News of the escape spread like a Santa Ana wind. The phones in the press office were ringing wild. I felt strangely numb. As I drove home that night, I was too bummed to listen to the nonstop reports on drive-time radio.
The boys were with their father that weekend. I just tossed my bags into a corner and slumped into a chair at the kitchen table, trying to summon the energy to throw something together for dinner. Shoulda picked up fast food. At 6:30 P.M., maybe a little after, the phone rang. It was Phil.
“Turn on your TV,” he told me.
There he was. Our fugitive in a white Ford Bronco, ghosting down the freeway, police cruisers following at a discreet distance. Commentators were calling it a chase, but it looked more like a presidential motorcade. Of course, unless he’s assassinated, a president never gets this kind of coverage. I surfed the dial. It was incredible. This surreal slo-mo spectacle was being carried by all three networks. (NBC even cut away briefly from the NBA playoff game. This was serious.)
Certain images burned themselves into my memory. The sunlight streaming across Al Cowlings’s jaw. The ghoulish frenzy of spectators waving placards: “Go, Juice.” An amorphous dark blob in which popular historians would struggle to find the outline of a man holding a gun to his head. Ninety-five million people watching a police drama unfolding in prime time! It was one of those peculiarly American experiences that, for years afterward, would lead strangers to ask one another, “Where were you when O. J. skipped?”
On the evening of June 17, 1994, I knew that I was at the very epicenter of this event, and yet I felt light-years away from it. I couldn’t watch for more than a few minutes. I don’t know if that was because it was too painful, or because I was just too disgusted. Sometimes you have to distance yourself from things to stay objective. I told myself that the risk to public safety was minimal. Simpson did have a gun, but he was not a serial killer. He would be caught, or he would be shot.
The jerk.
T
ake Two
I Could never bring myself to call him O.J. And it galled me when everyone else did. No one referred to Charles Manson as Chuck. Yet even the people on my own team would talk about “O.J. this,” and “O.J. that.” I had zero tolerance for it. “O.J.‘s the ballplayer,” I’d tell them. “This is ‘the defendant.’ ” At one point, we even began fining offenders twenty-five cents each time they slipped. Bill Hodgman set out a big glass jar to collect the levy. The jar slowly filled with quarters. Not one of them came from me.
I didn’t hate Orenthal James Simpson. At least I don’t like to think of it that way. Hate is not an emotion that a prosecutor can afford. Hate clouds your thinking and distorts your priorities. The public, by and large, doesn’t understand that. When they see you standing up in court leveling allegations against the man in the dock, they assume that your conviction must spring from some deep personal animosity. Usually that’s not the case. You must never be drawn into a vendetta against the defendant. You can’t let it get personal.
Having gone on record with that noble sentiment, let me say that I reserve the right to consider Orenthal Simpson unregenerate, low-life scum.
Prosecutors do not think much of defendants as a class. I’m no exception. I enjoyed a brief and unrewarding career as a criminal defense attorney. After I graduated from Southwestern University School of Law in 1979, I was taken on as an associate by a criminal defense firm, where I was assigned primarily to represent drug dealers. I was okay defending the dopers. After all, I was a child of the sixties. “Skip a little rope; smoke a little dope”—that was my motto. I’d wrap myself in the flag and declaim self-righteously about the Fourth Amendment, how it protected us all against unlawful searches and seizures. I sprang some dubious clients and had few qualms about it.
But after a few months, I started drawing the violent crimes. Now my clients, for the most part, were defendants whose greed or stupidity had wrecked not only their own lives but the lives of everyone around them. For me, the thrill of victory was no longer enough, because every time I scored an acquittal, I had to reckon with the possibility that I might have released another rabid dog onto the streets.
The moment of truth came while I was assigned to help defend a man charged with multiple murders. They were vicious crimes, but the D.A.‘s office didn’t have the evidence.
To a defense attorney, that’s very good news. My assignment was to draft a motion to dismiss. And I did one hell of a job; several days later, my boss, Jeff Brody, came in to tell me my motion had been granted. Instead of feeling jubilant, though, all I could think of was that I might have helped spring a murderer.
My face must have betrayed my conflict. “Don’t worry, Marcia,” Jeff reassured me. “The prosecution will refile.” (Indeed, they did.) And then he gave me a piece of solid advice.
I think you’d feel more comfortable as a prosecutor.”
He was right about that. Every defendant is entitled to competent counsel—but it didn’t have to be me. So I got myself over to the CCB for an interview with John Van de Kamp, who was then the D.A. of Los Angeles County. I threw myself on his mercy. “I can’t do criminal defense,” I told him. “I won’t do civil. This is the only job I want.”
Van de Kamp hired me and I took the prosecutor’s oath to represent the People. Now,
that
was an idea I could get behind. The People—especially those who have been victimized by brutal crimes—have just as strong a right to advocacy as defendants do. Prosecution was a fierce calling, and one I felt I could pursue with dignity.
I never worried that I’d do my job so well that an innocent man would go to jail. There were too many checks against such abuses. The grand jury wouldn’t return an indictment. A judge would throw out the case. And even if those system checks went haywire, there was a fail-safe: my own conscience. I could never throw myself into the pitched battle of a major criminal trial unless I believed in my head, heart, and soul that the defendant was guilty. When the Simpson case fell into my lap, I had been on the job for fourteen years. I had prosecuted literally thousands of defendants. I could feel a clench in my gut when I realized we had the right man.
By the time O. J. Simpson finally surrendered at his home the night of June 17, 1994, there was absolutely no doubt in my mind that he was the one. That familiar twist in my stomach confirmed it. Even before the blood, we had a strong case. But the blood clinched it. His blood was on Nicole’s walk. Nicole’s blood and that of Ron Goldman were on the glove from Rockingham. My God, the trail of blood
literally
led to Simpson’s bedroom. From where I was sitting, it was dead-bang.
Somebody, probably Suzanne, had given me the tape of Robert Kardashian reading Simpson’s so-called suicide letter, a travesty I’d managed to catch for only a few seconds when it was broadcast live. I took it home and, on the Saturday after the chase, I ejected a Disney tape from the VCR in my living room, parked myself on the couch, and watched the whole sorry performance.
“Please don’t feel sorry for me… . I’ve had a great life, made great friends. Please think of the real O.J. and not this lost person.”
He sent his “love and thanks” to all his friends. He started ticking off golfing buddies. Golfing buddies!
Are you fucking kidding? Your children are left motherless and all you can talk about is yourself, the media, and your golfing buddies?
The only pain he could feel was his own. That kind of total preoccupation with self is the mark of a sociopath. I’d seen it before. These guys commit unspeakable acts and yet somehow things get twisted around in their heads so that
they
are the victims. Simpson’s behavior hardly surprised me.
The question being kicked around our office by the end of the week was whether or not Shapiro would try some kind of mental defense. Would he try to claim a temporary insanity that absolved Simpson of responsibility—switching the penalty from life in prison to an indeterminate spell in a mental hospital? Gil was convinced that Simpson would do this by asserting some Menendez-type plea; at the very least he would argue it was a crime of passion. Over the weekend, on
This Week with David Brinkley
, Gil said, “It wouldn’t surprise me if at some point we go from ‘I didn’t do it’ to ‘I did it, but I’m not responsible.’ ” (It made me a little nervous that Gil was speaking so frankly to the media, but I trusted his judgment; I also understood that the defense, with its own outrageous pandering to the media, was forcing Gil onto the hustings.) David and I also thought there was a pretty good chance of a mental defense. I was actually hoping Simpson would try it. I had cut the legs out from under Robert Bardo, and I knew the drill—even a sociopath knows the difference between right and wrong.
Over the weekend, Simpson had been placed in the high-security wing of the Men’s Central Jail, under a suicide watch. Reporters were scratching and clawing for information about him. And Shapiro cheerfully obliged them by slinging them maudlin slops. Sunday was Father’s Day and Simpson, he said, had started to weep at the thought of not spending this day with his children. The press lapped that drivel right up. It was incredible. Here you had two people slaughtered like animals and yet the media coverage was actually creating sympathy for the suspect.
That weekend, I was working at home, sitting cross-legged on my bed with my laptop cradled between my knees. The phone rang. It was Shapiro.
“Hey, Bob, when’s the real lawyer coming in?” I needled him. On the surface it was good-natured, but after the chase—a debacle for which he bore no small responsibility—I really wasn’t joking. I figured that he’d be stepping aside to let a high-octane criminal attorney take over.
“I’m staying with this case, Marcia,” he said, seeming to ignore the taunt. “I’m in it to the end.”
“Stop it, you’re killing me,” I said. Now I got totally serious. “Come on, who’s the real lawyer going to be?”
“I mean it: I’m staying with the case.”
“Well, we’re filing the complaint on Monday. Are you going to ask for a continuance?”
He said they probably would. This was standard procedure. Defense attorneys usually try to postpone the plea to give them a chance to review the evidence and see whether there’s room for negotiation. And so I expected that when we all went down to Municipal Court, the hearing would last only long enough for the judge to set a new date for arraignment. From there, we would head straight back to the real show—the grand jury.
The next morning, David and I had taken our places at the counsel table when the bailiffs brought Simpson out of the holding cell. I didn’t have to look up to know he’d entered the courtroom. Spectators rustled in their seats. The reporters snapped to, straining forward to see the sheriff’s deputies and, finally, the prisoner enter the court. I raised my head and got my first glimpse of O. J. Simpson.
He looked like he’d been sleeping on the street. He wore a dark suit that seemed to sag on his body. In accordance with rules of the suicide watch, he wore no belt or shoelaces. His features were slack, his manner distracted. I suspected he was tranked. He looked half-angry, half-scared, utterly deflated. In the coming months I would watch an alert, carefully coached O. J. Simpson put on an affable, confident face for the jury and the world to see. And I would remember the way he looked this first morning. A common thug, collared.
Shapiro stood close to him, patting his shoulder, whispering in his ear, fawning. Seemed to me he wanted to be close enough to his client to make sure he was in the photos. The municipal judge, Patti Jo McKay, took the bench and we all sat down. When she asked Simpson if he was ready to enter his plea, I opened my calendar, ready to pick a new arraignment date. And to my shock, I heard Shapiro answer, “Yes, Your Honor, Mr. Simpson is ready to enter his plea.”
No continuance. The son of a bitch
.
Had Shapiro deliberately misled me? Fortunately, an arraignment is a routine procedure that most prosecutors can do in their sleep. I looked down at the complaint:
Count 1:
Orenthal James Simpson willfully, unlawfully and with malice aforethought murdered Nicole Brown Simpson on or about June 12, 1994, in Los Angeles County… .
Count 2:
Orenthal James Simpson willfully, unlawfully and with malice aforethought murdered Ronald Goldman on or about June 12, 1994, in Los Angeles County… .
Everything was standard, except for one thing. David and I had carefully worded a clause invoking “special circumstances.” As I’ve explained, this means that the crime was particularly heinous—in this case a double murder. Invoking the clause allowed us to consider the death penalty.
“Orenthal James Simpson, is that your true name, sir?” I asked him. He wouldn’t meet my eyes. He mumbled “Yes.”
“To the charges stated in Counts One and Two of the complaint, how do you plead, guilty or not guilty?”
Simpson’s reply of “Not guilty” was jumbled. In fact, it was barely coherent.
Then Bob Shapiro did something that shocked me—something that prefigured the Grand Guignol that this case was destined to become.
Shapiro beseeched the court to allow Mr. Simpson to redo his plea.
You could have scraped me off the floor. Did he think this was a goddamned soundstage? “Simpson plea: take two!”
I watched helplessly as the judge allowed Shapiro’s outrageous request. This time Simpson, drawing on the thespian skills doubtless honed by his work in
The Towering Inferno
, reached down inside himself and hit the mark. He restated his plea of “Not guilty” in a clear, strong James Earl Jones cadence. Enraged, I watched as Shapiro, his comically heavy eyebrows knitted in a show of concern, patted his client on the shoulder, congratulating him on his improved performance.
And then suddenly, without warning, it was my turn to perform. Suzanne Childs grabbed me outside the courtroom. “Marcia, you’ve got to go downstairs with David and Gil,” she said. “The press is waiting.”
It wasn’t that I was a novice in front of the cameras. Bardo, you’ll recall, was one of the first cases broadcast live on Court TV, and the Hawkins case had received its share of headlines as well. I had never gotten comfortable with press conferences and interviews; the media had become such an intrusive presence in judicial proceedings that you could deplore them, but hardly ignore them.