Jury Acquits Jackson on All Charges

In his remarks after the verdict, a glum Santa Barbara District Attorney Tom Sneddon said, "Obviously we're disappointed in the verdict," but went on to add that "we did the right thing" in pursuing Jackson. "We thought we had a good case." He denied -- again -- that he had a vendetta to pursue against the pop star.

Sneddon was asked in a news conference after the verdicts whether he believed a child molester just went free.

"No comment," snapped the prosecutor, who had investigated Jackson on previous allegations of molestation in 1993 and 1994. That accuser refused to cooperate after settling a civil case against Jackson in which he and his family were given a reported $20 million by the entertainer.

The media and most legal analysts following the case were divided over whether Jackson would be found guilty. So was Sneddon, who said he had "no inkling" which way the case would go when Santa Barbara County Superior Court Judge Rodney S. Melville announced that the jury had reached a verdict around 12:30 p.m. Pacific time Monday, after seven days and about 32 hours -- not including breaks -- of deliberations.

In the news conference in the courtroom after the verdict, the jurors (who were identified only by their assigned numbers) described a case that was weak and an accuser and his family, especially his mother, who could not be believed.

The jurors said they found the mother odd, and thought it weird that while on the stand, she snapped her fingers and tried to address them directly.

Sneddon suggested the jury might have been influenced by Jackson's celebrity and the throngs of media covering the trial, but the jurors said they often forgot that Jackson was in the courtroom.

They said their deliberations were calm and confident, that they raised their hands when they wanted to speak in the jury room, and that they remained on good terms. There were "no screaming matches," one of them said.

The criminal trial, with 140 witnesses, presented two clashing story lines.

In the defense case, Jackson was the naive and childlike victim, a creative if strange genius and a guileless pigeon, ripped off and sold out by his closest advisers and the hired help, and entrapped by the accuser and his family.

The prosecution countered that Jackson was an evil puppet master, the orchestrator of a complex conspiracy and a man who spent months grooming his accuser and other young victims with lavish gifts, all-expenses-paid travel and constant phone calls before he began to show them pornographic magazines, give them alcohol and then go in for the assault.

"The lion on the Serengeti doesn't go after the strongest antelope," Senior Deputy District Attorney Ron Zonen told jurors in closing arguments. "The predator goes after the weakest."