From Spector to Fritzl, lawyers lap up the limelight

As the Phil Spector retrial drew to an end in Los Angeles this week, prosecutor Truc Do closed her arguments in dramatic fashion. She needed to persuade the jury that the eccentric music producer had shot Lana Clarkson, a B-movie actress, after a late-night argument in his Alhambra palace.

Prosecutor Do dimmed the courtroom lights and projected the images of five women who have claimed that Spector confronted them with guns. "This case is about a man who has had a history of playing Russian roulette with the lives of women," she said. "Five women got the empty chamber. Lana got the sixth bullet."

Do's scenario of what happened in Spector's hallway on a February night six years ago came in a slick, staccato delivery. "He can wash his hands clean of her blood but he can't wash them clean of her murder", she said.

Had Truc Do been following the Josef Fritzl trial?

At Fritzl's short trial in St Poelten, Austria last week, the 33-year-old lawyer Christiane Burkheiser grabbed the chance to further her fledgling career as a state prosecutor. She turned the trial of the man accused of raping and enslaving his daughter Elisabeth into a one-woman experimental drama piece, featuring props, lighting and even smell.

Burkheiser stuck masking tape around the courtroom to show the dimensions of Fritzl's cellar, and recreated the conditions in which Fritzl raped his daughter by killing the courtroom lights. "Light off: rape," she said, flicking the switch. "Light on. Josef Fritzl leaves the cellar." Burkheiser's scene-stealing moment came when she made jurors retch by forcing them to smell from a box of objects that had been in the dungeon with Elisabeth Fritzl those 24 years.

In fact, it's more likely that Burkheiser herself was inspired by the way they do things across the Atlantic.

With the televising of most big trials in recent years, including the Spector one, courtroom theatrics have become commonplace and increasingly innovative. A British barrister interviewed by The First Post mooted the possibility that, subconsciously at least, Hollywood, with its conveyor belt of John Grisham adaptations and TV series featuring show-off lawyers - like Ally McBeal, Boston Legal, Dirty Sexy Money and Law and Order - is partly responsible for the trend.

Rusty Hardin once took a pick axe to a telephone directory demonstrate a crimeTed Wells is one defence attorney who probably never misses an episode. When he was representing Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff, in his trial for obstruction and perjury regarding the leaked identity of a CIA operative, Wells took on the guise of an evangelical preacher. His voice shifted from loud to quiet and then collapsed into a sob. "Don't sacrifice Scooter Libby", he implored, "Just give him back to me… just give him back to me."

Another of America's biggest courtroom thesps is Rusty Hardin, a notoriously fierce cross-examiner from Houston. Acting against Anna Nicole Smith for the estate of J Howard Marshall, the nonagenarian she briefly married, he mocked Smith's declaration of love for her wizened husband by playing You Light Up My Life, a Debby Boone song, to the courtroom. During one murder trial, he illustrated the brutality of the crime by turning up with a pickaxe and savaging a telephone directory.

The Old Bailey has yet to witness such amateur dramatics, partly because the British legal system has a keen sense of its propriety, and partly because lawyers here are not allowed to walk around the courtroom. "We're discouraged from showmanship", an earnest trainee barrister told The First Post. "It detracts from the evidence." ·