Habeas corpus: Bodies of evidence and performed litigiousness – the spectacle of Michael Jackson's trial

Abstract

Drawing on contemporary theorisation of the body and the ways in which the body is staged/performed, this article will consider the received legal tradition of the letter of the law as univocal and binding – enacted through the body of evidence and due process – and look at how, in the 2005 Michael Jackson trial, jurisprudence became imbricated with the staging of Jackson's multivalent body, the pornographic self-depiction of the child ‘victim’, and the television spectacle of dramatised court re-enactments, produced for such channels as E! Entertainment and Sky News. The implications of the latter (as opposed to the permitted live television coverage of the O.J. Simpson criminal trial in 1994) will be investigated in the light of Jean Baudrillard's notion of simulacra: in the case of the television re-enactments, the actual Santa Maria courthouse becomes displaced onto the world of the television set, where all the key members of the various legal teams, including Judge Rodney S. Melville, are played by professional actors. Edward Moss, who plays Michael Jackson, perpetuates and further ramifies the hyperreal performativity associated with the actual pop star, whose image has become so imbued with theatricality, media saturation and forensic prurience that he seems to have become a simulacrum of himself.