There’s another related but more subtle phenomenon at play here, and it’s that usually, people see what they expect to see or want to see, not what they are actually seeing. I believe it was Thoreau who spoke of the endless struggle to see what is right in front of our eyes. I don’t think I’m a particularly bright individual, but there are two qualities I long ago learned I did possess. One is the ability to separate the wheat from the chaff and see through to the core of a problem, usually very quickly. The second related quality (one which I have found is even more rare, and again has nothing to do with intelligence) is that when I read, see, or hear anything, for some reason I am totally uninfluenced by what has previously been said or written about the subject. I am able to form impressions simply on the basis of what I see taking place in front of me.
Here is just one example among a great many that come to mind. President Reagan has been called the great communicator, but the first time I heard him being interviewed years ago, it was immediately obvious to me he was not a good extemporaneous speaker, and that he was an effective communicator only when he was reading his lines from a TelePrompTer. His staff, of course, knew this, and this is the precise reason they kept presidential press conferences down to an absolute minimum, shielding him, whenever possible, from having to answer reporters’ questions. I picked up on the difference between Reagan speaking without a TelePrompTer and
with
one within a few minutes of the first time I saw him interviewed. What I had heard and read previously about Reagan’s supposedly superb oratorical skills meant absolutely nothing to me, having no influence on the opinion I formed about whether he was or was not an effective speaker and communicator. Yet the fact (it’s not an opinion) that Reagan without a TelePrompTer was not a good communicator was lost on millions of people, including columnists and the media, for many years. It has only been in recent years that it has become much better known.
In Reagan’s first debate with President Carter, Reagan was inarticulate and unknowledgeable. Moreover, he squirmed a lot and appeared nervous. In fact, there were moments when I felt embarrassed for him, as we all do when someone performing before us is not doing well. Carter, on the other hand, was organized, articulate, and very knowledgeable. There was no question in my mind he had won the debate on both substantive and stylistic grounds. Immediately after the debate the networks interviewed the staffs of both Carter and Reagan. Carter’s people were ebullient, and although they tried to hide it, Reagan’s were clearly morose. But about half an hour or so later, the results of television surveys started coming in from the folks back home in Des Moines, Omaha, Amarillo, Tampa, and elsewhere around the country. Reagan had won the debate hands down, according to the American public. And the survey respondents didn’t say it was because they simply liked Reagan more than Carter. No, they thought he performed better, knew what he was talking about more than Carter. What these people saw, of course, was not the actual debate. They saw what they expected to see. In their eyes, at least for debate purposes, they saw a peanut farmer from a one-stoplight town in rural Georgia against a famous Hollywood movie star. Obviously, the movie star is going to know how to perform and talk better than his opponent. That only stands to reason. I remember reading William Safire’s account of the debate a day or two later in the
New York Times
and I was happy to learn that he, too, was aware of Reagan’s dismal and embarrassing performance.
How could this tendency to see what we expect to see contribute to the verdict in the Simpson case? It is likely that the Simpson jury perceived the courtroom performances of the defense attorneys as being more effective than they were because they saw what they expected to see. And what they expected to see was the defense lawyers scoring a lot of points in their questioning of witnesses (whether they were doing so or not)
because
they were the Dream Team. If they were the Dream Team, they must be scoring a lot of points, and this all helps add up to reasonable doubt.
I saw the potential pernicious influence of the above phenomenon early on in the Simpson case, and it’s one of the reasons why, in the
Playboy
interview, I pointed out the absurdity of the media’s announcing that Simpson’s attorneys were the best that money could buy. As of the moment of writing this book, I have yet to read or hear any other commentator on the case scoffing at the idea that Simpson’s lawyers were the Dream Team and pointing out, instead, just how ordinary they really were. In fact, as I write these very words on my kitchen table, this is from today’s (December 31, 1995) editorial in the
Los Angeles Daily News
: “Simpson’s considerable personal wealth allowed him to hire
the best defense attorneys in the country
.”
There perhaps is no better example of the phenomenon of people seeing what they expect to see working to the prosecution’s very definite disadvantage than the situation with one of the defense’s expert witnesses, Dr. Henry Lee. Lee, director of the Connecticut State Forensic Science Laboratory, is reputed to be the preeminent dean of American forensic scientists, the “top forensic sleuth,” as it were. But I think we all know by now how suspect reputations can be, and if Lee’s testimony in the Simpson case is any indication at all of his abilities, he is nothing short of incompetent. At best, he’s an example of how Mark Twain once described an expert: “Just some guy from out of town.” The problem is that the jury couldn’t see through the bloated reputation of Dr. Lee, and the prosecution, in its summation, never exposed Lee so the jurors could see the emperor without his clothing on.
There were two particular areas in which Lee’s testimony, if believed by the jury, was very damaging to the prosecution. One, he testified that he found four small bloodstains on a paper bindle enclosing seven cotton swatches containing blood collected from one of the blood drops (Item 47) to the left of a bloody shoe print leaving the Bundy murder scene (later identified as Simpson’s blood by
DNA
testing). Lee couldn’t figure out how the blood could have leaked onto the paper when the swatches had been left out to dry overnight prior to their being packaged. The fact that there was no assurance the blood on all seven swatches had dried completely by the time they were wrapped in the bindles, or that the subsequently frozen swatches did not leak the blood later in the summer when they were thawed out for
DNA
testing, or that there was not some other innocent explanation (in virtually every case there are questions, the innocent answers to which are simply never learned) did not deter Lee from saying there was “something wrong,” a term that resonated with the jurors during their deliberations. The implication the defense sought to convey, of course, was that the answer lay in evil
LAPD
conspirators who crept into the
LAPD
lab in the middle of the night and planted and tampered with the blood evidence.
Lee also testified that he found three key “imprints” on the terra-cotta walkway at the crime scene which he himself photographed when he went to the scene on June 25, 1994. They did not match the many size-12 Bruno Magli bloody shoe prints at the scene which the prosecutors said belonged to Simpson. One was definitely a shoe print, he testified, one was a “parallel line imprint,” and the other he simply called an “imprint.” The latter two “could be” shoe prints, he said, all of which raised the inference of a second assailant. This, of course, challenged the prosecution’s position that Simpson was the lone killer, and hence challenged their conception of the entire case against him.
Lee also found bloody “parallel line imprint” patterns on the envelope found at the murder scene containing the glasses belonging to Nicole’s mother which she had left at the Mezzaluna restaurant earlier in the evening and which Ron Goldman was returning when he was murdered, on a small, triangular piece of paper near the bodies, and on Ron Goldman’s jeans. Lee testified that all of these imprints could possibly be partial shoe prints, and since he concluded they were not from the Bruno Maglis or Ron Goldman’s shoes, the defense suggested they came from the shoe of the second assailant.
But William Bodziak, the FBI’s senior expert on shoe prints, and the former chairman of the footwear and tire section of the International Association for Identification, later debunked all of Lee’s conclusions. Bodziak told me he went back to the Bundy crime scene with copies of photographs Lee had taken on June 25 to examine the shoe print and the other two imprints on the walkway which Lee said “could be” shoe prints. What he found was astonishing. With blown-up color photographs, he pointed out to the jury that one of the imprints (the parallel line one) on the walkway Lee had photographed and testified to was actually tool (trowel) marks made by the workers in the laying of the cement years earlier, and the other imprint was a shoe print from one of these workers which was a permanent indentation in the concrete (ridges, depressions) that Bodziak felt with his own hands! The third imprint which Lee had testified was a bloody shoe print was, in fact, a shoe print, but the prosecution proved it was not left at the time of the murders.
LAPD
photographs on June 13 of the same area Lee photographed on June 25 do not show the shoe print, proving it was the shoe print of someone (police, criminalists, perhaps even the postman, etc.) who left it there after the 13th, but before all the blood was washed away several days later.
As to the bloody “parallel line imprint” patterns on the envelope, paper, and jeans Lee had suggested could possibly have come from the shoes of a second assailant, Bodziak said that none of them were shoe prints. The parallel line imprints on the right leg of Ron Goldman’s blue jeans were too erratic to be shoe prints and also had no borders representing the edge of any heel or sole. They appeared to be consistent with having been made by a swiping or brushing motion against the jeans by a sleeve from Goldman’s long-sleeved shirt, which was thick and roughly textured. Bodziak testified that he found a “striking similarity between the ribbed design on the shirt [taken from test impressions]” and the bloody imprint on the shirt. (
FBI
special agent Douglas Deedrick, an expert on fiber evidence, had previously testified that the bloody imprint on the jeans appeared to have come from fiber such as that on Goldman’s shirt.) As to the small (“half the size of one’s thumb”) bloody imprint on the envelope, it too was not a part of a shoe print, again having no borders, being too erratic, and the patterns being so fine and small as to be uncharacteristic of any shoe sole or heel Bodziak had ever seen. Bodziak testified that the parallel lines were consistent with a “fabric” pattern, and could have come from the jeans or shirt of Goldman. Bodziak also testified that the bloody imprint on the piece of paper wasn’t a shoe print, and even if it had been, it would have had to come from the shoe of a tiny child.
Lee demonstrated further incompetence in the forensic technique he employed to reach his conclusions. He made no test impressions of Ron Goldman’s Levi jeans and shirt (although photographs were taken of the small piece of paper, the
LAPD
criminalists did not collect it). This was shocking to Bodziak. He testified: “You could look at the fabric on my sleeves with a magnifying glass, but because of its three-dimensional quality, you could not determine what the exact pattern would look like in a test impression. It is absolutely essential to make test impressions for comparison purposes. It is the
only
way that you can make a valid comparison.”
Lee, stung and wounded by the obvious repudiation of his conclusions by the FBI’s shoe print expert (Lee’s specialty is not shoe prints), told reporters from his laboratory in Connecticut that although he stuck to his conclusions, “I’m sorry I ever got involved in the Simpson case,” and said he would probably resist any defense subpoena to return to Los Angeles to defend himself and his conclusions.
As it turned out, he didn’t have to defend or rehabilitate himself. His reputation was enough for the jury, which should have been skeptical of every single one of his conclusions once his shoe print and imprint testimony was proved to be claptrap. The foreperson of the jury, Armanda Cooley, said in the book she coauthored on the case,
Madam Foreman
: “Dr. Henry Lee was a very impressive gentleman. Highly intelligent,
world-renowned
. I had a lot of respect for Dr. Lee.” Lee’s discredited testimony hadn’t lessened his stature in Cooley’s mind one iota. Juror Lionel (Lon) Cryer told the
Los Angeles Times
right after the verdict that the jury viewed Lee as “the most credible witness” of all at the trial. Cryer repeated Lee’s statement that “there was something wrong,” saying the jury took these words back to the jury room with them. “Dr. Lee had a lot of impact on a lot of people,” he added.
Lee’s reputation didn’t just have an impact on the members of the jury. Remarkably, after Lee testified for the defense on direct examination, Judge Ito looked down at Hank Goldberg, the deputy district attorney scheduled to cross-examine Lee, and said: “Frankly, if I were in your shoes I would cross-examine Dr. Lee for no more than half an hour. Accentuate the positive in a friendly and professional manner,
given his reputation, and then get out
.” Can you imagine that? Even David Margolick, the
New York Times
reporter who covered the trial in an expert fashion, and who should have known better, told his readers (before Bodziak testified) that Lee was “largely unassailable.”
Ito and Margolick, at least for the moment, apparently forgot that all things and all people in life have to sink or swim on their own merits, not their reputation; that just as a wise man can say a foolish thing, a fool can say something wise.
In effect, Ito told Goldberg not even to bother cross-examining Lee because, as Margolick said, he was essentially “unassailable.” (Oh, yes.
Newsweek
’s assessment of Dr. Lee, even after he had been discredited by William Bodziak? “The best witness money can buy.”) So in an indirect, insidious way, because the much greater part of mankind only hears the music, not the lyrics, of human events, the jury’s viewing the defense attorneys as stars, the Dream Team, the best in the legal profession (as they viewed Dr. Lee to be the best in his profession), most likely contributed to their perception of the evidence and what was taking place before their eyes.