the altar of “the people’s right to know,” that 1996 televised phone call being the least of it.

A little history:

Videotape rolling, a “Life on the Beat” camera crew accompanied LAPD officers into Michael Marich’s apartment to investigate his death. There he sat rigidly on the floor, cross-legged, barefoot, barebacked, gruesomely bent forward so that his head nearly touched the carpet.

How great it was, how perfect for the airwaves in these leering, voyeuristic times. So naturally the camera scanned Michael Marich’s body from a dozen angles.

Along with the phone call, these gratuitous pictures of his unidentified torso, with face blurred, were the core of a segment that “Life on the Beat” beamed nationally (to illustrate the magnitude of the drug problem, those great kidders, the show’s producers, claimed later with a straight face).

It went out despite the family’s pleas that it not be shown, “Life on the Beat” heeding a twisted version of the Golden Rule that commanded: Do unto others what you would never want done to you.

Yet there was more, for it aired in Houston late one night when Marietta Marich, a genteel actress who was then a drama teacher and unaware “Life on the Beat” aired beyond L.A., was at home grading papers with the TV on minus sound “just for company.” What came next was a nightmare.

Picture it, the mother casually looking up from her work and seeing her son’s body on the screen, her screams rousing Bob Marich from his slumber, the event devastating both of them.

MGM and QRZ have always claimed the Marichs did not object in time to abort the episode with Michael’s segment. The Marichs and their daughter, who lives in Los Angeles, and their friends here who made entreaties on their behalf, insist the lobbying began long before the show was to air. And they’re very persuasive.

In any case, it shouldn’t have been the Marichs’ burden to stop the broadcast, it was the program’s to get their consent, if only out of common decency. The parents had lost their son, the sister her brother, for heaven’s sake.

Where was the producers’ internal courtroom of ethical behavior at this point? Where was their internal jury, the one in their brains deciding right versus wrong? Where was their sense of moral obligation, the one directing them to guard the interests of this damaged family instead of flicking the Marichs away like lint on a lapel? Why the hard line when “Life on the Beat” easily could have done without Michael, whose death reel was a mere blip on the producers’ landscape of self-interest?

Here’s the irony, though. The worst done to the Marichs--publicly displaying Michael’s body against their wishes--wasn’t part of the suit, having been ruled protected by the 1st Amendment.

That protection is applied broadly, as it should be, better to have a free press misbehaving on occasion than an orderly one under the thumb of government. Having a legal right, though, doesn’t necessarily equal having a moral right. Because the media can do something, doesn’t mean automatically they should. Talk to the Marichs about that.

So here we are back at “intent” in a case about a cop’s phone call that QRZ’s experienced sound man testified he “intended to keep recording” in Michael’s apartment even after hearing what appeared to be voices on the other end. Go figure that.

Purposely recorded or not, those voices easily could have been--and should have--been erased before the broadcast, the failure to do it telling me that they were intended for America’s ears. Yet matters relating to “editing” also were beyond the scope of the case and protected by the 1st Amendment, Chalfant ruled.

The result is a verdict that sends a bad message to media already inclined to overstep, and a sad return to Houston for the Marichs, who deserve better.

Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted by email at howard.rosenberg@latimes.com.