If you wondered why Phil Spector's chief lawyer Bruce Cutler hasn't been leading the defence's questioning since his opening address at the start of the trial, well it seems he's been too busy filming his new courtroom TV show 'Jury Duty', in which he appears with a jury of three celebrities to deliberate on viewers' disputes.
Though, according to the Associated Press, who have been reporting on the reason for Cutler's absence from many of the Spector proceedings, the defence attorney still plans to deliver his side's closing arguments, assuring the AP that he has been watching the trial on TV so is fully up to speed with what has been discussed in court. He told the news agency: "I'm not doing it [the TV show] to deprecate the significance of the case. I don't need to be there every day".
The AP interviewed a law professor from Loyola University, Professor Laurie Levenson, about Cutler's decision to take on TV commitments while also representing a client in a trial as high profile as the Spector murder trial. And the prof reckons that while taking on the TV work in this way isn't necessarily unethical, it is "certainly unorthodox". Levenson: The ethical question is 'Can he [Cutler] still reach the level of competence needed to represent a client on a murder charge? If he's super lawyer and he can do it, he won't be violating ethics, but he certainly will raise some eyebrows".
As previously reported, the Spector trial is now in recess until 9 Jul after the defence began presenting their evidence last week. Spector, of course, is accused of killing actress Lana Clarkson at his Beverly Hills home back in 2003. He claims she committed suicide.