Trial By Mouse

In his Devil's Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce defines a defendant as "an obliging person who devotes his time and character to preserving property for his lawyer". Currently, the most famous defendant in this patch of the world is Michael Jackson, who has been charged with acts of child molestation on his property, the Neverland ranch in Santa Barbara county. This week, Jackson launched a website so that he could put his point of view across and respond to whatever the prosecution or the media might be throwing at him.

One wonders if this will, in future, become the standard response of all those who are well-known and who find themselves charged with serious offences. Will every defendant now need not only a lawyer but a website engineer? One of the reasons for a defendant's website is the state of the law of contempt in the US. This gives the media much greater laxity - or freedom, depending on how you want to look at it - than in most European countries in describing the charges against someone facing trial.

In Britain, for instance, once someone is charged, the media is limited to what they may say as to the merits or demerits of the case until the end of the trial. In some other European countries, the rules are stricter and the name of the accused cannot even be published until he or she has been convicted. Here things are different. The other day, viewers to a cable news station were invited to vote on whether or not Kobe Bryant, the Los Angeles Lakers basketball star, was guilty or not guilty of the rape charge he faces in Colorado. Who needs juries? Why bother with expensive trials when people can send in their verdicts by email?

As it happens, California is facing a lot of high-profile trials over the next year. Record producer Phil Spector is currently out on $1m (£589,000) bail on the charge of murdering an actress at his home. (Jackson is out on $3m [£1,766,000] bail, prompting the question as to whether allegedly killing a woman is regarded by the bench as three times less serious than lewd conduct with a boy.) Spector has not opened a website on the case but has said in an interview that the woman committed suicide. The actress in question had her own website before her death but now there is no one to respond on her behalf.

Actor Robert Blake has already spent some time in jail as he awaits trial for the killing of his wife. Again, no website but his legal team have been presenting a series of scenarios that would point to their client's innocence. Are potential juries influenced by all the propaganda pumped out by prosecution and defence? Who knows?

But there is certainly a new technology side to another upcoming case. Charles Booher, 44, from Sunnyvale in California, has been released on $75,000 (£44,000) bail for allegedly making threats to the staff of a Canadian company that he thought had been bombarding him with those spam emails that promise to increase the size of the male member. He supposedly threatened to send a "package full of Anthrax spores" to the company and offered to torture those responsible with a power drill, unless they took him off their list.

It would seem that he does not need to open his own website to put his side of the case. When he comes to trial, all he has to do is ensure that the jury consists of people who have a computer and receive emails and who will thus be secretly and deeply sympathetic.

Still, it is worth remembering Ambrose Bierce's definition of a trial: "a formal inquiry designed to put on record the blameless character of judges, advocates and juries".