A last-minute agreement between the prosecution and defense this afternoon averted the prospect that Sammy March, 15-year-old son of Janet and Perry March, would take the witness stand today in the murder trial of his father -- ten years to the day after his mother went missing, never to be seen again.The two sides in the Perry March trial agreed to show jurors a 1999 television interview with Sammy without calling the teenager to the witness stand. They likewise agreed to admit statements Sammy is said to have made soon after his mother disappeared, at the age of six. These two versions of the last time Sammy saw Janet contradict each other in important ways, but the adversaries concurred that they would not force Sammy to address those differences in open court.Defense attorney Bill Massey told the judge that both sides agreed "it is in the child's best interest not to be on the stand," and Assistant District Attorney Tom Thurman had made clear that he felt the same way. But Davidson County Criminal Court Judge Steve Dozier at first appeared dubious about the deal."I'm not going to get involved in your claiming that something I fashioned turned out to bring in inadmissible evidence," Dozier told the contending parties.Thurman acknowledged the quandry created by the mutual effort to spare the young man the trauma of testifying. "I don't think there's any case law on it," the prosecutor told the court. "It's creating an evidentiary nightmare." After a pair of lengthy breaks in the proceedings early this afternoon, though, Dozier accepted a draft jury instruction that the two sides had agreed to, covering the unusual nature of the evidence that both sides have deemed admissible.
Perry March took the stand with the jury absent in order to confirm his agreement to the compromise. "My son has been in far too many courtrooms at his young age," he testified. "I do not want my son in this witness stand."Warned by defense attorney Bill Massey that the state will be putting on rebuttal testimony concerning the video, March replied: "I'm not worried about the credibility of my son."March also confirmed on the stand that, as expected, he will not testify on his own behalf.Earlier today and yesterday, Massey told the judge several times that he intended to call Sammy unless he and the prosecution could come to an agreement on how to get the child's past comments about the case into the trial record.In a meeting yesterday in the judge's chambers, with attorneys from both sides present, as well as Sammy's grandparents and current guardians Larry and Carolyn Levine, Sammy stated that he did not wish to speak to either side in advance of taking the stand. The defense would thus have been taking a considerable risk in calling to the stand a young person whose past statements have contradicted each other as to when and how he last saw his mother.At age six, within weeks of Janet March's disappearance, Sammy told child psychologists in Chicago that he was asleep when she left the house and that he remembered nothing about her departure.At age nine, in a 1999 interview with Larry Brinton of WTVF-Channel 5, filmed at Perry March's home in Mexico, Sammy recalled that on the night of August 15, 1996: "I waved to her and she waved to me when she left."He continued: "She told me that she'd be back soon. She came in and gave me my good-night kiss. She took her bags, went downstairs, got in the car and left."
