Jenny Jones Trials: 1996-99

Scott Amedure's family, meanwhile, who had settled out of court with Schmitz for a few thousand dollars, sued Jenny Jones and Warner Brothers, its distributor, for Amedure's wrongful death. The outspoken attorney Geoffrey N. Fieger, who had often represented right-to-die activist Jack Kevorkian and who routinely won huge civil damage awards, claimed that the show and its negligence had been responsible for Amedure's death.

The show's executives "created a scenario," Fieger said in his opening statement to the jury. "They picked the victim. They deceived him. They picked the murderer and deceived him. They did everything but pull the trigger." The show had put Schmitz in a humiliating position without even trying to discover his past record of mental instability, substance abuse, and suicide attempts. The killing would never have happened, Fieger argued, if the program had not ambushed Schmitz in the manner that it did.

To show how humiliating the experience could be, Fieger put producer Ed Glavin on the witness stand and asked him to describe a sexual fantasy for the jury involving Glavin's own wife, which Glavin refused to do. Fieger also put Jones herself on the stand. Two years after the shooting, she had written a book in which she discussed the tragedy and denied that she or the producers had misled Schmitz. But during questioning, just as at the first criminal trial, the talk show hostess seemed ignorant of the workings of her own series and unable to answer clearly even basic questions about the process of selecting and preparing guests. This put the show in an even less favorable light than before.

Attorneys for Jenny Jones countered that Schmitz had known that the topic in question was "Same-Sex Secret Crushes," and that he had been able to make conscious decisions about all of his actions including appearing on the show, buying the gun, and firing it at Amedure. In the end, the jury sided with the Amedures, awarding them $25 million in damages. A few months later a new jury convicted Schmitz of second-degree murder at this second trial. On September 14, 1999, Judge Wendy Potts sentenced Schmitz to 25 to 50 years in prison. This was the same sentence that Judge Francis X. O'Brien had given him after Schmitz had been found guilty in the first criminal trial.

The Jenny Jones trials, as they came to be known, spotlighted the longtroublesome issues of personal responsibility in a criminal justice setting. This time, though, the culprit to which the defendant pointed was a new one, a television genre that many people found incendiary and offensive. Some denounced the outcome of the civil trial as a dangerous development that might ultimately threaten First Amendment broadcast rights; others applauded it as a message to powerful, profitable, and irresponsible media that it must begin to show self-restraint.