brian oxman

Jacko Lawyers in Public Spat; Oxman Fired

It wasn't the usual day in court yesterday for Michael Jackson's defense team.

At roughly 2:35 p.m. PDT, right after court ended, the team wound up having a fairly public fight in the parking lot of the Santa Maria courthouse.

The reason was that lead defense attorney Thomas Mesereau Jr. fired Brian Oxman from the team.

Oxman had come to the case as Randy Jackson's lawyer from previous domestic skirmishes within the Jackson family. But he had no experience in criminal defense matters, and often slept through crucial sessions in Jackson's child molestation case.

My sources say that Oxman — who'd been missing from court for over a week — had been told by Mesereau not to appear yesterday. Oxman ignored him, however, and showed up at the start of court.

When he tried to take his seat, Mesereau ordered him to sit with the public and not with the defense. Once seated, Oxman was then served with official notice that he'd been fired.

The result was a fight in the parking lot with Oxman screaming at Mesereau and associate Susan Yu. But this latest move should have come as no surprise to him.

Oxman — who was once suspended for a year from practicing law in California — got a rough start in the Jackson trial when he was publicly admonished by Judge Rodney S. Melville. Since then, he's been forced to sit behind the defense attorneys at what observers call "the children's table."

There's no official word on what Mesereau's breaking point was, but I am told that the senior member of the team recently discovered that Oxman had filed a number of papers in another Jackson case that contradicted much of the work Mesereau had done in the child molestation case. More on that as it develops. ...