The media has for decades played a role in influencing how high-profile criminal trials play out, but the public is getting smarter with more access to dissenting voices, according to Marcia Clark, the former Los Angeles prosecutor who spearheaded the massively publicized O.J. Simpson trial.
Clark has written a new book on a forgotten but scandalous 1950s home invasion murder that rocked Los Angeles. Unfortunately for the lead suspect, she said, local newspapers took the prosecution’s shaky case at face value and ran with it, convicting her in the public eye before she was put to death after a questionable case and multiple scandals…