If Manson were properly advised, by his newly appointed advisor, he would, at the very commencement of his trial, do the following:
1) He would appeal for a trial away from Los Angeles County on the basis of a campaign of vilification being conducted against him by the media. He would stress the opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court in the Sheppard Case.
2) Manson should attack the California method of selecting the members of the Grand Jury. The selection of the Los Angeles Grand Jurors, for your information, is under the personal selection of the Superior Court Judges. In Jan. 1970, those judges announced the 1970 Grand Juries, whose average male age was sixty-eight years! The female members have an average of fifty-five.
An analysis of the ruling majority of these jurors shows that they belong to the WASP ethnic majority and tend to reflect the economic and social philosophy of the judges. Since the list of the jurors is highly secret and is not released to the public until the last possible moment, no citizen has the opportunity of investigating the background of these men and women who have the power to destroy a fellow human being by issuing a criminal indictment for whatever reason. The District Attorney can always find a reason.
Thus, a Grand Juror can be a Nazi, a white supremacist, a Bircher, a Wallacite…he can have a passionate hatred for young people or for the color of your skin, or for the beliefs and convictions with which you have been associated.
The background of the Grand Jury explains why no policeman has ever been indicted for a killing a member of a minority group. These jurors tend to believe that the cop has inalienable right to commit genocide under the banner of Law and Order.
Grand Jurors are personal selectees of the judges. The judges can sleep well at night knowing that they can depend upon them to return the kind of verdict they want.
This is why Manson must attack the method used by judges to select grand juries. The theory of the grand jury, as it evolved in England, and in the United States was that the members of the jury represented the over-all community—not just one ethnic group in the community. The average age of the members of the Constitutional Convention in 1779-1781 was 40 years. The average age of the 1970 Los Angeles County Grand Jury is sixty-three! And what a hell of a mess those old people have plunged the country into!
3) Manson should attack the method of selecting the members of the jury that will sit in judgment on his case.
4) Manson, if the District Attorney attempts to produce and read the Atkins $200,000 confession to the jury, should subpoena Lawrence Schiller, and Manson could and should compel Schiller to disclose and explain what, where, when and how monies were received by Atkins and Schiller for the “confession.”
In view of the past interpretation of the “basic principles of American justice” by California Bar, Manson will probably lose on 1, 2, and 3. But if Manson does not, at the very beginning of the trial, fight for a ruling on these three points, he cannot raise them on appeal. Therefore, it will be interesting to see how his legal “advisor” is going to advise Mr. Manson.
Furthermore, Manson, in his prison cell, must be able to produce some evidence regarding these three points. But if the judge, the prison custodian, or the District Attorney’s office refuses to permit Manson to study these three issues, then Manson has a good opportunity to be given a new trial, even if found guilty.
As to the trial itself, the only course that can assist Manson is the old, old adage: “Keep your mouth shut!” Do not go on the witness stand. Because, at no time, according to the “confession” of Susan Atkins, did Manson appear at the Tate murder site.
The greatest danger that Manson will encounter will be a “deal” between the district attorney’s office and the other defendants. Manson is the target that the establishment wants to shoot down and place in a gas chamber. A “deal” is an arrangement between a prosecuting office and a defendant or a group of defendants to confess to a crime, implicating someone else, in return for a light sentence.
Technically, this is illegal, but it has been used time and time again. The number of innocent persons convicted by this method is staggering.
Manson has as much chance of securing a fair trial in Los Angeles as a Russian in a Siberian labor camp. His theory that he has, or has, the hypnotic power to compel several persons to commit several murders is nonsense and would be laughed out of any Federal court because there is no medical proof in the thousands of medical case histories extant of any person being hypnotized to commit a murder. And to state that one person could hypnotize four other individuals to commit a group murder defies every law of medical and psychic science.
If the District Attorney’s office accepts the theory, then that office is automatically proclaiming that those persons who acted in such a trance or hypnotic state ARE LEGALLY INNOCENT!
For, if they were acting under a trance, they had no will to commit a premeditated murder of another human being. And under the basic principles of American law, no person can be convicted of murder if there be no premeditation, for there is no malice aforethought.
But will Manson, acting as his own attorney, be capable of adequately arguing these issues? Will his advising attorney advise him on how to obtain these facts on cross-examination?
If Manson can conduct a cross-examination, he may be able to hang the District Attorney with his own rope!
