Courtroom trials are a snooze. Seriously. If you’ve ever ridden the benches through a complete legal proceeding from jury selection to guilty/not guilty, you know the average trial is low on regular dramatics; mostly, we’re talking about long, detail-logged witness testimony and interminable pitched battles over fine print. Even when backlit by the kind of human depravity that’s marked the public career of Jimmy Dimora, the day-to-day slog between lawyers and witnesses is more likely to put you to sleep than hook your attention.
Which makes courtroom coverage — again, even when we’re talking about a trial as chin-deep in depravity as Dimora’s — a hard sell, newsmaking wise. Besides the geriatric-in-a-walker pace of Justice, the same news coming out of Dimora’s trial was everywhere. All four of Cleveland’s TV stations and the Plain Dealer had corps of reporters filling up notebooks with the same daily revelations, not to mention freelancers, columnists and editorialist firing off from the sidelines. The result was a bit over-saturating. Too much Dimorapalooza.
Luckily for us news consumers, some of the local outlets — under the whipcrack from editors and station directors, no doubt — went beyond just parroting the daily details. They found unique, odd angles on the mess. Now that Dimora’s defense has waved the white flag and everything looks like it will be over soon, we’re going to run through our favorite outside the box Jimmy-related news reports.
This article appears in Feb 22-28, 2012.
As pathetic as Dirmora was / is: what more can be said beyond the trial?
I am completely in favor of anything that mocks these clowns.