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June 06, 2008
Trapped in the courtroom
I've been following the R. Kelly trial with some interest. It's an interesting change from the rather boring, but infinitely more important, Tony Rezko corruption trial. (Please please please somebody indict the governor next!)
The gist of the case is that R. Kelly filmed himself having dirty, dirty sex with a girl who may have been *thirteen* years old at the time, in a log cabin themed room at his house. Jesus! (The house, incidentally, is on George Street somewhere by Halsted. I need to check it out.)
So, the prosecution wants to get Kelly for making child pornography. I haven't looked it up, but I think this is a roundabout way of doing it because the alleged victim refused to cooperate, and because it happened eight or nine years ago, the statute of limitations for prosecuting statutory rape is way up.
The defense, meanwhile, is asserting several defenses: it's not Kelly in the sex tape, all the witnesses have a vendetta against Kelly, or somebody photoshopped Kelly into the video. Slate sent a reporter, JosH Levin, to the trial, and his dispatches have been consistently entertaining. In particular, this paragraph is about the greatest summation so far:
Since I left you a week ago, R. Kelly's Little Man defense faced its stiffest challenge yet. Grant Fredericks, the prosecution's forensic video analyst, testified last Thursday that to do a convincing job of morphing a 27-minute, 100,000-frame video—tweaking the shadows, matching the eye blinks—would take 44 years of steady work. Since Kelly is 41 years old, the architects of such a cut-and-paste job would have needed incredible foresight, or access to a flux capacitor. Fredericks also matched knots in the wood of Kelly's log cabin to those seen in the sex tape's log cabin. And despite the defense's contention that Kelly's distinctive mole could not be seen on the tape, the video analyst pointed out a quite comparable dark spot on Sex Tape Man's back. Unless Kelly's attorneys can conjure a forensic dermatologist, a forensic lumberjack, and a forensic Wayans brother, I'd say the tape is looking pretty unassailable.
A forensic lumberjack? That's gold, Jerry! The entire series of reports can be found here.
entry no. 1161
Posted at June 6, 2008 10:12 AM