… At 10 this morning. The defense goes first, and then the prosecution gets the last word, the papers say.

The Chicago Tribune reports:

Despite the high-profile nature of the trial, the case itself is not very complex, experts say. It boils down to two questions: Is the girl on the sex tape at the heart of the case underage? And is that Kelly in the video with her? Both sides will have one last chance to sway the jury of nine men and three women.

The paper goes into more detail here …

The lack of a cooperating victim is a central weakness in the state’s case, according to some legal experts, but others say she did nothing to help the defense.

“It used to be a fatal part of the case, until [defense attorney Edward] Genson couldn’t produce her either,” said Leonard Cavise, a law professor at DePaul College of Law. “As a result, they are in the same boat.”

… but, as has been the case all along, they don’t relate this directly to the charges in the case, which are related to child pornography, not statutory rape. Does the concept of “victim” even apply in a child porn case?

The Sun-Times doesn’t go any deeper:

Two issues make the case volatile, [DePaul law prof Leonard] Cavise said: Sex and celebrity. The tape shows intercourse and oral sex, and it shows the man urinating on the female. The shock factor alone could push the jury to a guilty verdict, experts said.

“You see a real possibility that the jury can go guilty because the tape is so disgusting” and jurors want to punish someone, one legal observer said.

At the same time, Kelly’s fame could prejudice the jury in the defense’s favor. “Everybody on the jury who likes R. Kelly is going to hold out for him,” Cavise said.

Studies show that 80 percent of jurors make up their minds before they have heard any evidence, Cavise said.

“As we go into closing arguments, at least 80 percent of those people have an opinion already,” Cavise said.

I’m worried that after the verdict comes down, the jurors are going to tell us it all came down to some obscure part of the directions the court gave them, which was never mentioned in the press coverage.

Incidentally, the Tribune’s odd handling of its R. Kelly stories continues. Where the Sun-Times has always had an R. Kelly main page on the web on which you could access all of the paper’s voluminous R. Kelly coverage, the Tribune’s promotion of this valuable archive online has been spotty. (Valuable to the paper I mean; it’s the logical place for folks around the world to find comprehensive coverage of the trial.) You need to find an actual R. Kelly story, and then try to navigate the (non-chronological) list of stories to the left to get up to speed. If there’s a home page for the paper’s Kelly coverage I’ve never been able to find it.

Now, it seems, some of the early stories in the case have disappeared, apparently because the Trib removes two-week-old stories and sticks them in a (for pay) archive. The Trib had an early deal with AOL and I’ve always thought it was an operation with sophisticated web folks around.

Is it possible, in 2008, that the paper’s web people don’t notice stories drawing increased attention and get to work maximizing the interest? What kind of numbskulls start taking down their on-the-scene coverage of a local story of international interest? Sam Zell know about this?