Jackson Team Seeks to Oust D.A. From Case

Michael Jackson’s attorneys have accused Santa Barbara County Dist. Atty. Tom Sneddon of being “blinded by his zeal” to prosecute the pop star and have asked that he be thrown off the child-molestation case.

In court filings made public Thursday, Sneddon and his deputies were accused of a “vendetta” that would prevent a fair trial for Jackson.

The request that Superior Court Judge Rodney S. Melville remove the district attorney’s office from the case is the latest sign of a defense strategy that challenges the motives and methods of the prosecution.

Disclosed in a 39-page motion, the tactic was given only a slim chance of success by some legal experts.

“These motions aren’t filed often and they rarely succeed,” said Jean Rosenbluth, a USC law professor and former federal prosecutor. “I’d venture a guess that 99% if not 100% of the point of this motion is just to get the media to write about these charges.”

If Melville does take the case away from local prosecutors, it would be given to the state attorney general’s office. That office is required to step into cases perhaps 12 times a year, said Nathan Barankin, a spokesman for the office.

In their motion, Jackson’s attorneys repeated a number of accusations they have made previously. But never before have they assembled them in one place for such a concerted attack against the career prosecutor and his office.

Prosecutors, who have not filed a response and who are bound by a gag order in the case, have asked Melville to set a date for arguments on the motion at a hearing next week.

According to the motion, Sneddon’s hostility toward Jackson stems from his foiled effort to prosecute the singer for alleged child molestation in 1993. No charges were filed against Jackson after he paid a multimillion-dollar settlement to that accuser’s family in a civil case.

Ten years later, Sneddon launched another investigation after a TV documentary showed Jackson talking about his sleepovers with a 12-year-old cancer patient.

This time, the district attorney was so keen on convicting Jackson that he abandoned his professional standards, the motion contended.

Jackson’s lawyers point to Sneddon’s jovial mood at a news conference announcing the criminal charges against the entertainer. Sneddon has since expressed regret over his behavior at the event.

The motion also contends that prosecutors bullied grand jury witnesses and allowed grand jurors to hear “one-sided, highly inflammatory and sensational evidence guaranteed to result in an indictment.”

In particular, it alleges, Sneddon did nothing to counter the mother of Jackson’s accuser as she “prejudiced the grand jury with wild tales of ‘killers’ and secret conversations in ‘code’ despite a total lack of support for this version of events by other witnesses, including her own family.”

Defense attorneys do not appear before grand juries investigating their clients. Under the law, prosecutors are expected to present evidence that might contradict their own.

The defense motion also takes Sneddon to task for allegedly evading a gag order on attorneys in the case. It maintains that the district attorney has made “an unofficial spokesperson” of former Santa Barbara County Sheriff Jim Thomas, now a commentator on the case for MSNBC.

Reached Thursday, Thomas denied the accusation, saying he is “not an agent for the district attorney.”

“There’s no weight to that,” he said. “The defense is filing a motion for just about everything they can think of.”