Nineteen years to the day before the two attorneys made their final pleas to the jury, Claus and Martha ("Sunny") von Bulow were married in a small ceremony in New York City. If the defendant was aware of the irony, he did not show it. While his lawyer depicted him as a callous philanderer but not a murderous one, and the prosecution made him out to be a homicidal schemer, Claus von Bulow, his wedding ring as ever on his left hand, maintained an attitude of intense if slightly distant interest. Afterward, the jury of eight men and four women filed out of the courtroom to begin deliberations on whether he had twice attempted to murder his wife with insulin injections. At week's end, the sequestered jurors still had not rendered a verdict.
In their summations, the attorneys in the Von Bulow case seemed to have exchanged roles. Defense Counsel Thomas Puccio once again seemed to be the aggressive prosecutor of his Abscam days, assertively addressing the facts of the case, while Prosecutor Marc DeSisto offered a histrionic and impassioned plea, long on emotion, short on detail.
Puccio, standing stiffly behind a wooden lectern ten feet from the jury, relentlessly disputed the central tenet of the prosecution's case: that insulin had been used to cause Mrs. Von Bulow's two comas. With increasing vehemence, he punctuated his argument with the phrase "No insulin injection!" as he recapitulated testimony by the defense's medical experts.
Puccio then set out to discredit the prosecution's witnesses. He insisted that the sparrowlike Maria Schrallhammer, Mrs. Von Bulow's maid of 23 years, viewed Von Bulow as a shadowy interloper who broke up the "fairy tale" romance of Sunny's first marriage, which ended in divorce. About onetime Soap Opera Actress Alexandra Isles, Claus' former lover, Puccio turned sarcastic: "She appeared before you in one of her most dramatic performances." In the end, Puccio asked not for sympathy but justice. "It's not a pretty picture," he said. "Mr. Von Bulow was cheating on his wife and he was stringing Alexandra Isles along. No matter what you think of Mr. Von Bulow's conduct of his marriage, please don't hold that fact against him in this case."
DeSisto, in contrast, was earnest and amiable, beginning his summation with a windy anecdote about Abraham Lincoln. Instead of reviewing his case, he painted an emotional and highly colored tableau of the alleged murder attempts. With his hands resting on the front of the jury box, DeSisto pleaded with the jurors to try to relive the crime, to put themselves in the room where Sunny von Bulow went into her two comas. As if holding a syringe in his hand, DeSisto asked, "Can you see it? As he was pushing the plunger down, can you see it? The defendant then sat down and read a book . . . Think about that room and stay there all afternoon while his wife is unconscious. Stay there until you can hear Martha von Bulow rattle. Rattle!"