What I did see, however, were jurors who (1) clearly did not have too much intellectual firepower and (2) were biased in Simpson’s favor, most likely from the start. But a powerfully presented case and summation—which we were light years away from in this case—in which you put bibs on the jury and spoon-feed them, can virtually always be counted on to overcome both of these problems. In fact, a jury with problems like the Simpson jury is simply one of the obstacles that a competent prosecutor has to sometimes deal with. And this jury wasn’t quite as dense as some have felt. In posttrial interviewing, nearly all have proved to be fairly articulate, two having college degrees. The
only
kind of juror you can’t turn around would be one who was determined to let Simpson get away with these murders even if he or she had no doubt at all Simpson was guilty. But it would be an extremely rare occurrence for even one juror to have this outrageous and unconscionable attitude, much less all twelve. You’d have to be a bad human being to knowingly and deliberately give someone two free murders. And I don’t believe these twelve jurors were bad people. Being biased and being bad are two very different things. If the case had been properly prosecuted, not only would a conviction have been likely, but at an absolute minimum it would have been a hung jury.
Yet the misconception persists among most Americans (at least those who haven’t read this book) that the prosecution did an excellent job, and it was completely the fault of the jury. Chris Darden, one of the two lead prosecutors, has done his part to perpetuate this myth in his book,
In Contempt
. When one separates the wheat from the chaff,
In Contempt
has just one paragraph, the very first paragraph of the book, on why the Simpson case was lost. Even though the thrust of the paragraph is ridiculous and false on its face, no one apparently has challenged Darden on it. In the paragraph Darden says that he knew there was going to be a not-guilty verdict “from the beginning, from the moment I walked into that courtroom…and saw that jury. I could see in their eyes the need to settle a score.” “From the beginning,” he told Barbara Walters on March 15, 1996, “from the very moment I saw that jury, I didn’t believe we had a snowball’s chance in hell of convicting O. J. Simpson.”
So Darden, with highly refined and elegant powers of perception (we’ll prove throughout this book how extremely undeveloped these powers of his actually were), saw, for instance, in the eyes of the Simpson foreperson, a very pleasant and decent-looking woman, the need to give Simpson two free murders. But did Darden also see this in the eyes of the twenty-two-year-old young woman who worked for an insurance company in Burbank, and who happened to be white? Unless he has forgotten, she voted not guilty, too.
But of course, when Darden talks about a “need to settle a score,” i.e., get even, he obviously is referring to the predominantly black jury. It would be reprehensible enough for Darden to think so little of his own race that he accuses them, in so many words, of deliberately violating their oath to base their verdict on the evidence and, in effect, knowingly give Simpson two free murders to settle some score. But it becomes particularly odious when he doesn’t believe this, and is only making the charge to use the jury as a scapegoat for his and Marcia Clark’s incompetence. In writing this book, I spoke many times with eight or nine out of the twenty-five prosecutors assigned to the Simpson prosecution team. One of these prosecutors told me: “How could Chris say what he did in his book? When he joined the prosecution team (after the jury had been selected), he was just as confident of a conviction in this case as we all were.” Darden himself reveals his true feelings in the fourth paragraph of his book, also on page one. He quotes himself as saying, when the verdict of not guilty was read: “My God, my God, my God, my God.” Were I to cross-examine Darden, I’d ask him: “Chris, why were you so shocked and surprised by the verdict? According to you, you already knew, nine and one-half months earlier, that the case was lost.” And on page 327 of his book, he quotes himself as telling District Attorney Gil Garcetti after the failed glove demonstration: “Gil, it’s not over yet. We’ll still get him. I promise.” Didn’t Darden bother to read the book that he coauthored with writer Jess Walter?
The media has unthinkingly accepted Darden’s position. “It is accepted wisdom now,”
Newsweek
told its readers on September 30, 1996, “that prosecutors lost the criminal trial virtually the day the predominantly African-American jury was sworn in.” Yes, the accepted “wisdom” of all those who haven’t read this book. But as the
Los Angeles Times
said in its review of
Outrage
, “No one who reads this book will ever again believe that the most publicized acquittal in the history of American jurisprudence was solely the result of juror prejudice or the machinations of unscrupulous defense attorneys. The D.A. and the prosecutors have been called before the bar of justice.”
In fact, before the book you are about to read was published in early June of 1996, not one public figure, commentator, or writer was blaming the prosecution for the result in this case. (Alan Dershowitz, in his book
Reasonable Doubts
, was the only one who even said the prosecution was partially responsible for the result, but Dershowitz doesn’t mention any of the tremendous number of enormous blunders set forth, page after page, in this book, and the blunder Dershowitz claims the prosecution made—calling Mark Fuhrman to the stand—wasn’t a blunder at all. They had no choice
but
to call him. See discussion on pages 163–164).
Since the publication of this book, many pundits and writers now say the prosecution, to one degree or another, was inept. A case in point, which I want to elaborate on since it is illustrative of what has taken place, is author Jeffrey Toobin’s later book,
The Run of His Life
. Toobin covered the trial for
The New Yorker
magazine. In his October 16, 1995, wrap-up article (almost a year before publication of his book), not only doesn’t he criticize the prosecution’s performance in any way whatsoever, but he writes: “
It is difficult to imagine how else Clark might have tried her case
…. there appears to have been no one thing the prosecution could have done—or undone—that would have changed the result in this case…. The result, it now seems, was pre-ordained.” He describes Clark as being “at times, brilliant.” But as the review of Toobin’s later book in the
New York Times Book Review
on September 29, 1996, points out, Toobin now suddenly finds all types of problems with the prosecution’s performance. The reviewer writes: “Mr. Toobin may claim that the inadequacies of Ms. Clark and Mr. Darden were revealed only gradually, but in his book he criticizes Ms. Clark at the same stages of the trial during which he praised her in his magazine pieces. For example, his glowing profile of her was published shortly after what the book describes as her disastrous, misguided jury selection, which he implies may have lost the case. Of course, he is entitled to change his mind,
but without any explanation
his divergent reports raise questions about his credibility. You want to put him under oath and cross-examine him.”
When I said earlier that a superior presentation in the Simpson case would have resulted in a guilty verdict, this, of course, presupposes Simpson’s guilt for these two murders. But about that there can be no doubt. As I said in a
Playboy
magazine interview before the trial commenced: “No matter the outcome of the trial, O. J. Simpson is guilty. There can be no doubt in the mind of any reasonable person.” In fact, the question in the Simpson case has never been whether he is guilty or not guilty but, given the facts and circumstances of this case, whether it is possible for him to be innocent. And the answer to that question has always been an unequivocal no. In all my years, other than in cases where the killer has been apprehended during the perpetration of the homicide, I have never seen a more obvious case of guilt.
To distill this case down to its irreducible minimum (and temporarily ignoring all the other evidence pointing inexorably to Simpson’s guilt), if your blood is found at the murder scene, as Simpson’s was conclusively proved to be by
DNA
tests, that’s really the end of the ball game. There is nothing more to say. (And in this case, not only was Simpson’s blood found at the murder scene, but the victims’ blood was found inside his car and home.) I mean, to deny guilt when your blood is at the murder scene is the equivalent of a man being caught by his wife
in flagrante delicto
with another woman and saying to her (quoting comedian Richard Pryor), “Who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes?”
At the crime scene there were five blood drops leading away from the slain bodies of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman toward the rear alley, four of which were immediately to the
left
of bloody size-12 shoe prints (Simpson’s shoe size). This indicated, of course, that the killer had been wounded on the left side of his body. And the morning after the murders, Simpson was observed by the police to be wearing a bandage on his left middle finger. When the bandage was removed that afternoon, it was seen that he had a deep cut on the knuckle of the finger.
DNA
(deoxyribonucleic acid) is the genetic material found in all human cells that carries the coded messages of heredity unique (with the exception of identical twins) to each individual.
DNA
, then, is our genetic fingerprint. Each of the approximately 100 trillion cells in a human body contains twenty-three pairs of chromosomes—one of each pair coming from one’s father, the other from the mother—which contain
DNA
molecules. In criminal cases,
DNA
can be extracted from samples of blood, semen, saliva, skin, or hair follicles found at a crime scene and then compared to
DNA
drawn from a suspect to determine if there is a “match.”
DNA
testing is a new forensic science, first used in Great Britain in 1985 and in the United States in 1987.
DNA
tests on all five blood drops and on three bloodstains found on the rear gate at the crime scene showed that all of this blood belonged to Simpson. Two
DNA
tests were used,
PCR
(polymerase chain reaction) and
RFLP
(restrictive fragment length polymorphism). The
PCR
test is less precise than the
RFLP
, but can be conducted on much smaller blood samples as well as samples that have degenerated (“degraded”) because of bacteria and/or exposure to the elements.
PCR
tests were conducted on four out of the five blood drops. Three showed that only one out of 240,000 people had
DNA
with the genetic markers found in the sample. (A marker is a gene that makes up one portion of the
DNA
molecule, and the more markers in the sample, the more comparison tests can be conducted, and hence the greater the exclusion of other humans.) Simpson was one of these people. The fourth blood drop had markers which one out of 5,200 people could have. Simpson was one of these people. The fifth blood drop had sufficient markers for an
RFLP
test, and showed that only one out of 170 million people had
DNA
with those markers. Again, Simpson’s blood did. The richest sample was on the rear gate, and an
RFLP
test showed that only one out of 57
billion
people had those markers. Simpson was one of them. In other words, just on the blood evidence alone, there’s only a one out of 57 billion chance that Simpson is innocent. Fifty-seven billion is approximately ten times the current population of the entire world.
Now I realize that Igor in Kiev, Gino in Naples, Colin down Johannesburg way, and Kartac on Pluto might have the same
DNA
as O. J. Simpson. If you’re a skeptic I wouldn’t blame you if you checked to see if Igor, Gino, Colin, or Kartac was in Brentwood on the night of the murders, used to beat Nicole within an inch of her life, had blood all over his car, driveway, and home on the night of the murders, had no alibi, and, if charged with the murders, would refuse to take the witness stand to defend himself. Who knows—maybe Simpson isn’t the murderer after all. Maybe Igor or one of the others is. You should definitely check this out. And while you’re checking it out, someone should be checking you in to the nearest mental ward.
To elaborate on the irreducible minimum mentioned earlier, there are only three possible explanations other than guilt for one’s blood being found at the murder scene, and all three are preposterous on their face. One is that Simpson left his blood there on an earlier occasion. When Simpson was interrogated by
LAPD
detectives on the day after these murders, he said he had not cut himself the last time he was at the Bundy address a week earlier. But even without that, how can one believe that on some prior occasion Simpson bled, not just on the Bundy premises, but at the precise point on the premises where the murders occurred? In fact, so far-fetched is this possibility that even the defense attorneys, whose stock-in-trade during the trial was absurdity, never proffered it to the jury.
And here, not only was Simpson’s blood found at the murder scene, but as stated, four out of the five drops of Simpson’s blood were found just to the left of the killer’s bloody shoe prints leaving the murder scene. If there is someone who isn’t satisfied even by this, I would suggest that this book is perhaps not for you, that you think about pursuing more appropriate intellectual pursuits, such as comic strips. When I was a kid, one of my favorites was
Mandrake the Magician
. You might check to see if Mandrake is still doing his thing.
The second possibility is that Simpson cut himself while killing Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown in self-defense—that is, either Ron or Nicole or both together unleashed a deadly assault on Simpson, and he either took out a knife he had on his own person or wrested Ron’s or Nicole’s knife away, and stabbed the two of them to death. This, of course, is just too insane to talk about. Again, even the defense attorneys, who apparently possess the gonads of ten thousand elephants, never suggested this possibility. It should be added parenthetically that if such a situation had occurred, Simpson wouldn’t have had any reason to worry, since self-defense is a justifiable homicide, a complete defense to murder.