The premiere, then the trial
Two weeks before Scott Peterson sets his eyes on the group of people who will be picked to decide if he murdered his wife and unborn son, millions of Americans will have the chance to watch an actor portray the Modesto fertilizer salesman in a USA Network movie.
“The Perfect Husband: The Laci Peterson Story,” which premieres tonight, spans the four-month period between Laci Peterson’s disappearance on Dec. 24, 2002, and her husband’s arrest. The two-hour movie uses composite characters and compresses incidents to move the story, but it follows the actual timeline of the case, relying on publicized facts, said John Kelley, USA’s senior vice president of communications.
“It’s a compelling look at the aftermath of a tragic crime,” Kelley said. “People are getting their information faster and faster via all media. Frankly, I think this story would be of interest no matter when it was told. It’s been documented several ways already in newsmagazine shows, magazine accounts and newspapers. We’re just one more piece of this landscape.”
Indeed, if a dramatization of the high-profile case before a potential jury is even questioned seems premature, there is more than a decade of precedents.
* A 1990 CBS movie, “Good Night, Sweet Wife: A Murder in Boston,” depicted the murders of Carol Stuart and her unborn baby, and the racial rage set off in Boston after a black man was arrested because her husband claimed that a black man jumped into their car on their way home from a birthing class. A grand jury concluded that Charles Stuart, who committed suicide 11 weeks after his wife’s death, killed his wife and baby -- but not before the movie-of-the-week aired.
* When the two juries for Erik and Lyle Menendez deadlocked in 1994, the mistrials did not stop Fox or CBS from airing movies about the brothers, who were later convicted of killing their parents.
* In October, another USA original movie, “D.C. Sniper: 23 Days of Fear,” reenacted the psychological siege of the Washington, D.C., area during the 10 sniper slayings of 2002. John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo were convicted of murder several weeks later.
As a result of the frenetic modern-day news cycle, high-profile court cases become three-act plays, said Robert Thompson, director of the Center for Popular Television at Syracuse University. The event and ensuing news coverage occurs in the first act. The fictionalized interpretation plays out in the second act. And the third act consists of the trial.
“You can get a production team, a script and a cast faster than you can put together a case and get a trial going,” Thompson said. “People don’t watch these things expecting surprises. They watch them for the emotional detail they don’t see in the news coverage.”
The premiere of the movie coincidentally falls on the heels of pretrial hearings in which defense attorney Mark Geragos asked a judge to exclude statements by Peterson to the media, to sequester the jury and to seat separate jury panels for the guilt and penalty phases. Geragos, who has expressed concern over Peterson’s ability to have a fair trial, could not be reached for comment.
Stanislaus County Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. John Goold said he is focusing on preparing for trial. The trial was moved from Modesto to Redwood City because a judge determined it would be impossible to find an impartial jury in the town where the Petersons lived.
“There’s no telling how [the movie] is going to affect the jury,” Goold said. “There’s no telling until we start jury selection.”
The damage that can arise from pretrial publicity is not necessarily inherent in the amount of coverage a case has received, but rather in the type of coverage, said David M. Siegel, a criminal law professor at the New England School of Law in Boston.
“The problem with this type of movie is that it’s a combination of fact and fiction,” Siegel said. “Prospective jurors don’t yet know what part of the movie could be significant because they haven’t heard the case.... The goal of a movie is to emotionally and artistically engage the viewer. A juror might be able to set aside what they remember but not set aside their feelings.”
USA Network scheduled the movie for tonight long before a trial date became imminent, Kelley said.
“It’s a look at an all-American couple that seemed to have it all, but that kind of life is often a facade,” he said. “Clearly, Scott Peterson himself has been chipping away at the facade he had, in fact, built up.... But there’s nothing in this film which hasn’t aired before.”
Elayne Rapping, author of “Law and Justice as Seen on TV” and a professor of women’s and media studies at State University of New York at Buffalo, says that news coverage and made-for-television movies prejudice jurors. But she admits she will be watching tonight.
“We all watch it because it’s a titillating story,” she said. “The way TV works now is that everything goes so fast. After the trial is over, nobody will remember Scott Peterson. The fact of the matter is that the jury pool is tainted way before these movies come out. But the even larger issue is that it taints the public’s sense of justice when the media comes down so hard on people who are merely suspected.”
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‘Perfect Husband’
What: “The Perfect Husband: The Laci Peterson Story”
Where: USA Network
When: Tonight, 8 to 10
Rating: The network has rated the film TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14).
Dean Cain...Scott Peterson
Sarah Joy Brown...Kate Vignatti
David Denman...Tommy Vignatti
Dee Wallace Stone...Sharon Rocha
Tracy Lynn Middendorf...Amber Frey
Executive producer, Diane Sokolow. Director, Roger Young. Writer, David Erickson.