No Peeking at Jackson's Penis

Barring a wardrobe malfunction of the severest degree, jurors will not see Michael Jackson's penis.

Superior Court Rodney S. Melville ruled Thursday that photos and a child's artistic rendering of Jackson owned-and-operated genitalia may not be shown at the singer's child-molestation trial.

Or as Melville put it: "I'm going to deny the request to bring in the evidence of the blemished penis."

In another key ruling, Melville said prosecutors could screen a videotape of the young accuser's original police interview.

At the same time, the judge said the defense could call the boy back to the stand. Also put on the reinvite list: the accuser's mother, the family's civil attorney and the psychologist to whom the boy first confessed the alleged molestation.

As for the matter of the penis pictures, that was the prosecution's latest attempt to mine its wealth of evidence from the scuttled 1993-94 molestation case.

As part of that probe, police took photos of Jackson's penis, with an eye toward comparing them to drawings made by the singer's then-accuser. As prosecutor Ronald J. Zonen explained Thursday, the alleged victim, a young boy, "had knowledge of the existence of [a] particular spot" on Jackson's genitals.

Zonen said the old evidence would help rebut testimony of current defense witnesses, such as Macaulay Culkin, who essentially told jurors that a night in Jackson's bedroom was a "nonsexual event."

The fact that the former accuser was able to describe "a unique feature of [Jackson's] anatomy" was evidence that not all of Jackson's relationship with children were innocent, Zonen argued.

But defense attorney Robert M. Sanger said the pictures would be "prejudicial," not to mention "very shocking."

Jackson, 46, is accused of molesting and bartending to a boy in 2003, when the child was 13. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.

If the defense prevailed in keeping Jackson's penis under wraps, then the prosecution won the battle to expose his young accuser to jurors.

On Wednesday, prosecutor Tom Sneddon told Melville he wanted to play the accuser's police interview from July 2003.

Sneddon said the hourlong video would counter defense contentions that the boy is a product of his mother's coaching.

Arguing for the defense, Sanger accused the prosecution of trying to cheat the system.

"[The tape is] a way to have [the accuser] come back and testify, in essence, without cross-examination one more time in front of the jury right at the end of the case to bolster what is, I think, quite a weak case," Sanger said.

Sanger did not say that the defense offered up its own virtual testimony when it played outtakes of Jackson's 2003 interview with journalist Martin Bashir. The footage was the closest the star defendant came to taking the stand.

In allowing the prosecution to play its tape, Melville gave the defense permission to question the boy anew, if needed, in person.

Add in the possibility of further appearances by the boy's mother, attorney Larry Feldman and Dr. Stan Katz, and it no longer seems a good bet that closing arguments could begin early next week.

Elsewhere, the prosecution used three witnesses, including the grandmother of the accuser, to help cast doubt on the defense contention that the accuser's mother lied about the origin of injuries the woman blamed on store security guards in a years-old civil lawsuit.

On Tuesday, jurors heard a paralegal testify that that woman was beaten up by her then-husband the night of the store dustup, and later blamed those injuries on the guards.

But Donna Aggers of the West Covina Police Department said both mother and the father were briefly jailed on the night the couple were said to be engaged in a domestic tussle. And an hour after the mother was released from custody, she showed up at a hospital seeking treatment, Theresa Marquez, a records keeper for Kaiser Permanente said.

Still, the defense managed to use both Aggers and Marquez for their cause. Aggers acknowledged that there was no indication in the jail records that the mother, who was taken into custody right after the security guard imbroglio, was injured. Marquez said the mother was released from the hospital "in good condition" just a few hours after checking in.