Impiden a Larry King testificar en juicio a Jackson

SANTA MARIA, United States (AFP) – The judge in Michael Jackson’s child sex trial barred US talk-show host Larry King from taking the witness stand for the superstar, saying his testimony was irrelevant.
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«At this point I don’t see any reason to call Mr King to testify,» Judge Rodney Melville told Jackson’s lawyers out of earshot of the trial jury.
The defense wanted King to tell jurors about comments made to the television personality by Larry Feldman, a lawyer who once represented Jackson’s young accuser and his mother, about the mother of Jackson’s teenage accuser.
«He (Feldman) just said she (the mother) is a whacko,» King told the court. «He said she is in it for the money,» he said reporting his conversation with the lawyer.
The defense, which has painted the accuser’s mother as a «professional plaintiff» who made up the allegations against Jackson in a bid to extort him, had wanted to impeach Feldman’s earlier testimony at Jackson’s trial.
Feldman had denied making statements to King and other about the accuser’s mother, but the judge said King’s testimony was not sufficient to impeach Feldman.
King had turned up at the courtroom in the California town of Santa Maria ahead of the mini-hearing to establish whether he would be allowed to testify.
King had been expected to be one of the key celebrity witnesses in the trial of the star who could be jailed for up to 20 years if convicted on all counts, including child molestation and holding the accuser and his family against their will.
Melville also disallowed similar testimony by publisher Michael Viner, saying it would be insufficient to cast doubt on Feldman’s statements to the jury.
Viner told the judge he recalled Feldman saying of the accuser’s family that «he felt that their statements, their case, didn’t hold up to scrutiny and that he did not believe them.»
A court document filed by the defense said Viner told an investigator he was at the meeting and that «Feldman had referred to the mother as ‘a flake’ and said he did not believe the boy.»
«Feldman added that he did not believe them and they were into this case for one reason, ‘money’.»

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