They are the oddest people left in the case, for, if they’ve followed the orders of Judge Lance Ito, they don’t know what the general public does. They missed Rosa Lopez’s antics, they didn’t hear the unexpurgated Fuhrman tapes and they didn’t have the benefit of 12 months of Geraldo Rivera’s commentary. All they know, supposedly, about who killed Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman one night in June 1994 is what they heard in the courtroom. And last week as the trial reached what should be its penultimate peak, they heard something remarkable. The jury was no longer deciding one of the thousand-or-so murder cases in Los Angeles. The closing arguments, ringing with dueling Martin Luther King Jr. quotes, appeal to the memory of the civil-rights movement, and ringing references to the Bible pushed the trial – and the jury – fully into the racial whirlwind of the nation.
The closing arguments underlined yet again that there is another set of Two Americas – one white, one black. The case of the State of California v, O. J. Simpson has become a harrowing journey along the racial divide (page 34). From the beginning of the trial, polling has consistently shown that black and white Americans are essentially watching different trials. Blacks overwhelmingly side with O.J.’s defense, whites with the prosecution. On one point they roughly agree: according to a new NEWSWEEK Poll, about 60 percent of whites and nonwhites think that race will be an important factor in the jury’s deliberation.
So it did not take long last week for Simpson’s lawyers, led by Johnnie Cochran, a smooth yet fiery speaker, to play their race card. In a stirring performance, he asked the jury to send a message. A vote to acquit, thundered Cochran, leaning into the jurors, would be no less than a vote to defend the Constitution, a vote to stop rampaging racist police forces and a vote to tell authorities that enough was enough. “If you don’t speak out, if you don’t stand up, if you don’t do what’s right, this kind of conduct will continue on forever,” Cochran declared.
Cochran was hoping that at least the nine African-Americans on the jury would be responsive. In an interview with NEWSWEEK (page 31), Cochran offered no apologies and, in vigorously defending his client, perhaps needed none. “I don’t want to exacerbate racial problems,” he said. “But you have to be true to who you are.”
Prosecutors tried mightily to wrest the jury back to the version of the evidence as they saw it, including the potent DNA blood evidence linking Simpson to the murders. But Christopher Darden, the black deputy district attorney, battled Cochran on his own terms. Darden had been criticized earlier in the trial for tactical blunders, but last week he redeemed his reputation. Matching Cochran in invoking Martin Luther King Jr., Darden implored jurors to see through the defense’s “smoke and mirrors.” He told a story of how Dr. King calmly dealt with a knife attack, averting possible death, in 1961. Jurors, he said, likewise needed to consider calmly the facts of the case – and forget about sending messages. “You can’t eradicate racism” within the LAPD or the nation simply by voting not guilty, Darden said.
The arguments, outraging some, pleasing others, filled a week that was soaked in emotion, passion and tears. Cochran matched his rhetoric with some showmanship, donning a knit cap to make the point that disguise isn’t so easy, and squeezing into a pair of gloves. “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit,” was his singsong refrain. Memories of the victims were painfully dragged into the courtroom. During her rebuttal on Friday, lead prosecutor Marcia Clark played tapes of a frantic Nicole calling the emergency 911 line to report abuse incidents in 1989 and 1993. Sitting in the gallery, Nicole’s sisters, Denise and Tanya, put their fingers in their ears to block the sound. At the end, the families sobbed as pictures of Nicole’s and Ron’s battered bodies were displayed one last time in the courtroom. When the three families filed out of the courtroom at the end of the week, the mood was so somber even reporters dared not ask questions.
The final days of argument pushed the trial back onto the national chatter agenda. The oratory gripped the nation in a way that even the most articulate DNA expert could not. Television ratings shot up again (though not as high as at the trial’s start) and the networks ran prime-time specials.
Outside the courthouse, security was beefed up as hundreds of spectators gathered, some waving signs proclaiming O.J.’s innocence, and others seeking autographs of the lawyers, now familiar personalities. As Cochran left the courthouse cafeteria on Friday, diners chanted, “We love you, Johnnie!” Cochran raised a few eyebrows earlier in the week when he (and Simpson family members) showed up surrounded by guards from the Nation of Islam. He said he had received faxed death threats.
The trial’s divisiveness spilled out of the courtroom on Thursday, after Cochran attacked former LAPD detective Mark Fuhrman, repeatedly calling him a “genocidal racist” and comparing him to Hitler. “This man, this scourge, became one of the worst people in this world, Adolf Hitler, because people didn’t care, didn’t try to stop him,” Cochran said. The comparison shocked many observers (including fellow defense lawyer Robert Shapiro), but none more so than Fred Goldman, Ron’s father. Goldman muttered audibly, and then outside the courtroom excoriated Cochran as “someone who shoves racism in front of everything.” Shaking and pushing away his tearful wife, he called Cochran a “sick man. He ought to be put away. He’s a disgusting human being.” A little later, Simpson’s family members held their own news conference. “It’s wrong, even when you’re hurting, to personally attack our lawyers and say that they’re liars,” said O.J.’s sister Shirley Simpson Baker.
If Cochran’s attack on Fuhrman was overkill, it constituted the heart of the defense case. The LAPD is filled with corrupt bunglers who either planted evidence to frame Simpson or contaminated it so badly that it was useless. Cochran left it to Barry Scheck, a scrappy New York lawyer, and not Ito’s favorite, to try to put some muscle behind his emotional rhetoric. Scheck’s strategy: create an aura of suspicion around the state’s scientific evidence so large that no jury could possibly send a man to jail based on it. Methodically but with passion, Scheck called the LAPD’s forensic laboratory a “black hole” that tarnished any scientific finding. Given suspicions of a frame-up, he told jurors, neither the message nor the messengers could be trusted. Scheck found his trial mantra in the words of Dr. Henry Lee, the prominent forensic scientist who testified for the defense: “Something is wrong. Something is terribly wrong.”
To Clark and Darden something was terribly wrong – and it was that the defense was dealing in minutiae intended only to distract the jurors from the array of evidence left at the scene and at Simpson’s estate. They begged the jurors to stay focused on the evidence. “We have shown you that he would have killed, could have killed and did kill these two people,” Darden said, echoing Simpson’s own words to Ito, outside the presence of the jury, two weeks ago.
If they couldn’t match the storytelling prowess of Cochran and Scheck, the two prosecutors laid out a strong set of facts and adeptly used Nicole’s voice and pictures to remind jurors of the victims. But the push and pull of the arguments had done what they’re supposed to: create a series of critical puzzles for the jury to study in the deliberation room. Cochran challenged Clark to answer 15 questions to satisfy the burden of proof. She answered some only indirectly in her rebuttal. Darden offered a different set of questions for the defense. All were worthy of a good mystery novel, and as fine a starting point for the jurors as any. Among them:
Where was O.J.? There’s nothing like a solid alibi to get a defendant off, but prosecutors hammered that Simpson had no explanation for his whereabouts for a critical 78-minute period during which the murders were committed. Using a detailed time-line graphic, Clark told jurors that on the night of the murders, Simpson was last seen by Brian (Kato) Kaelin around 9:36 p.m. Allan Park, a waiting limousine driver, saw a tall black man enter Simpson’s house at 10:54 p.m. Cochran, in perhaps his weakest comeback, simply said Simpson was at home getting ready for the trip to Chicago but offered no evidence. He never repeated, or tried to substantiate, his opening-statement contention that Simpson was chipping golf balls in front of his estate. He doesn’t have to, of course. The defense doesn’t have to say a word. But Darden took advantage of Cochran’s opening. If Simpson is innocent, he asked the jury, “where was he at the time of the murders?”
When did the dog bark? The prosecution says the murders were committed around 10:15 p.m., which would give O.J. time to return home and catch his airport limo. The evidence: witnesses who say they heard Nicole’s dog barking in the night. That’s not an easy sell, and Cochran knew it, ridiculing the notion that jurors would convict a man based on the wailing of a dog.
Why wasn’t there more blood on O.J.? Given the ferociousness of the murder struggle and the depth of the victims’ wounds, the jury might ask why O.J. wasn’t drenched in blood. Cochran and Scheck asked repeatedly why more blood wasn’t found on Simpson’s Bronco, around his house, on the white carpeting in the house and in his bedroom. Clark suggested that Simpson stood behind the two victims during much of the attack, so that the blood spurting from their bodies missed him. But the state thinks the better question is: how can Simpson explain the blood that does link him to the murders? Clark ticked off the array of blood evidence, based on DNA findings, including his own at the crime scene, Goldman’s in the Bronco and Nicole’s on his socks. Said Clark: “We have linked the defendant to the victims, we have linked the defendant and the victims to his car and that link has reached from Bundy into his bedroom at Rockingham.”
Did Mark Fuhrman plant the bloody glove? After sifting through Cochran’s vilification of Fuhrman, deserved as it may be, jurors may find precious little direct evidence that the former detective had it in for Simpson. But Cochran and Scheck did raise a few oddities: that there was no other blood found on the ground around the glove at Simpsons estate, and that the glove was still moist when it was found. A glove that had fallen off Simpson’s hand naturally would have caused more blood spatter, they suggested, and it would have dried by the time Fuhrman claimed to have discovered it. And why, Scheck asked, was blood found on the wrist of the glove rather than on the fingers – where Simpson presumably would have yanked to remove it? Clark distanced herself from Fuhrman at the start of her closing argument, but said he simply didn’t have the opportunity to plant the glove.
Are the bloody socks found in O.J.’s bedroom trustworthy? If there was a struggle, why didn’t the socks have any dirt on them? And why did the blood, according to a defense expert witness, contain traces of a preservative found in test tubes? And why did blood found at the rear gate of Nicole’s condo contain high levels of DNA? It was planted, the defense said, giving Scheck a chance to bellow, “Somebody played with the evidence. There’s no doubt about it.” Clark called that notion ridiculous but offered little to explain the lack of dirt on the socks. It may have simply fallen off as Simpson walked away from the crime scene and returned to his home, she said. As for the preservative, Clark said the state’s expert witness found none.
Where’s the motive? To convict Simpson the jury will most certainly be looking for a reason that a man would savagely kill his ex-wife and her friend. Darden told the jury that Simpson repeatedly abused Nicole as part of a jealous effort to control her. O.J. was a lit fuse, Darden said, “and it’s burning, but it’s a slow burn” that eventually led to the murders. Will the jury make the link? Cochran ridiculed the idea, and played a videotape that shows a happy O.J. after his daughter’s dance recital the day of the murders. In an indignant tone, Cochran demanded, “Where’s the fuse now, Mr. Darden?” In a devastating response, Clark played the famous 911 tapes when Nicole called for help while O.J. raged in the background.
Which O.J. will the jury buy? Is he the famous-good-natured pitchman, or the feral ex-husband? Fifteen months after the murders, the prosecution team still worried that jurors would have trouble surmounting an issue that transcended even race: celebrity. The defense had an exhibit of O.J.’s wholesomeness, a large photograph of a proud Simpson and his daughter Sydney taken the day of the murder. Cochran set it up on an easel in front of the jurors. Near the end of her closing, Clark talked softly about how “it’s really kind of hard to have to believe the man we saw in the movies and commercials could do this.” The fact that he did, Clark said, “doesn’t mean he wasn’t a great football player” but “it cannot mean you let a guilty person go free.”
After Clark’s moving statement, It read more admonitions to the jury, among them: not to be influenced by the fact that “the whole world is watching.” The jurors then moved into secret deliberations, and almost immediately, speculation began over what would happen after the verdict. By some reports, if O.J. were acquitted, he’d sell his Rockingham estate, fight for custody of his two kids and head for Mexico – stopping long enough for a lucrative pay-per-view TV extravaganza. If he’s convicted, he can expect a long stretch in the state’s overcrowded prison system; and there was debate, immediately, over his treatment inside. If the jury hangs, as so many talking heads have predicted, he’d surely ask for bail, and probably be denied. The jury gets to decide the case. Then the rest of us, the Other America, gets to talk about it. Forever.
(those saying yes) WHITES NONWHITES Prosecution 41% 49% Defense 75% 73% Jury’s verdict 60% 66%
WHITES NONWHITES Prosecution 40% 23% Defense 27% 56%
FOR THIS NEWSWEEK POLL, PRINCETON SURVEY RESEARCH ASSOCIATES TELEPHONED 758 ADULTS, SEPT. 28-29. THE MARGIN OF ERROR IS +/- 4 PERCENTAGE POINTS FOR WHITES, +/- 10 FOR NONWHITES. THE NEWSWEEK POLL
