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Legal News

: Lawbeat

"Sting" story months in the making

By Mark Obbie

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Christopher Ketcham's story from the upcoming January issue of Vanity Fair shows what a magazine writer can do to break news in a tabloid-friendly murder case -- especially when one side in the case chooses to use publicity as part of its strategy. Ketcham tells the story of Doreen Giuliano, whose 25-year-old son, John Giuca, is serving 25 years to life for the 2003 murder of Mark Fisher, a 20-year-old college student. To attempt to prove a wrongful conviction, Giuliano ran a sting against a juror in the case and now claims to have taped evidence of juror misconduct. Giuliano told her side of the bizarre story of sex, drugs, and surreptitious tapes to Ketcham before it all is to come out in court papers, which supposedly is to happen next week. At one point near the end of the feature, Ketcham reveals that "a reporter" was talking to Giuliano about the sting as long as seven months ago, in a middle-of-the-night meeting immediately after her last meeting with her target juror, Jason Allo. Mostly it's just a good yarn. At one crucial point, however, Ketcham might as well be ghost-writing the Giuca petition when he writes of the new evidence:

The law is clear: John Giuca, based on the evidence secretly gathered by his mother—along with other discrepancies in witness testimony—may very well be entitled to a new trial. Even if Allo didn’t understand the questions during voir dire of a connection to Giuca, under his oath as a juror he was obliged, once their intersecting circles became apparent, to inform the court of this conflict.

We shall see. But, assuming that favorable publicity is part of the gambit by Giuliano and her son's legal team, it's working. The Times' Kareen Fahim tells the story in this front-pager today, adding the juicy development that Fahim broke the news to Allo that the woman he befriended was actually the mother of the defendant in the case he served on. The response from the tabs so far is less enthusiastic -- just this perfunctory piece in the Daily News by Dave Goldiner, which quotes liberally from the Vanity Fair story but doesn't break any new ground. Can a defense-friendly preview help win a post-conviction argument? I wouldn't bet on it. But one thing's for sure: It's bound to win a screenplay option for Ketcham and Giuliano.

Full post as published by Lawbeat on November 29, 2008 (boomark / email).