I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
Nine score and seven years ago some of my fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new treaty, conceived in deceit, and dedicated to the proposition that all Native Americans should be driven from the lands the U.S. government claimed.
This new one was styled the “Treaty with the Cherokee, 1835.” Also called the Treaty of New Echota. New Echota was the capital of the Cherokee Nation; today it’s just a historic site in Gordon County, Georgia, to mark one of many treacheries by treaty against Indians.
My ancestors signed both sides of the treaty. Among the twenty men with Cherokee or near-Cherokee names were Tesa-ta-esky, Tah-yeske, Cae-te-hee, Te-gah-e-ske, and Jesse Half-breed. Signing in behalf of the United States was General William Carroll, who may have been related to my maternal grandfather, Ed Carroll. (As were in family lore the Carroll who signed the Declaration of Independence and the one who signed the United States Constitution. After U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren’s experience with grandparental recollections, I’m not sure I should rely on my own: by such carefree genealogy, I might also claim as distant cousin, Carol Burnett. Still, it’s my granddaddy’s story and I’m stickin’ to it.)
This was the treaty that led to the infamous Trail of Tears. Despite specific promises to remove the Cherokees “comfortably, and so as not to endanger their health,” it was essentially a forced march of eight hundred miles to Oklahoma under horrific winter conditions that killed four thousand of them.
There was another “promise” the Cherokees are, even today, asking the United States to keep at long last.
Article 7 of the treaty deemed it “important that every proper and laudable inducement should be offered to their people to improve their condition as well as to guard and secure in the most effectual manner the rights guarantied to them in this treaty.” To that end the Indian nation “shall be entitled to a delegate in the House of Representatives of the United States whenever Congress shall make provision for the same.” Delegates don’t get a vote; they do get access — a huge advantage over people who don’t.
In the law, the word “shall” has a particular power: it means something is required to be done. Has to happen. Drafters of law and treaty intend it to happen. Courts intend it to be upheld.
Yet the drafters of this Treaty with the Cherokee were lawyers. Lawyers — the despicable ones anyway — like weasel words; they put one in that Article: “whenever.” Whenever Congress gets around to it. Could be now. Should be sometime soon. Could be never.
I specifically asked Joe Neguse, the Congressman from my own district in Colorado, if Congress should get around to seating a delegate from the people who paid for that delegate with four thousand lives. He specifically declined to answer but said he’d be sure keep my thoughts in mind. There aren’t many better than him in the House of Representatives.
And the Cherokee?
Nine score and seven years from now, I’m guessing they’ll still be asking for their promised seat at the table.
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
How many times do we have to step on this roach?
The only two-legged insect ever elected to the White House (though not by popular vote — most of us don’t like odious insects) said today he wants to do it again. Even if he has to serve from behind bars.
So, once more unto the breach with the greatest threat to criminal justice and human rights — not to mention democracy — that the United States, and an appalled rest of the world, has more or less (usually less, at least among invertebrate politicians at home) faced.
Some of the lowlights from his announcement, dully delivered in a monotone reading off teleprompters:
Even longer than Woodrow Wilson, he said, he kept us out of war. “I’ve gone decades — decades — without a war. I’m the first president to do it.” (To be fair, his four years did feel like decades. And he hasn’t wanted to go to war since his bone spur years.)
He referenced foreign nations, “many of whom find us detestable,” and “speaking of us with scorn and laughter and derision.” Apparently using the objective form of the royal “we.”
He fears invasion, and not just by the FBI.
“Our country,” he said, “is being invaded by millions and millions of unknown people, many of whom are entering for a very bad and sinister reason — and you know what that reason is.” (Every white nationalist does: they want our women.)
He really likes the death penalty as a response to both violent and nonviolent crime, a sort of final solution he says he learned from the Chinese despot Xi Jinping. He asked Xi if China had a drug problem. “He looked at me like I didn’t know what I was doing,” he said. (Everyone looks at him like that.) Xi told him why China didn’t have a drug problem. He loved it, so as soon as he’s president again “we’re going to be asking everyone who sells drugs…to receive the death penalty.” Same for human traffickers, though he didn’t mention whether that would include personal friends like his dead pal Jeffrey Epstein and his living dead pal Matt Gaetz.
He expressed fond admiration of Xi’s idea of a quick trial. “That is where,” he gushed, “you get caught dealing drugs, you have an immediate and quick trial, and by the end of the day you’re executed.”
His vision for American justice.
He wants more respect for police.
“The police are being treated so badly,” said the man responsible for one hundred fifty injuries and several deaths of police when he turned an armed mob upon them shortly before leaving office.
On the plus side, it looks like he’s been working out: he only needed one hand this time to lift his little water bottle to his lips.
Touting his famous ability to get along with everyone, he said, “We love both sides.” Reprising the love he showed for both Nazis and Jews in Charlottesville.
He implies he’s doing everyone a favor by running again. “I didn’t need this.” he said. “A lot of you people don’t need it either.” No kidding.
At one point he said he wanted to introduce a child. Turned out it was his little boy Eric Trump. Right.
Finally, he announced he has plans to go to Mars.
I hope he goes sometime soon. Before 2024 would be ideal.
O.J. Simpson finally tackled in Las Vegas. 2007 Photo by Craig Moran.
Editor’s Note: Last month, on the anniversary of his acquittal, University of Maryland Professor Aryn Phillips and her father, Southern California lawyer Mark Phillips, wrote engrossingly of the murders that led football hero O.J. Simpson to lose his Heisman Trophy anyway.
They originally told the whole tale in 2016’s “Trials of the Century,” and graciously update it here for Drunk & Disorderly readers.
This month: the trial.
More than any other in the twentieth century, the trial of O. J. Simpson was the quintessential “trial of the century.” It was covered to saturation by both the electronic and print press, and avidly followed by consumers of spectacle, both in America and abroad. No trial before or since has captured the minds and passions of so many Americans, or sparked so much media attention.
Prosecutors were convinced of Simpson’s guilt. Held without bail, Simpson was arraigned at a preliminary hearing on June 20th, 1994, and the assistant district attorney assigned to the case, Marcia Clark, standing with District Attorney Gil Garcetti, declared in a press conference afterwards that Simpson was the sole murderer.
The first legal sparring came with the Grand Jury, where a prosecution sets out its case in secret without defense lawyers present. Simpson’s lawyers instead forced this presentation before the public in a preliminary hearing, allowing for their cross-examination of witnesses who are typically less thoroughly prepared than they would be for trial, at the disadvantage of having the community and the potential jury pool poisoned by the mostly negative testimony. On July 8th, after six days of hearing testimony, Judge Kathleen Kennedy-Powell declared that there was “ample evidence” to try Simpson on two counts of first-degree murder. On July 22nd, Simpson pleaded “absolutely one hundred percent not guilty” and the trial was assigned to Judge Lance A. Ito.
Because the murders were committed in the upscale West Los Angeles neighborhood of Brentwood, the district attorney’s office would have been within its rights, indeed would have kept with practice, by filing the charges in the Santa Monica judicial district where the crimes occurred. Instead, District Attorney Garcetti filed the case in the central district downtown, where the percentage of potential Black jurors was much higher, allegedly for the convenience of attorneys and court staff. It was a tactical decision later criticized as a “monumental blunder.”
That was evident when jury selection got underway on September 24th. Present that day were 250 potential jurors, attorneys Robert Shapiro and Johnnie Cochran for Simpson, and Marcia Clark and Bill Hodgman for the prosecution. Both sides were accompanied by jury consultants. The ultimately chosen jury of ten women and two men consisted of eight Blacks, two Hispanics, one Caucasian/Native American and one Caucasian female. The racial composition of the jury differed dramatically from that of the community, and even from the pool of prospective jurors, which had initially been 40% White, 28% Black, 17% Hispanic and 15% Asian.
Simpson quickly assembled for himself a powerful team of lawyers. Lead attorney Howard Weitzman gave way that first week to Robert Shapiro, perhaps as a consequence of Weitzman’s questionable early decision to allow Simpson to be interviewed under oath by police detectives Philip “Dutch” Vannatter and Tom Lange at Parker Center the day after the murders without counsel present. Though well-respected, Shapiro had not yet tried a murder case. He was soon joined by Johnnie Cochran, an experienced criminal defense attorney best known for his unsuccessful defense of Black Panther member Elmer “Geronimo” Pratt some twenty years earlier, and the more recent acquittal of Michael Jackson on child molestation charges. Next to come aboard was F. Lee Bailey, long past his youth but famous for the defenses of Sam Sheppard and Patty Hearst. Two New York lawyers, Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, were hired to handle the blood evidence, and nationally known Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz was retained to manage appellate issues. Arguably the best lawyers money could buy, they were quickly dubbed by the media the “Dream Team.”
Arrayed against them was the entire weight of the prosecutor’s office, marshaled under lead trial attorneys Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden. Clark was a prosecutor with fifteen years of experience, notable for having successfully prosecuted troubled fan Robert John Bardo for the murder of actress Rebecca Schaeffer in 1989. Darden, then thirty-eight, had gained a reputation for prosecuting police misconduct, and as an African American was thought to defuse the perception of racial bias on the part of prosecutors. They were joined by a small army of consultants, experts, investigators and attorneys. All told, twenty-five prosecuting attorneys were assigned to the case, thirteen full-time and twelve part-time.
After nearly two months of pre-trial motions, opening statements came on January 23, 1995. Over the following eight months, until jury deliberations began on October 2, 1995, the prosecution and defense together presented 150 witnesses, alternating by turns from sensational to mind-numbingly tedious. The jury chafed at the length of the proceedings, but the media reveled in it. Two hundred and fifty new phone lines had to be installed in the court’s pressroom to handle the needs of more than 1150 journalists credentialed to cover the trial. Of the fifty-eight seats in the courtroom, twenty-four were set aside for the press. Those reporters not seated inside roamed the corridors, interviewing anyone with any connection to the trial, and some without.
And of course the proceedings were televised. CNN, Court TV, and local station KTLA covered the trial live every day. Every other news organization summarized the daily proceedings, often with commentators — “talking heads” — of varying quality. On CNBC, attorney-turned-journalist Geraldo Rivera hosted a nightly roundup of each day’s testimony.
The live broadcast of criminal trials was then, and remains today, controversial. Judges, lawyers, and witnesses cannot resist performing for a television audience, and the interests of the criminal defendant suffers. The number of objections by counsel multiply exponentially as they perform for the cameras — in the Simpson trial an astonishing 16,000 times — and juries grow weary as trials lengthen. Measured against these disadvantages are the rights of citizens to witness a free and open courtroom dispensing justice in the manner the law requires. Of perhaps greater concern to the city of Los Angeles were the still raw memories of the riots two years earlier following the acquittal by a suburban White jury of the four police officers who beat Black motorist Rodney King. In that frightening and bitter week, fifty-three citizens died and more than a thousand buildings were torched.
After opening statements by both sides, the first prosecution witness, Los Angeles Police Department 911 dispatcher Sharyn Gilbert, took the stand at the end of January, 1995. She was followed by more than seventy witnesses over ninety-nine full trial days in a detailed and complex presentation by Los Angeles prosecutors. These witnesses were grouped into what attorneys Clark and Darden believed was a coherent system designed to prove the guilt of Simpson beyond a reasonable doubt, but the sheer number of witnesses and the length of the prosecution was daunting. The first group of witnesses included relatives and friends of both Simpson and his murdered ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson, whose testimony was intended to evidence Simpson’s former brutal treatment of Nicole and his documented history of abuse. They included Nicole’s sister Denise, Nicole’s friend Candace Garvey, wife of former Los Angeles Dodgers star Steve Garvey, and numerous friends, acquaintances, and neighbors. Simpson’s friend Ron Shipp testified that Simpson had confided on the night of the murder a dream of murdering Nicole. Police dispatchers and investigators testified to prior incidents of violence between the two, including the frantic call from Nicole that led to Simpson’s pleading of no contest in 1989 to spousal abuse. Various neighbors of Nicole testified to the behavior of the defendant and victim, including Carl Colby, son of former CIA director William Colby, who testified that he once called 911 after observing Simpson in front of Nicole’s condo peeping through her windows. This corroborated Grand Jury testimony that Simpson spied on Nicole as she had sex with other men, and intimidated them after. Staff members of Mezzaluna, the trendy West Side restaurant where Nicole and her family had dinner the night of the murder, testified to her last evening. It was because Nicole’s mother accidentally left her sunglasses at the restaurant that waiter Ronald Goldman was sent to return them to Nicole’s condo, an errand that cost him his life.
The second set of witnesses presented by the prosecution was offered to prove that Simpson had the time and opportunity to commit the murders, which the prosecution contended took place at approximately 10:15 that Sunday evening. Limo driver Allan Park repeated his testimony regarding Simpson’s suspicious behavior on the evening of the murders, and described the small black bag which Simpson would not let him touch. The bag was never seen again, suggesting how the murderer’s missing bloody clothes and murder weapon were disposed of. His testimony was followed the next day by that of James Williams, a skycap at the Los Angeles International Airport, who testified that he saw Simpson near a trash bin that night and that he had only three of the four bags that Park had said that he started with.
One of the trial’s most talked-about witnesses, houseguest Kato Kaelin, was able to establish Simpson’s timeline before and after the murders took place. The two had gone for a hamburger at McDonald’s, returning to Simpson’s Rockingham Avenue estate at 9:35. After that, Kaelin couldn’t account for Simpson’s whereabouts until after 11 p.m. when he helped O. J. load his luggage into the limousine. An instant celebrity to viewers with his bleach-blond hair and surfer mannerism, Kaelin’s testimony in the criminal trial was rambling, at times unclear. Deferential to Simpson, Kaelin denied noticing wounds or cuts on the defendant’s hands. Prosecutors struck back by declaring him a hostile witness, allowing more aggressive examination, but Kaelin’s testimony was not decisive for either side.
Contradicting Simpson’s expected testimony that he did not leave his house between 9:30 and 11 that night, the prosecution produced telephone records that Simpson used his cell phone from his car at 10:03 to call his girlfriend, Vogue model Paula Barbieri.
The final group of witnesses in the prosecution’s case-in-chief were those intended to tie Simpson directly to the murders. Detectives Ron Phillips, Lange, Mark Fuhrman, and Vannatter, along with Lieutenant Frank Spangler, detailed the circumstances of the murder, the investigations into the victims’ wounds, the visit to Simpson’s residence at 5 a.m. the next morning, and the eventual arrest of the defendant. What followed was long and technical testimony regarding the results of tests on blood, fibers, hair, and footprints from the crime scene and Simpson’s residence.
The blood evidence was the most telling. Forty-one blood samples were harvested from Nicole’s Bundy Drive condo, O. J.’s Bronco, the Rockingham Avenue driveway, and from his bathroom floor. Most but not all were subjected to DNA tests. PCR (polymerase chain reaction) tests are less precise but can be conducted on quite small blood samples. RFLP (restriction fragment length polymorphism) tests are more accurate but require larger samples. Police investigators conducted PCR tests on four of the five blood drops at the Bundy crime scene that led away from the bodies, and three of the four showed DNA markers consistent with Simpson alone out of every 240,000 people. The fourth blood drop had markers which only one out of 5,200 people could have, again including Simpson. The fifth blood drop was large enough for an RFLP test, and that showed markers carried by only one out of every 170,000,000 people, the equivalent of only 41 people on earth, including Simpson. The blood drop on the rear gate at Bundy was most definitive, with markers that only one out of 57 billion had, only one person on earth, and that one was Simpson. A second RFLP test on blood found on two black socks in O. J.’s bedroom tested positive for Nicole’s blood, with odds of one out of 6 billion having the same blood markers. This long and technical testimony, difficult for even lawyers to follow, occupied nearly twelve weeks of trial.
But in the midst of this testimony came what many saw as the turning point in the trial, the prosecution instruction to Simpson to try on the bloody gloves. They were unusual and uncommon gloves, with only a few hundred made, and there was both evidence of Simpson’s purchase of identical gloves and photos of him wearing them. There was no doubt that Simpson owned these gloves, or ones exactly like them. Yet still it was a reckless miscalculation by a prosecution so convinced of Simpson’s guilt that they chanced a demonstration without knowing with certainty that the gloves would fit.
It was a disaster. To all appearances struggling to pull the battered gloves on over latex under-gloves, Simpson said loud enough for the jurors to hear “They don’t fit.” The latex gloves may have inhibited the fit, or the leather gloves may have shrunk from wetness, exposure or nonuse, but it was a setback from which the prosecution never recovered.
On July 10th, Simpson’s lawyers began their defense-in-chief. They had scored numerous small victories in their cross-examination of the prosecution’s witnesses. Now they went on the offensive. Their argument was two-fold: first, that the blood evidence was collected and tested in such a way that it was corrupted and thus unreliable, and second, that Simpson was framed by the investigating officers, primarily Mark Fuhrman and Philip Vannatter, who the defense contended had dripped Simpson’s uncorrupted blood on the back gate of the crime scene, his driveway and his home, and had intentionally removed a bloody glove from the Bundy crime scene and planted it behind Kaelin’s guesthouse.
They began with an attack on the reliability of police testing procedures. The defense proved that the blood samples from the five blood drops at the Bundy condo were left after collection in the crime scene truck through the hot summer day following the murder, suggesting that it had degraded. The evidence was so complicated that defense attorney and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, arguably one of the smartest lawyers of his generation, later wrote that much of the evidence was incomprehensible to him. In the face of that complexity, the prosecution failed to point out, and the jury obviously failed to comprehend, that while degradation of blood evidence might cause analysis to fail to identify a defendant or a victim, no amount of degradation or mishandling could cause numerous samples to all point to Simpson.
As the defense presentation unfolded, the claim that Simpson had been framed resonated ever more clearly. The arguments for a police frame-up were based on circumstantial evidence but played well to the minority jury. The defense questioned the warrantless invasion of Simpson’s Rockingham residence early that following morning, challenging Vannatter’s testimony that he went simply to notify Simpson of the death of his ex-wife, that it took four detectives to do so, and that they only entered the property without a warrant when they became fearful that other victims might be inside. With Simpson in Chicago, the defense argued, a racist Mark Fuhrman took the opportunity to plant the bloody glove that he had allegedly brought from Bundy Drive.
The defense next discredited the police department’s chain of possession of the reference blood drawn from Simpson at Parker Center the day after the murder. Nurse Thano Peratis initially testified that he had collected 8 cc of blood from Simpson. Philip Vannatter admitted to taking possession of the vial of blood to turn it over to criminologist Fung, then at the Rockingham residence, rather than immediately checking it in to the evidence room at Parker Center. When evidence was presented that there were only 6.5 cc of blood in the vial, the defense argued persuasively that Vannatter had no valid reason to have been walking around for three hours on the day after the murders with a vial of Simpson’s blood in his pocket. His credibility damaged by his implied untruthfulness in entering the Rockingham estate without a warrant, it was only a short jump to the accusation that Vannatter had sprinkled the missing blood at Simpson’s residence.
There was also surprising testimony about the bloody glove found behind the Kaelin guesthouse at the Simpson residence. It was still wet and sticky at 5 a.m., when independent tests showed that blood exposed to the air for some seven hours should have dried. There was also no evidence of blood on the ground or leaves around it, although there was also no testimony that the police criminologists had searched for any. How Fuhrman could have spirited the glove from a crime scene bustling with fourteen patrol officers, none of whom had seen a second glove, was never explained, but in a courtroom charged with racism and conspiracy, no explanation was necessary.
But the most electrifying testimony came from detective Mark Fuhrman. Questioned by F. Lee Bailey whether he had ever used the “N” word in the past ten years, he responded that he had not. Yet in the possession of the defense were 13 hours of taped interviews that Detective Fuhrman had given to a professor and aspiring screen writer from North Carolina, Laura Hart McKinney. In those tapes, recorded between 1985 and 1994, he used the epithet some 40 times, along with racially tinged statements against Blacks, Jews, and other minorities. “Yeah we work with niggers and gangs,” he could be heard saying on the tapes. “You can take one of these niggers, drag ’em into the alley and beat the shit out of them and kick them. You can see them twitch. It really relieves your tension.”
With the jury absent on September 6, 1995, Fuhrman was asked by defense attorney Gerald Uelmen whether he had ever falsified a police report, planted or manufactured evidence in the Simpson case, and whether his testimony given at the preliminary hearing was completely truthful. To each question, Fuhrman asserted his 5th Amendment privilege not to incriminate himself. When the testimony ended, Simpson sat at the defense table, his face buried in his hands and crying.
Simpson never testified in his own defense.
Final summation by both sides occupied four days in the last week of September, 1995. Prosecutors Clark and Darden were nearly apologetic in tone. “Nobody,” Darden told the jury, “wants to do anything to this man.” They were uncentered, almost fatalistic. They made no attempt to explain, defend, or rehabilitate Fuhrman, and devoted little effort to point out the unlikelihood or even the practical absurdity of an entire police department impulsively conspiring to frame an innocent man.
By contrast, the defense came out swinging. Recognizing the weakness and complexity of their blood arguments, they devoted almost all of their energy to convincing the jury that Simpson had been framed for the murders by racist White officers. Cochran talked of almost nothing else. “Mark Fuhrman,” he told the jurors, “is a lying, perjuring, genocidal racist.” He compared him to Hitler. On September 29, he finally addressed the bloody glove. Rising above the almost indisputable evidence that the gloves belonged to Simpson, Cochran locked eyes with the jury and told them “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”
The jury retired for deliberations shortly after 9:00 a.m. on October 2nd, but in only four hours they notified Judge Ito that they had reached a verdict. The court adjourned with instructions that the verdict would be read at 10 the following morning, October 3rd.
The entire country came to a halt to hear the verdict that morning. Ninety-one percent of all televisions in operation in America were tuned to the coverage; only the first U.S. moon landing and the funeral of John F. Kennedy attracted a larger share of the audience. The LAPD went to full alert, arrayed against a repeat of the Rodney King riots. President Clinton was briefed on national security measures, then left the Oval Office to watch with staffers, one of an estimated 140,000,000 Americans tuned in. Larry King, host of CNN’s “Larry King Live,” told his viewers “If we had God booked, and O. J. was available, we’d move God.” Time magazine described it as the single most successful moment in television history.
To the surprise of most of America, the jury found Simpson not guilty.
The mostly Black jury, and most of Black America, saw the case as primarily about race. Even many who rejoiced at Simpson’s acquittal did not believe him to be innocent. He benefited from the anger Blacks felt at mistreatment by White law enforcement in general, and the oppressive LAPD in particular. And ironically, in many ways Simpson the individual had transcended race. He was famous, rich and popular, welcome at any restaurant, hotel, or club in any state in the nation. While not completely unsupportive, he was no champion of Blacks in America, nor a spokesman for Black causes. He was largely perceived as having abandoned his Black roots to move in a socially White world.
But skin color can never be erased, never forgotten, and Johnnie Cochran knew that. Black himself, he preached to the jury. In his now famous sing-song cadence, he cited Cicero, Frederick Douglas, and the Bible. He was escorted to the courthouse by bodyguards supplied by the Nation of Islam, resplendent in their perfectly pressed dark suits and trademark bow ties. He reportedly invited civil rights icon Rosa Parks to come sit in the courtroom and listen to closing arguments, but she refused. By positioning his client to a predominantly Black jury as a victim of framing by racist White policemen, he attained for Simpson a not-guilty verdict without the necessity of proving his innocence.
Vincent Bugliosi, the successful prosecutor of Charles Manson two decades earlier, was harshly critical of Garcetti, Clark, Darden, and indeed the entire prosecution team. “The prosecution of O. J. Simpson was the most incompetent criminal prosecution I have ever seen. By far,” he wrote in his book “Outrage.” “There have undoubtedly been worse. It’s just that I’m not aware of any.”
Released after fifteen months in jail, Simpson and his lawyers and friends celebrated that night at Rockingham, Simpson holding a Bible. “When things have settled down a bit,” he said, “I will pursue as my primary goal in life the killer or killers who slaughtered Nicole and Mr. Goldman.” He gave interviews and released a mail order video declaring his innocence, but no one has ever seriously suggested another suspect in the double murder.
The camaraderie between Simpson’s lawyers was short-lived. Disgusted with Cochran’s tactics, co-counsel Shapiro accused him the next day of playing the race card, echoing an opinion piece published six weeks earlier in the L.A. Times in which Joseph Wambaugh, former LAPD officer and best-selling author of “The Onion Field,” wrote:
The bottom line is this: although the crimes perpetrated in the King and Simpson cases had nothing to do with racism, the aftermath of those events had everything to do with racism. Johnnie Cochran has not only played the race card, he’s dealt it from the bottom of the deck.
Cochran fired back that Shapiro was suffering from a bruised ego, the result of his being supplanted as Simpson’s lead counsel. Bailey agreed with Cochran, and Shapiro replied that he’d never work with either lawyer again.
Two years later, after several months of trial in which Simpson was compelled to testify, a civil jury in Santa Monica found Simpson liable for the wrongful deaths of Ron and Nicole, ordering Simpson to pay $33,500,000 in damages. Little of that judgment was ever recovered. “I’m not going to work and give my money to Fred Goldman,” Simpson told CNN. In 1999, his Heisman trophy was auctioned off along with various other memorabilia. Valued as high as $4,000,000, it sold for only $230,000. Other items fetched another $100,000. One bidder paid $16,000 for various items including two jerseys with Simpson’s iconic number 32, and then burned them in protest on the steps of the Los Angeles courthouse. Simpson’s Rockingham residence, lost to foreclosure in 1997, was bulldozed by new owners in July of 1998. Surrounded by onlookers, this time police officers were present just to control traffic. His pension exempt from execution, Simpson continued to live his lavish lifestyle.
But miscellaneous civil, tax, and criminal problems continued to dog him, and he appeared in the news frequently in one scrape after another. Finally, in September of 2007, he led a group of armed men into a hotel room at the Palace Station Casino in Las Vegas to recover sports memorabilia allegedly stolen from him. Arrested two days later he was charged with multiple felonies including conspiracy, kidnapping, assault, robbery, and the use of a deadly weapon. Three co-defendants accepted plea deals in return for their testimony, and Simpson and co-defendant Clarence Stewart were convicted on all charges. On December 5, 2008, Simpson was sentenced to 33 years in prison and incarcerated at the minimum security correctional center in Lovelock, Nevada. He was released on October 1, 2017, having served almost nine years.
As the publicity surrounding the trial faded, so did the public’s interest in the other players in the Simpson drama. Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden both left the district attorney’s office after the trial and published books on the experience. Los Angeles District Attorney Gil Garcetti survived the loss and was re-elected in 1996. His second term was consumed by the controversy surrounding allegations of extreme police misconduct in the city’s Rampart Division, including the alleged framing of suspects, and he lost his bid for a third term. His son Eric was elected mayor of Los Angeles in 2013.
Johnnie Cochran continued to handle high profile cases, and to make frequent appearances as a commentator on television. He is mentioned in numerous television shows, movies, and even a Broadway play, and famously parodied in several episodes of Seinfeld in the character of Jackie Chiles. His boyhood middle school in Los Angeles was renamed for him. He died in 2005 from a brain tumor, aged 67. Among many other celebrities, Simpson attended his funeral in Inglewood, California.
F. Lee Bailey, one of the most famous lawyers of the second half of the twentieth century, endured a tumultuous fall from grace. Ordered to turn over assets in another case, he was jailed in 2000 for 44 days for contempt, and eventually disbarred. He died last year in Atlanta, Georgia.
Defense attorney Robert Shapiro also went on to other high-profile cases, and controversy. In widely publicized cases he sued former outfielder Darryl Strawberry for unpaid fees and was sued by record producer Phil Spector for the return of $1,000,000 in unearned fees. He is the public face for LegalZoom.com, an online document preparation service for nonlawyers.
Friend and lawyer Robert Kardashian, who sat at Simpson’s side throughout the trial, died of cancer in 2003 at the age of 59. After the acquittal he expressed misgivings about the jury’s decision. “I have doubts,” he told an ABC interviewer. “The blood evidence is the biggest thorn in my side; that causes me the greatest problems.” His children went on to fame as stars of the reality television show “Keeping Up with the Kardashians.”
Tough-talking Philip Vannatter died of cancer in January of 2012. His partner, Tom Lange, retired from the LAPD shortly after the acquittal, wrote a book with Vannatter, and became involved in other entertainment projects. Ron Phillips stayed on with the LAPD for at least another decade before his retirement.
On July 5, 1996, the Los Angeles prosecutor’s office announced the filing of perjury charges against Mark Fuhrman. In October of that year, he accepted a plea deal and pleaded no contest, later stating that he neither had the funds to defend himself nor was likely to receive a fair trial. Sentenced to probation and fined $200, Fuhrman’s is the only conviction achieved following the brutal murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. Fuhrman retired from the LAPD, moved to Idaho, and has written extensively on the Simpson murders and other cases.
That the Simpson case was ultimately about race was understood by the media immediately. It is tempting to believe that by 1995 a post–Civil Rights America had shrugged off its legacy of prejudice, but the reality is different. Most White Americans polled opine that the laws and institutions in America are color-blind, and this lets them rationalize the abolition of affirmative action and a judicial system that incarcerates a much greater percentage of Black males. In their turn, Black Americans feel abandoned by the loss of preferences that only sought to make up for the centuries-old head start that White Americans enjoy. Those beliefs did not change with Simpson’s acquittal.
Defense counsel Alan Dershowitz is more nuanced. While not asserting Simpson’s innocence, he believes that the prosecution intentionally put on a case it knew to be partially false, in order to prove what it honestly believed to be Simpson’s guilt. Such conduct being improper under the law, he contends Simpson to have been properly acquitted. Dershowitz wrote:
Only time will tell whether the O. J. Simpson trial was a great case that made bad law, or merely another media event that brought fleeting fame to all who participated in it. One observation that will not be disputed is that it was a case for the 1990s, involving as it did the most controversial and divisive issues of this decade: spousal abuse, racial politics, economic inequalities, scientific innovations, criticism of lawyers, and instant communication.
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
I’ve been handed a fair number of subpoenas that I just ignored. Most of them because they were improperly (not legally) served. One poor process server in Florida made the mistake of taking my hand and pushing the subpoena into it, then start to walk away; he got about two steps when I grabbed him by the back of his pants and stuffed the papers into his butt crack. The police officer he called said if it had been him he would have shoved it all the way up.
So I’m not insensitive to people who would like to ignore their subpoenas. But this other guy in Florida, who was just served an impeccably proper subpoena and seems intent to ignore it, is way outside the pale of sensitivity.
This wasn’t a subpoena served by some knucklehead in loose-fitting pants. These were elected knuckleheads, representatives of the American people, who want him to tell the people why he felt it was a good idea to overthrow an election he knew, months in advance, he would lose.
Who also want to know why he put so much of the money he raised from suckered citizens not into legitimate legal challenges, but into his own pocket; why he purposely and maliciously disseminated false allegations of election fraud, including to the nation’s courts; why he attempted his own election fraud by pressuring state officials and legislators to change the results of their state counts; what he did to encourage those folks to submit false electoral certificates to Congress; and why, when all that failed, he called an armed mob to the Capitol to see if they might persuade those representatives to simply not count the embarrassing electoral votes, with just the teensiest hint that unless the politicians complied they’d all be measured for extra-long turtlenecks.
The subpoena commands — subpoenas don’t ask — that he testify at a January 6th Committee deposition on 14 November, and that he stay there answering questions until they say he can go.
Of course he won’t do that. If he did he’d take the Fifth, the same right he says only mob bosses take. Why not? He was a mob boss on 6 January.
He’ll ignore it. Won’t go.
And then this is what I think should happen to him: he should be arrested and taken, kicking and screaming, blowing farts — whatever else big boys like him do when they are physically compelled to change geographic location — to the scene of the crime, to the U.S. Capitol Building he defiled.
By law, the House of Representatives has the inherent power, if not the courage or will, to arrest a recalcitrant witness and try him for contempt. Found guilty, they can jail him.
I think they should send their Sergeant at Arms himself, south to make the arrest. William Walker is former commanding general of the District of Columbia Army and Air Force National Guard. The fellow he’d arrest likes being in the company of generals; puffs him up. He might even be inclined to go peacefully.
If he isn’t, and if I were Walker, this is what I’d tell the criminal standing before me:
I understand you don’t want to come with us, and you need to understand that if you don’t come with us, without resistance, you will be drugged, and an animal your size comes under considerable danger from a drug dart. Fall the wrong way and your own weight can crush your larynx.
I saw a hippopotamus drugged like that once, and its weight choked off its airway and it died, and you might go that way too, the only difference being you won’t be mourned.
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
I thought the winters in Boston were cold, Till I met a man from Ukraine. The winters in Ukraine sounded cold, Till I met a man from Siberia. The winters in Siberia sounded really cold, Till I met a man from Mars. The winters on Mars sounded impossibly cold, Till I met a man from mental health. He tells me I’ll never know cold again.
