Santa Maria Is Bracing for Jackson

With the arraignment of Michael Jackson set for April 30, officials in Santa Maria are beefing up security and planning to erect barricades around the courthouse to keep order among anticipated throngs of media and fans.

Meanwhile, two of the superstar’s former employees were waiting Thursday to hear whether they too were named in the sealed indictment, which was handed down by the Santa Barbara County Grand Jury.

The panel returned its indictment Wednesday after 13 days of testimony. Jackson has been accused of molesting a 12-year-old boy at his palatial Neverland Ranch in the Santa Ynez Valley, but the details of the indictment will not be released until he is arraigned.

Because criminal charges were filed months before county Dist. Atty. Tom Sneddon decided to convene the grand jury, Jackson is in the unusual position of being forced to enter a plea twice in what is essentially the same case. His lawyers have said he will plead not guilty.

At his first arraignment Jan. 16, hundreds of Jackson’s fans cheered him as he danced on a van’s roof with the world’s media avidly chronicling every move. His followers had organized rented buses into a “convoy of love” from Los Angeles and, as he danced, crowds surged onto the street.

On Thursday, Santa Maria police warned against a repeat performance.

“When he made the unwise decision of jumping on top of the van, that incited the crowd,” said Lt. Chris Vaughn, a department spokesman. “We weren’t happy at all about that event and hope Mr. Jackson doesn’t try anything like it again.”

Vaughn said fans will be kept across the street from the courthouse instead of being allowed to mill around on the grounds. Jackson and his attorneys will be urged to arrive with fewer vehicles in their caravan and take what Vaughn described as “a more directed route” into the courthouse. At least 90 Santa Maria police officers and Santa Barbara County sheriff’s deputies will be on hand, he said.

It was partly to avoid another spectacle that Sneddon opted for the secrecy of a grand jury in an obscure location -- a sheriff’s training center north of Santa Barbara -- over a public preliminary hearing that would have required Jackson’s presence, sources have said.

On top of that, grand juries, where defense attorneys are barred from appearing, usually do the bidding of prosecutors. A classic 1964 study of Illinois grand juries showed them returning indictments in 90% of their cases, and legal experts said the same was probably true decades later in California.

“They tend to be rubber stamps for prosecutors,” said Mike Vitiello, a professor at Sacramento’s McGeorge School of Law, who has studied grand juries exhaustively. “The old cliche is that a grand jury would indict a ham sandwich and that’s probably true. But it would have to be a really good ham sandwich.”

The Jackson grand jury was conducted amid such secrecy that witnesses were sometimes rushed into the hearing room under blankets. On Thursday, an attorney for two Jackson associates who had been accused of threatening the alleged victim’s family said even he couldn’t find out from Santa Barbara County authorities whether his clients had been indicted.

“They need to tell me so we can make travel arrangements,” said Joseph Tacopina, a New York attorney representing Vincent Amen and Frank Tyson.

The men have not been charged in the case, but they were asked to appear before the grand jury because of accusations by the mother of the alleged victim.

Prosecutors “are just trying to put pressure on these kids” for incriminating testimony against Jackson, said Tacopina, who added his clients had done nothing wrong.

While an indictment means Jackson must plead again at an arraignment, Vitiello and other experts said they saw nothing in the law that would necessarily require him to be arrested again. Jackson’s attorneys already have laid the groundwork for a legal challenge of the indictment. In an April 2 hearing, defense attorney Benjamin Brafman contended that prosecutors had failed to adequately present the grand jury with evidence favorable to his client, as the law requires.

After the arraignment, Jackson’s lawyers could move to have the indictment thrown out for that reason, said Gerald F. Uelmen, a former federal prosecutor who teaches at the Santa Clara University School of Law.

Uelmen, one of the attorneys on the O.J. Simpson “dream team,” said he had reservations about the Jackson grand jury because of the criminal charges that already had been filed in the case.

“The prosecution is not supposed to use the grand jury as a discovery tool to prepare a case that already has been charged,” he said.

On the other hand, he pointed out, Jackson’s lawyers could have demanded a public preliminary hearing but didn’t want one.

“They have good tactical reasons to not have their case exposed to the kind of intense publicity it would have gotten,” he said. “Having victims come in and testify at a preliminary hearing before they’re ready could skew public opinion in a negative way.”