The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office looked like it got hit with a bucket of cold water when legendary Hollywood defense shark Blair Berk came in swinging, demanding discovery and an immediate preliminary hearing. That little move apparently caught somebody flat-footed. Deputy District Attorney Beth Silverman says she is sitting on terabytes of discovery. Terabytes. Wonderful. The question is whether she can actually produce it in a form and on a timetable that matters, instead of waving around digital bulk like a magician’s scarf. Count me skeptical.
What the defense appears to be running here is a classic squeeze play. Tight. Aggressive. Nasty. Exactly the kind of pressure move that forces prosecutors to stop posing and start performing. If Berk can lock the case into the 10-day rule for a preliminary hearing, the prosecution could find itself in a very uncomfortable position. In plain English, they may have to either put up or shut up. And if they cannot present a coherent, trial-ready showing in time, dismissal becomes a real possibility.
Of course, this being Los Angeles, the prosecution has escape hatches. They could sidestep the preliminary hearing altogether by running to a grand jury and seeking an indictment. That would eliminate the need for a public prelim. They could also simply file a new criminal complaint later. Murder has no statute of limitations, which means the state can keep coming back like a bad rash. Complaint today. Indictment tomorrow. Refile next month. The calendar is not their enemy.
Then came the prosecutor’s claim that Burke supposedly has a significant amount of child pornography on his phone, despite the rather inconvenient fact that he has not actually been charged with that crime. That little bombshell landed exactly where prosecutors like such things to land: in public, in headlines, and in the bloodstream of public opinion. Very convenient. Nothing spices up a murder prosecution like tossing in uncharged allegations radioactive enough to poison the room before the real fight even starts.
The preliminary hearing is reportedly due to begin March 1 in Department 105 before longtime criminal court judge Larry Fiddler. Fiddler has long had a reputation as one of the more prosecution-friendly jurists in the building. So if the defense is expecting a warm bath and a violin recital, they are in the wrong courthouse.
I expect this preliminary hearing, if it happens, to be a marathon. Not a brisk little legal formality, but a bruising courthouse war of attrition. Beth Silverman and Blair Berk are shaping up like two lady gladiators in heels, circling each other with sharpened steel and excellent hair. One will be trying to bulldoze the case forward. The other will be trying to expose every weak seam, every missing link, every bit of prosecutorial puffery dressed up as certainty.
At the end of the day, the safest bet is still that David Burke gets held to answer and bound over for trial. That is how these things usually go. The state does not bring a case like this to the edge of the arena just to faint dead away. But that does not mean the prosecution is comfortable. It means only that the machine is built to keep moving.
Still, this case may yet be routed into the grand jury lane, which would kill off the need for a preliminary hearing entirely. The real question is whether prosecutors can actually get that indictment and whether they prefer a closed room over a public test of their evidence. Silverman says there are terabytes of discovery. Ordinarily that means either a grand jury presentation or a preliminary hearing would be a long, ugly slog. Berk, on the other hand, has been demanding a fast, public hearing. That is not an accident. That is pressure. That is strategy. That is a defense lawyer forcing the prosecution to show whether all that supposed evidence is real muscle or just courthouse theater.
According to published media reports, the Los Angeles medical examiner determined that the 14-year-old girl died from multiple sharp-force injuries. But that does not magically answer every question. Since the remains were both badly decomposed and dismembered, proving whether those sharp-force injuries were inflicted before death or after death may be very difficult. There will be no serious dispute that the body was mutilated. The real question is whether the mutilation caused death or followed it. That is not a minor detail. That is the difference between a neat prosecutorial narrative and a forensic knife fight.
Then there is the cadaver bag. The girl’s torso was reportedly found inside a standard cadaver bag, which raises a serious and obvious question: where did it come from? Unless it had some bizarre use as a video prop, that is not the kind of item one normally expects a commercially successful entertainer to have lying around next to the phone chargers and designer sneakers. For reasons still unexplained, the girl’s limbs were reportedly found in a separate bag, one that has not been clearly described in media accounts. That is not a trivial loose end. That is the kind of detail that matters. And yes, the medical examiner’s report is a public record. It can be purchased, reviewed, and republished. Which means eventually the glossy public spin may have to answer to the ugly little details in black and white.
One possible outcome of today’s hearing is that Burke’s case gets dismissed pending future proceedings. That would not be an acquittal, and it would not mean the state is done. But it would be a colossal embarrassment for the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office. The kind of embarrassment that leaves a mark. Because after all the press, all the leaks, all the thunder, and all the chest-pounding, nothing looks worse than being forced to admit that when the time came to actually present the case, the mighty machinery of prosecution was not ready for prime time.
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