The media has influenced how high-profile criminal trials unfold for decades, but the public is becoming increasingly savvy as it has more access to dissenting voices, according to Marcia Clark, the former Los Angeles district attorney who led the high-profile OJ Simpson trial .

Clark has written a new book about a forgotten but scandalous 1950s home invasion murder that shocked Los Angeles. Unfortunately for the prime suspect, she said, local newspapers took the prosecution’s shaky case at face value and ran with it, condemning her in full view of the public before executing her after a questionable case and multiple scandals.

Discussing this case and other high-profile trials with Fox News Digital, Clark revealed unlikely similarities in the media frenzy surrounding the 1953 murder trial of “Bloody Babs” Barbara Graham, the 1995 Simpson trial in which she was involved, and this year’s Trial of Daniel Penny. Penny is a Marine veteran who was found not guilty of manslaughter in the New York City subway chokehold of Jordan Neely.

Regardless of how a case is reported, it can have a major impact on public perception and jeopardize a defendant’s right to a fair trial.

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“Now people are starting to look back and say, ‘Wait a minute, we didn’t get the whole story. We didn’t understand the context. All nuances are missing.’ And they start to really criticize and also analyze what they get and contextualize the stories and wait for the real, the whole story to come out and then tell it when it’s true,” she told Fox News Digital.

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As cable news became the dominant medium in the 1990s, she experienced this firsthand as the lead prosecutor in the Simpson trial.

With social media and the possibility of any random post going viral, there are a number of viewpoints that are available to the public. And people have access to more information to form their own opinions, as was recently seen in the New York murder trial of Daniel Penny, Clark said.

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“Initially there was an outcry on behalf of the victim, the homeless man, saying, ‘This is a terrible, racist thing, and this was an ex-Marine full of badges who persecuted him unnecessarily,” she told Fox News Digital . “But then it turns out that people who were actually taking photos at the time reported to the police that I was scared to death at that moment.” “I thought he was going to kill us.” “I thought there was a real reason To be afraid.”

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This technology puts the power to put information into the hands of everyday Americans, she said.

“People are getting smarter in today’s world because we have iPhones and Androids and all these things that take snapshots of what’s going on in the moment and give you a broader context,” she said. “And that’s a very good thing.”

At the time of Graham’s trial, there was no Internet or cable news, and all competing newspapers all had a similar view, Clark said.

In the 1990s, the Simpson trial became known as the “Trial of the Century.” Simpson was one of the most famous people ever to be charged with murder in U.S. history. Instead of surrendering to police as planned, he led them on a slow chase while curled up in the back seat of a friend’s white Ford Bronco.

The televised trial dragged on for months and became part of the daily lives of millions of Americans thanks to extensive cable television coverage. And his prominent, highly paid defense attorneys, including Johnnie Cochran, Alan Dershowitz, Robert Kardashian, Shawn Holley, Robert Shapiro and others, were nicknamed the “Dream Team,” ultimately convincing jurors of enough reasonable doubt to acquit Simpson of the murders -Mrs. Nicole Brown Simpson and her boyfriend Ron Goldman.

“That was one of the parallels that I didn’t expect,” Clark told Fox News Digital. “In Barbara’s case…they didn’t have internet, and yet they had three editions of the newspapers – morning, afternoon, evening.”

While newspapers have declined dramatically since the 2000s, they were an important part of public life in the 1950s, she said.

“We’ve gone digital, but it’s not just that,” she said. “It is that these newspapers were the only source of information.”

And in newspapers in the 1950s was the prosecution’s story that Graham was “Bloody Babs,” Clark said, portraying her as the criminal mastermind behind a brutal botched robbery.

Clark goes into the details of the case in “Trial By Ambush.” The high-profile murder of 62-year-old former vaudevillian Mabel Monahan in her Burbank home inspired the Oscar-winning film “I Want to Live!” starring Susan Hayward, which faded from public memory decades ago.

In reality, Graham’s role in the conspiracy was to distract Monahan so that her accomplices could steal more than $100,000 in cash that they mistakenly believed was in the house of her ex-son-in-law, Tutor Scherer, the Las Vegas casino owner was kept.

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Graham, who spent most of her life as a low-level hustler, was tried for murder, convicted and sentenced to death.

But while Clark believes Graham spent most of her life as a crook, she said she doesn’t believe Graham pistol-whipped Monahan to death. She notes how prosecutors withheld evidence, the media unfairly crucified Graham, the key witness changed his own story, and investigators, with the help of another inmate, lured Graham into a trap by offering her a false alibi and then using it against her in court used.

“She never told the truth. I don’t think she’s entirely credible,” Clark said. “(But) she didn’t kill Mabel Monahan. Yes, I believe so.”

The tactic was legal at the time, she said. But that has changed. Graham’s execution came years before the Supreme Court’s decision in Brady v. Maryland, which found that prosecutors would violate a defendant’s right to due process if they withheld exculpatory evidence. California also treats murder cases, in which a person is killed during the commission of another crime, differently under modern law.

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“The whole operation would now be highly illegal,” she said. “The entire case would be dismissed. It would be very questionable whether you could resurrect a case from the ashes because, in my opinion, it would be easy for the defense to say, ‘Look, they were poisoned.’ “The jury was poisoned by all this illegally obtained evidence.”

Back then, many of the underhanded tactics were allowed, such as commuting the sentence of an inmate who had convinced Graham to offer to pay for an alibi from a man who turned out to be an undercover cop.

“Back then they could get away with a lot of things that they can’t do today,” Clark said. “But still, they pushed the boundaries even further and did things they weren’t even allowed to do at the time, like burying the first recorded statement from John True.”

John True was an accomplice turned state witness who gave contradictory statements to police, a detail withheld from the defense as a “serious violation of due process.”

Based on evidence the jury never heard, Clark believes that while Graham was at the crime scene and was clearly an accomplice, she was not the actual murderer. She believes True and two other men, Emmett Perkins and Jacko Santo, beat and suffocated the victim.

Perkins, Santo and Graham were all executed. True received immunity in exchange for testifying against the others.

“Interestingly, one of the reporters who was convinced of her guilt and the murder of Mabel Monahan went to interview her several times after her conviction, and then spoke to John True a few times and became aware of it.” Barbara “Couldn’t have killed her,” Clark said. “Barbara didn’t whip out the pistol. John True probably did.”

Original source of the article: OJ Simpson prosecutor Marcia Clark examines the influence of evolving media on trials and true crime