HOLLYWOOD, Fla.— Acquitted Evil Angel owner John Stagliano and the trio of lawyers that represented him spoke Friday at The AVN Show, www.avn.com, for their first extensive comments since his trial last month.
Stagliano said the trial made him feel like a celebrity with a cause and that the reason for his acquittal was his legal team. [How about the government screw ups? www.adultfyi.com/read.php?ID=43018 ]
To that end, Stagliano acknowledged that the government stumbled throughout the case, and his legal team was able to poke holes in their evidence, witnesses, and their own credibility.
According to Stagliano, the prosecution’s most glaring error was their inability to burn a working copy of the web trailer of Belladonna’s Fetish Fanatic 5. That fumble pretty much led to the dismissal of two counts against Stagliano, and started a chain reaction that eventually led to the a Rule 29 motion, which dismissed the remaining charges.
“Maybe this is good for government work, but not for a criminal trial,” Stagliano commented.
“They played loose with the details. They didn’t care enough. I learned that government lawyers aren’t as good as private lawyers. In general, government incompetence reared its head again.”
Also scolded by the judge for several procedural faux pas, Stagliano must have betrayed some form of amusement. He was asked by Judge Richard Leon if he thought that was funny.
“I’m on trial for girls squirting milk out of their butts. I think that’s already pretty funny,” Stagliano said.
One of Stagliano’s attorneys, Paul Cambria lauded Stagliano for being a freedom fighter who believes in principles and believes in his movies.
According to Cambria, the government’s strategy in these cases is to
pick the worst place to try the trial, pick an ignorant jury and shock the hell out of them in a jury room.
Cambria also suggested that the government’s case was probably lost from its opening statements when they couldn’t get the definition of prurient interest right. To which Cambria objected.
“We laid out the argument perfectly in our opening statement; we wanted to lay out our whole theory in it. When the doors opened up, we knew how to walk through them.”
Though the trial’s original venue was Alabama, another of Stagliano’s attorneys Lou Sirkin found it strange that the case would be brought in D.C.
“The National Archives and Constitution sits virtually across the street. That the government would bring these freedom of speech issues in the place that guarantees us these freedoms is ironic.”