Does stardom eclipse justice?

Morvillo said jurors in California may be particularly sympathetic to celebrities. "Maybe it's because they live with celebrities."

After the Jackson verdict, jurors said the child molesting case fell apart because crucial prosecution witnesses were not credible. It did not fall apart, they said, because Jackson was a pop icon.

"Michael Jackson, to the media and to everybody, is a huge person, but where we live, he's just a person," Cheri Baldacchino, an alternate juror in the Jackson case, said in an interview on Tuesday. Her home is in Solvang, a few miles from Jackson's ranch in the Santa Ynez Valley, where famous people like Bo Derek, David Crosby and John Forsythe own property.

Baldacchino said she and other members of the panel did their best to consider Jackson as just another defendant. "I know those people looked at him not as a superstar but as an individual," she said, referring to her fellow jurors. "We have a lot of celebrities. He could go down to the El Rancho Market, and no one is going to care."

Jurors appeared to subscribe to the defense team's argument that the mother of the accuser was not to be trusted, and that Jackson's fame and fortune had made him a target for extortion.

Jurors might well believe that their deliberations were not affected by Jackson's celebrity, as they claim, but people who have studied juries say those assertions are probably wrong.

"There's research on inadmissible evidence, which is another thing that jurors are asked to disregard," said Phoebe Ellsworth, a professor of law and psychology at the University of Michigan. "They're really not very good at it. So if it creeps in that the defendant has a criminal record, and the judge says, 'Jury, that's improper for you to consider, put it out of your mind,' they will try to. But in experimental studies, it shows that nonetheless the juries" are more likely to find a defendant guilty.

But whether jurors viewed Jackson's fame favorably is unclear. Some celebrities have a good reputation, while others do not, said Robert Shapiro, who helped defend Simpson and who is a partner at Christensen, Miller, Fink, Jacobs, Glaser, Weil & Shapiro.

"Mike Tyson is a celebrity that would be an unpopular defendant," Shapiro said. "Martha Stewart cuts both ways."

In Shapiro's view of celebrity cases, juries are the defendants' last chance for fair treatment, because prosecutors are more likely to pursue the famous with excessive zeal.

"In the Michael Jackson case, there is no chance that any prosecutor would've spent this much time investigating what are fondling allegations" if the defendant was not a superstar, Shapiro said.

But what most distinguishes celebrity defendants from their less-famous counterparts, said Blair Berk, a lawyer in Los Angeles who has defended several Hollywood celebrities, is wealth.

"The quality of justice that someone like Michael Jackson received is solely about money," Berk said. "Having a lawyer who not only demands a fair trial but has the resources to assure it has become a precious thing in the United States. We really do, unfortunately, now have two systems of justice, but it has nothing to do with how famous you are."

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Contributing: Nick Madigan