Trials and Truth with Mark Geragos

Published Dec 6, 2024, 5:04 AM

Famed criminal defense attorney Mark Geragos is joined by Juliette to dig into some of the most buzzed about court cases right now, including the Menendez Brothers, Scott Peterson and Hunter Biden. He breaks down how the media and TikTok have influenced the public's curiosity.

All right, well, welcome to Going Rogue. It's Juliet and today I am joined by somebody that I really admire and I'm very excited to speak to. You would know him as one of the most well known, high profile attorneys out there and the managing partner of Gegos and Garagos. Please let's welcome Mark Geragos.

How are you today? I'm doing great? Thank you.

In addition to the questions that I'm going to ask, the way that I'm approaching things is a little bit differently. So everybody that I'm sure you're interviewing with is very straightforward, what's happening with this, what's happening with that. I'm kind of interested in how the media of it all fits in, and you, in your own right, having been a host in media personality and then you use media throughout the legal process. So that's kind of what I'm trying to achieve here. So my questions are going to be a little bit more peppered in that direction.

So, for example, I love talking about it. I love that. I love that.

So let's dig right into. Obviously, something that's very high profile and out there right now is the Menendez brother case. Anything that you can in general tell us what's sort of the update right now?

Well, I think part of the update on Menendez brothers. I think the most consequential thing since the last court appearance, which wasn't that long ago. The last court appearance, what nobody really reported on, speaking of media, is there was a wall to wall coverage of the fact that the former now former as we record this, DA, George Gascon, had initiated what's called a resentencing process. Under California law, you can re sentence under the Code sections and clearly Lyle and Eric qualify for resentencing, and the DA did that. Then what happened was is that he did that prior to the election. Then a new DA was elected, and there has been a number of developments, but just yesterday, as we record this today, the new DA was sworn in. And to some degree I enjoyed some of his remarks yesterday because he's been asked repeatedly since he has won the election, not what his new policies are, not what the what you plan on doing, how are you going to revamp the office? Every question on every program that I see is what are you going to do about Menendez? And he gave me a very good answer, I thought. Yesterday after the swearing in which was done by former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, he said that he was going to use Menendez as a teachable moment, which I think is interesting because I as somebody who has been around the criminal justice system going into my fifth decade, it is a teachable moment in this sense. You have a case that garnered wall to wall attention. It kind of sparked the birth of Court TV. It was prior to OJ was trial number one of the Menendez case and that was covered Wallda Wall in the first case ended in a Hume jury, and Leslie Abramson was showcased as the defense lawyer for Eric in the first trial, and she was one of my one of the I don't know if mentors too strong, but certainly every lawyer in the eighties and the nineties coming up in LA knew of Leslie and her accomplishments in her courtroom style. And now we fast forward, we're now talking about Menendez thirty five years later because for a variety of reasons, and not the least of which has been the what I call the TikTok army and the TikTok Army kind of viewed the case through a new prism, and it's interesting to me. It's fascinating to me. And I know people have said or made the argument that why is this all of a sudden a renaissance or rebirth. Part of that, I think is the culture has changed, okay.

Fair enough, and actually to expand upon that. So what role does the media play in all this right now? Because I look at you know, the from the documentaries to the reporting.

You know, first of all, do you.

Feel that has changed over the last several years or a couple decades, and do you think it actually or how does it influence the public?

Well, to borrow the Hawkman's teachable moment, I know that back in ninety four, which was circa the same time as this being tried in LA, I tried a murder case in Pomona, and I was defending a woman who had tried to commit what's commonly called a murder suicide. I won't get into the facts of it, but it was she felt aggrieved and ended up killing her husband and then trying to take her own life. But she survived. And I tried that case and I was able to use one of the foremost experts on intimate partner violence battered woman's syndrome. We were ultimately successful in that case. She was ultimately pled to a voluntary manslaughter after trial, so we went to trial. She was convicted of a second. The second was reversed, she got a voluntary man so and she was placed on probation. Interestingly, she was able to use the battered woman's defense, but the Menendez in trial number two were not able to use it. And by the way, I'm not so sure that the law. I think the law was a little morphous. Back then, the DA's office made the argument their children, they were children. Intimate partner defense does not apply to child abuse, and the DA in the first case, all you got to do is google it. You can because the transcripts are hard to find, but the court TV TV clips are all over YouTube. The DA's office made the argument and trial number one that men and boys could not be raped they don't have the equipment quote unquote. If you google Pampazanich, who was the DA in trial number one and men or boys don't have the equipment, you'll see that. You'll see her argument. Wow, yeah, so people. Now he reminds me there are a lot of similarities to other kind of cultural evolutions. But it reminds me of how quickly my kids, when they were in high school so many years ago, kind of accelerated the evolution of what was then the prop different property. But the gay marriage. It was incomprehensible to kids why their friends' parents, who may be in a committed gay relationship couldn't get married. And you'll remember that back when Obama was president, it took Joe Biden ironically to come out first and get ahead of that administration and endorse that. But the kids, the kids were on the vanguard of that, the kids, the younger generation. And that's why that kind of that movement in that the reversal of you, if you will, of legal precedent and things of that nature, and the enactment of a constitutional right came to be.

So what about the court of public opinion?

Right?

Does that affect you? Does it affect the judicial process? So you as an attorney, does it affect a da that's running for election because on a high profile case, you know, the court of public opinion is very loud and we all buy into it, But does it actually influence an outcome?

Do you think, Oh absolutely, if you think differently than it's almost as if you're committee malpractice. And you know, by the way, the law recognizes that the court of a public opinion, it plays a part if we want to just talk about the criminal justice system. The original case where the US Supreme Court dealt with public opinion and public outrage was the Shepherd versus Maxwell case. There was a lawyer his name was was Flee Bailey, who most people may have forgotten about, but Flee Bay made his career off of the Shepherd versus Maxwell case and getting the Supreme Court to reverse that. That case became for those who were old enough like me. You're probably too young. But there was a famous movie and TV series called The Fugitive and it was based on that case with the one Armed man, and that case back in the fifties took the position that had the judges had to do something to clamp down on enormous public interests when there's a media kind of covering a sensational case. That case has been kind of turned upside down in the last seventy years and now gag orders are generally used against the defense, but most judges will push back against that, because there was a case out of also out of Nevada, guy by the name of Genteel, where the state bar of Nevada came after him because he was making public pronouncement defending a client. And I have always said, if you don't defend your client now against this media onslaught, it's almost malpracticed, because you can't go into a courtroom then and have a jury and pick a jury in any case. I'll remember Scott Peterson. I took that case because the public was so against him, the publicity. I didn't get involved until maybe six months after he had been arrested, and you know it was a Christmas Eve crime at least, and then I jumped in in May when he was arrested. But by that time the public had already assumed he was guilty. And no matter what you did, jury selection took forever because we called him sixteen hundred jurors and we did surveys and they're the pre judgment. Belief in his guilt was already set. And I remember the late Al Deluki, who was the judge, to tell the me, where do you want me to send this case, mister Gergus into a spaceship around the world, or where am I going to find jurors? And that that is very true. And if you don't do something quick, the public gets they get that feeling of guilt cemented, and then it's an uphill battle.

It's a really really good point. And I hadn't thought about the obvious impact of the jurors hearing all of that and only hearing that, so that that's also very interesting. And I think the other thing, what is your take on the fact that so we can use Rachel as an example but not talk about a case, but the fact that everybody is an armchair lawyer, right, so you have all these bloggers that are dissecting the case and telling you what the outcome could be, should be, will be, and then and then the public has this entitlement to know, right and being on the side that I am, it's so frustrating because I'm like, but wait a minute. Let's you know, everybody doesn't just you. The attorney doesn't throw the evidence out to the public. You wait and you do a process in court because that's the best thing for the client. But like, how do you caution people to think about that? Or you know, how do we get a grip on that, because the public definitely feels entitled to this information and it is important to get a certain amount of it to sway that opinion that you were just referring to.

So I've thought about this quite a bit, and I have a theory here for part of the sensationalism of crime and the sensationalism of trials, because trials are stories, and the stories unfold and obviously the lead up to the trial, what's the appetite for the public to follow the trial. So in that model, England has what they call the Contempt of Court Act, where even the most sensational trial after or as it gets very close, they clamp down. There's actually they shut out the coverage so that you can have the trial in kind of a vacuum. I think we're too far gone in this age to try to import that into the US. I think I was naive years ago thinking that you could do that, but I don't think that's possible anymore. The old expression the genie's out of the bottle, but there is, and I made that once again. You always learn from your mistakes. I think that one of the biggest mistakes I made once again in Peterson, because that's my highest profile loss and over twenty years ago and I still plagued by it. I don't think I ever should have acquiesced to not having cameras in the courtroom. And I will tell you why. I used to work out in the mornings there. We were in San Mateo, and I had a gym membership, and I used to go into the gym in the morning before court. And every single day when I was in the gym, I would have some almost always don't take this wrong way, white older woman, generally professional, who would come up to me and start hammering on me about Scott representing Scott when it was almost always it was a type, and it would always be a series of urban legends I heard, and then they would tell me this, and I would debunk it, and then they would say I heard, and I'm on the elliptical, and I say, no, I debunk it, and then you get to like debunking the fifth urban legend, and then finally it would always default inevitably do the same thing. Well, I don't care what the evidence is. I had a boyfriend ro An X, just like him, and I can see where he would have done the same thing with them, but you know, with some cheap blonde on Christmas E Lee Get Home Pregnant. Was that. I can't tell you how many times I heard that. And the thing about it is, I don't blame a person for that because there was no coverage in the courtroom. All they would hear about was back then it was kind of out of New York, the three thousand miles away, no court coverage. They're getting it secondhand from a reporter usually. And I used to say the same thing, a former prosecutors giving their spin on it. And if there were no resemblance, if you were to watch it and drive you crazy, if you were trying the case like me, you would watch the coverage and now you want to kill yourself. You say that, I'm not. I don't even understand what trial they were watching. But it became this kind of this belief that it was the urban legend. Now, mind you, it took probably seventeen years for the California Supreme Court to rule unanimously and reverse the death penalty in that case. And you know why they reversed it. At the time, I kept telling the judge, you're kicking off everybody who doesn't support the death penalty automatically, they're just base support it. You kick them off. If they say they do support it, then you're questioning them or you're engaging with them. Can you set that aside bout it? All you've done is you have free ordained that you're going to get a death qualified jury, which all the evidence shows, all the studies show, all sociological analysis shows, is pro prosecution, pro death, and that's what you get. And they reversed it. By the way, I was telling the judge Luki in real time, you're using the wrong standard. That's not the law. But he was doing it. And in fact, if you read the opinion, if you're a lawyer, it's interesting because they kind of chied the prosecution in the case for allowing this to happen. But that is part of and you know, I hate to say it, the pendulum swing that we had at the time, right, And I'll give you one other I'll tie that the vogue then you have in Los Angeles, speaking of Menendez trial, Number one with Menendez is more jurors. There were two juries, one for Scott, one for Lyle, one for Eric, one for Lyle. Bolter's juries voted not guilty for murder the majority and guilty of manslaughter. Then trial number two comes and the one jury is unanimous for a conviction of murder without with special circumstances, which is life without pearl. You know what happened in the interim eight days before they started evidence on trial number two, OJ was acquitted and that drove that drove the DA's office, which was on their heels because they had lost OJ. They had lost the Rodney King, a case where the four officers. Mind you, same judge by the way as the judge in Menendez one and two. And so there was an existential threat DA politics back then and then fast forward and I'm hoping and I'm confident that there will not be DA politics system.

Well that's another interesting point too. So when you look at the level of publicity that these cases are garnering, do you, as the kind of attorney are in, the type of attorney are does that cause more of a pressure or is it more of a tool for you?

It's actually I always say the high profile cases for some for a lawyer who's never done it, I don't know what your audience looks like or is or the demographic but the high profile cases are and I've done no profile to high profile. I still continue to do that. Some of my biggest wins, I always say, are cases you've never heard of, with involving clients that you may know by their name, but you've never heard that the case has gone away. But the biggest problem with that is that people, everybody gets paralyzed by the publicity and don't want to do what they normally would do. And that's a problem.

Got it, okay? And now shifting a little bit because you know, you threw out a name yesterday and I'm like, wait, what, So, probably the thing topping all of the newser right now is the pardon of Hunter Biden, which I think most people and look, it's a polarizing thing, and I think most people would see that it was, you know, the case against him was definitely politically motivated. The question I have now is, so what does that do though, because it's media, it's politics, it's our government, Like, where does that leave us next? Because we're still going to have both sides arguing we now you know, they're basically saying, well, that opens the door wide open for Trump to do whatever he wants. Was it right.

Was it wrong?

Biden said he wouldn't. Then he did, how can you sort of summarize what that means for us moving forward?

For you know, so you were, you know, part of my I track the trajectory of my career. I think the case that was kind of I had tried a case back in the nineties in LA and the client was equitted across the board in Santa Monica of embezzlement. She then got dragged back to Arkansas and in the middle of Whitewater, she was tried by the Independent Council whose name was Ken Starr, who's passed away. Her name was Susan McDougall. For those who don't remember, she was the erstwhile business partner Bill and Hillary Clinton. And we ended up getting her acquitted on the obstruction of justice. And back in nineteen ninety nine, and they had the jury hung on the contempt of court, the contempt charges. By the way, they hung seven to five. Guess what the jury's political makeup was. It's nineteen ninety nine, seven Democrats, five Republicans, and they voted seven to five for acquitto on the contempt, unanimous on the obstruction. And I said, then I complained then about the Independent Council. I complained about Ken's starr, complained. One of my friends was a good friend, Charles Beckley, was the spokesperson for the Independent Council. He used to complain to Chuck about it. He said, here you are, you're the spokesperson. You'd never want to be on the receiving end of this Independent Council. And he would constantly say, yeah, but what about to run contra with Reagan. You guys did it to us, now we're doing it to Clayton. And I said, that's why you never want to have an independent council. Fast forward twenty five years later, because remember that was nineteen ninety nine. You're in twenty twenty four, and what do you got. You've got a special council. Mind you. The sitting US attorney here in the Central District of Los Angeles was presented the tax case against Hunter Biden. He passed, and mind you, the sitting then US Attorney David Weiss, presented a plea offer to hunter Biden to misdemeanors basically, and a judge, when questioned, scuttled that. Merrick Garland then appointed David Weiss as special Council, Special Council. And next thing you know, Hunter is indicted here and he's tried on a gun charge in Delaware. My point, anybody who says it's not political, he is naive number one, And you're not looking at the facts. I mean, what I just recited about is sober a recitation of what actually happened. Is you can get so. By the way, you're going to complain about Biden pardoning Hunter, you know, go back to George Bush Senior. If I'm not mistaken. He pardoned his son Neil, and Clinton pardoned his half brother Roger. So stop with the stop with the faux outrage and clutching of pearls. It's what people do when they're there. And by the way Trump Trump.

Pardened is is then in law. Jared's dad just announced that he's appointing an ambassador to Friend. So you know, you can say whatever you want, that's what happens. That's the reality. Stop acting like this is breaking news. Of some it is breaking news, but it's certainly not something that there isn't pressing for, and it's certainly it's the part of the problem is and I had said this when Jack Smith dismissed against Trump two weeks ago. Now I don't even remember it, and I said, yeah, that was the right decision.

And by the way, it gives win at the back of all those who said those prosecutions were political, because no matter what you say, Jack Smith then dismisses as soon as Trump wins, and you know Alvin Bragg even on the state side, well as soon as that happened, mind you, I said, well, then, how it's Hunter still being prosecuted. I mean, if Jack Smith saying the election is over, Hunter should be out of here.

Right is So the public perception of a special counsel is that it's supposed to be non biased and fair. But in everything you just cited, it's absolutely the opposite, correct.

The opposite. It's a fundamental undermining of the criminal justice system. You do not want a prosecutor's assigned to one person. That's that's the worst thing you can do with the criminal law. Criminal law is supposed to be somebody. You don't look at the person to find the crime. You find the crime and then look for the person. And so that's it fundamentally turns the criminal justice system on its head.

What exactly is a pardon, How does what does that mean?

It basically wipes the slate clean, and that's exactly what it does. A commutation basically says, Okay, if you were sentenced to this, that or the other thing, I'm going to stop. We're calling time out. You're done. If you have more time, if you've got collateral consequences, you've got all kinds of other things, commutation takes care of that. Pardon is at your schedule.

So for final question, what is anything that you can tell us in regards to for the Menendez brothers as to what is next or what we can expect or or what life afterwards will mean for them?

Well, first on my one step at a time, Okay, January thirtieth and January thirty first, they're blocked off. That'll be the hearing. Got it. So I'm going to guess that I get an email from you saying come back and talk to me. I got a job.

Thank you very much, Thank you so much.

Mark, have a great day too. Bye bye, thank you, I'm going road. Bye. Okay.

Well, I hope you guys enjoyed that. I find him fascinating. I've worked with him on some different cases and I lose myself in the conversation because it's it's fascinating to balance the legality and the publicity and what it all means. And one of the things I found interesting that he just said to us is that for an attorney that hasn't dealt with the media side of things, how it can be paralyzing or daunting. You're worried about if you say the wrong thing. It's living in perpetuity. It's no longer just in a courtroom. It's out there for the world to see. But then there are attorneys that have a real knack and artistry for using the media, and in my opinion, Mark Gergos is one of those. He knows how to use the media as a tool to help the client, to help the big picture. And when you think about it, all of us are listening to sound bites and headlines and those are driven by that media for that case, and if it goes horribly wrong and you don't respond quickly to it, that's the last thing everybody is left with and they forever think that person is guilty or wrong. We're also right now living in a SoundBite situation where people look at an article they no longer read the whole article, they look at the headline and that's their opinion. And something he said in this interview that I hadn't even thought about is the jurors are influenced by all that media. So everything from a true crime podcast to a Bravo podcast analyzing these different cases. The presentation of facts may or may not be factual, and the tone that goes along with it sets the precedence. So we all as viewers feel entitled to knowing that information and sometimes jump to conclusions. So I think as valuable as a tool as the media is for myself obviously, and for clients and for all of us to get our news, remember that the court of law, they're going to take their time to present the actual evidence, and we don't get that. We get the opinions, we get the fast fact, we don't see the evidence. So I personally am trying to read more into the depth or be more patient, but in today's world of entitlement and quick information, it's tough. But I want to thank Mark. I find him fascinating and what he does fascinating in the cases that he's worked on, and I hope that that was fun for all of you. And that you enjoyed hearing from him directly in reference to what's next. And and don't think we aren't going to call him on the thirtieth and the thirty first. We're going to reach out and we're going to find out what's next for the Menendez brothers. All Right, everybody, have a great day. Thanks for joining