The Search for Justice (58 page)

Behind the families were the friends. From where I sat at the end of the defense table, I could see them all. Steve and Candace
Garvey. The musician David Foster and his wife Linda, formerly married to Bruce Jenner. Bruce Jenner with his wife, Kris,
formerly married to Bob Kardashian. In spite of their differences and personal histories, all of these couples had raised
children and stepchildren together, going to O.J. and Nicole ’s for birthdays and barbecues. Since the murders, many of the
friendships had ended. Now they were sitting uncomfortably close, waiting tensely as the story moved to its conclusion.

As Marcia Clark began speaking, Tanya Brown dropped her head into her hands and sighed audibly enough to be heard. O.J. was
breathing heavily. The jury was completely riveted on Marcia. She was almost matter-of-fact, yet soft.

She knew that she had to separate her own credibility from Mark Fuhrman ’s. She came down hard on him. “Did he lie about the
n
word?” she asked, and then answered, “Yes. Do we wish no such person belonged to the L.A.P.D.? Yes. Do we wish no such person
were on the planet?” she asked, and again answered in the affirmative. She was eloquent in her dismissal of him, and in the
dismissal of the planted-glove theory. But I
wondered: Is this good enough to get the sound of his voice on the tapes out of the jurors ’ memories?

She weakened a little at the motive, and what she called the planning, noting that O.J. borrowed cash from Kato. However,
as she moved to the murders themselves, O.J. and Tanya Brown started crying at the same time. Fred Goldman had his jacket
off. Arnelle sat with her head buried in her hands, her aunt ’s hand on her back.

Suddenly there was an interruption. A camera had focused on O.J. ’s hand as he wrote something on the legal pad in front of
him. Judge Ito stopped the proceeding, saying that what had happened was a clear intrusion on the attorney-client privilege.
He was thinking of ending the camera coverage, he said. Soon, however, he relented, and once again, Clark continued her closing.

“These are not efficient murders,” Clark said. “They are slaughters.” As she spoke, O.J. and Tanya again started to cry. I
could hear Fred Goldman breathing heavily behind me, and as his son was mentioned, he too began weeping. “Open up the windows,”
Clark said. “Let the cool wind of reason come in.”

Chris Darden ’s closing came after Marcia ’s, and it was his best lawyering of the entire trial. He was passionate, straightforward,
and spoke from the heart, with complete conviction.

When he talked about Nicole ’s move to Bundy, O.J. leaned over and whispered, “He ’s got the dates wrong, what ’s he talking
about?” When he talked about Simpson being a time bomb ticking away, O.J. said, “That ’s wrong. I gave it a year; we broke
up, we agreed it was best. Why is he saying I was angry at the recital? He ’s stretching like I can ’t believe. All anybody
has to do is look at that video. I wasn ’t mad.” Judge Ito gave me a now-familiar look. He could hear every word O.J. was
saying.

We were haunted by Johnnie ’s opening statements. Darden and Clark hammered on Rosa Lopez, on Mary Anne Gerchas and the four
men running away from Bundy. These were all witnesses we never called. “I ’m just the messenger for Nicole,”
Darden was saying. “She wanted you to know, she left you a road map.”

We recessed for the day before Darden had completed his statements, so he finished the next morning when we all returned to
court. He attacked Aronson and Mendel, our two straightforward, credible timeline witnesses. I would ’ve ended with the 911
tapes. Darden made an error, closing by trying to rebut the defense case.

For our side, Cochran began his close by taking direct aim at the L.A.P.D., calling it “an infected investigation by a corrupt
detective and a bumbling cesspool of a lab.” He challenged the mountain of evidence, especially the so-called blood trail.
“If he had bloody clothes, bloody gloves, bloody shoes, then where ’s the blood on the doorknob? On the carpet?” Yet Cochran
also lapsed into phony histrionics. He put on the knit cap, asking, “Who am I? I ’m Johnnie Cochran, with a cap on. If it
doesn ’t fit, you must acquit.” He took a swipe at Chris Darden ’s “messenger” reference by recalling Mark Fuhrman ’s message.
“The message can ’t be trusted,” he said.

The next morning, Cochran came back to continue his close. At first, he talked from his heart, he talked from his soul, he
talked from the Bible. It was almost as if he was preaching. His rhythm would get going, and you almost expected the jury
to fall into a call-and-response pattern. “If you ’re untruthful in small things, you cannot be believed in large things,”
he said.

It was a musical style, a cadence that had served him well throughout his career, especially with black jurors. My concern
was that the majority of the black jurors were already in our camp and that Johnnie ’s arguments now should be addressed to
those who we ’d felt were pro-prosecution. We needed to woo those who might be on the fence. How would they hear what Johnnie
was saying?

And then he made a terrible mistake. He linked Fuhrman, a banal, petty, mindless racist, with the most monstrous murderer
of all time, Adolph Hitler. In less than a minute, he accelerated from a corrupt Los Angeles cop to the Holocaust itself,
suggesting
to this jury that they could stop Fuhrman, as the Germans had not stopped Hitler. “Maybe this is why you ’re sitting here,
the right people, at the right time,” he said. It was gratuitous, inflammatory, and just plain wrong. Worse, as far as this
case was concerned, it was completely unnecessary.

Barry Scheck ’s portion of the closing statement went a long way toward restoring my faith. “Ladies and gentlemen, as you
’ve heard, my partner Peter Neufeld and I are from New York. More specifically, we ’re from Brooklyn,” he began, and then
proceeded, point by point, to rebut the prosecution ’s forensics evidence.

Using Dr. Lee ’s example of cockroaches in the bowl of spaghetti, he pointed to Nicole ’s blood planted on O.J. ’s socks,
and O.J. ’s blood showing up after the murders on the rear gate at Nicole ’s condominium. “How many cockroaches do you need?”
he asked.

“Every explanation that they ’re desperately trying to come up with is a highly improbable influence,” Scheck said. “The most
likely and probable explanation is the one that is not for the timid or the faint of heart:
Somebody played with this evidence!”

That ’s what this case is all about, I thought. Ito had told the jury from the beginning that a defense team has no burden—
they don ’t have to prove anything. But we
had
proved something. We ’d proved reasonable doubt.

“That ’s a reasonable doubt for this case,” Scheck continued. “Period. End of sentence. End of this case.”

Johnnie then came back to finish. He defined reasonable doubt for them, with a simple emotion and articulation that surpassed
Ito. He quoted Abraham Lincoln, he quoted the philosopher Cicero, he once again quoted the Bible. “You can ’t trust their
message,” he told the jury. “If it doesn ’t fit, you must acquit.”

The following morning, the prosecution came back for their rebuttal arguments. Chris Darden spoke first, briefly confusing
the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence but nevertheless acquitting himself reasonably well. But he was tired,
as we all were, and could not bring back the emotion of the day before.

When Clark followed him, she, too, made mistakes, only this time it was because she went too far with her emotion, leaving
simplicity and logic behind. She pleaded for the jury to believe her. “You can trust me that this evidence is good evidence,”
she said. “I wouldn ’t bring this case before you if I didn ’t believe that it was a good case.”

Johnnie Cochran and Barry Scheck interrupted Clark ’s second close with more than sixty objections to her personal assurances
to the jury that all the prosecution ’s evidence was solid and reliable.

Objecting during closing arguments is a matter of style. The general rule is that people don ’t interrupt the other side.
Not only is it discourteous, but jurors tend to hold it against you. They don ’t like it when you ’re rude. Lawyers will generally
hold or reserve an objection until the very end, unless it is something that is so harmful and inappropriate that it must
be addressed immediately by the judge. That was the case here. Ito sent the jury out of the room, and then he strongly cautioned
Clark not to use her personal opinions in the case. “We ’re close here, Counsel,” Ito said.

“Your Honor, this has been highly improper,” said an agitated Scheck, still standing from his last objection.

“Sit
down!”
the judge told him. And then he repeated, “You ’re close, Miss Clark.”

“When Counsel takes off the gloves,” Clark argued, “saying basically that we ’re criminals, then we have the right under the
law to correct that misimpression.”

“But this is way, way over the line,” Scheck said. “I mean, I ’ve been teaching law for eighteen years, and I ’ve never heard
this kind of stuff.”

Finally Ito said, “Miss Clark, I don ’t want to hear any more ‘I ’ s. ’”

“Right,” Clark answered.

When closing arguments had been completed, Judge Ito at last sent the jury out to deliberate. As he did, he reminded them,
“You are not partisans or advocates, but impartial judges of fact.”

As I watched them leave the courtroom, I began to replay the last sixteen months in my mind. We gave him the best we had,
I thought. Every area of reasonable doubt had been explored, examined, and exposed. I truly did not expect a conviction. The
worst-case scenario was that it would be a hung jury; Garcetti had already said if that happened, he ’d retry the case.

I expected the verdict to come in two, maybe three weeks. Johnnie needed to make a business trip east, so he asked that we
be put on twenty-four-hour call. Ito denied that, saying that everyone had to be available immediately. He simply was not
going to inconvenience this jury one more day.

Three minutes after the jury left the courtroom, the buzzer from the jury room sounded: They had picked a foreman. It was
their first unanimous decision. As we ’d expected, they had selected juror number one, Armanda Cooley. From the very beginning
of the trial, juror number one seemed to take everything in stride. Whenever there was a crisis, she came into meetings with
a smile on her face, willing and able to make suggestions that found agreement from the judge, the lawyers, and the rest of
the jury. Whenever hostilities came up, her name was never on the list of transgressors. For months, she had been the center
of warmth and common sense toward which the other jurors seemed to gravitate.

On Monday, after one more sequestered weekend, the jury would begin to deliberate.

The reward for winning is to be tossed right back into the pit.

G
ERRY
S
PENCE

A
side from the judge ’s instructions to the jury, which are pertinent to each case, there is no primer, no rule book from the
American Bar Association or the Supreme Court, no words from the judge, that tell a jury how to do its job. There are only
two basic directives: The first is to elect a foreman, the second is to keep an open mind. There is no set procedure that
dictates what follows.

The jury had spent 266 days in sequestration; only half of those had been spent in court. The rest were spent in limbo, wondering
what it was that had sent them out of court this time, and destined not to know until after they ’d completed their deliberation
and delivered a verdict—unless, of course, conjugal visits had delivered contraband information. There was no way for any
of us to gauge what effect the enforced isolation would have on them, or on their deliberation process.

The lawyers, their families, and their staffs spent that weekend knowing there was nothing else that could have been done,
and nothing else to do. For months, we had all led our lives inside that courtroom, and the first order of business was housekeeping.
Pack it up and move it out. Files, computers, fax machines, more files. And all the while, the random thoughts kept coming
into my head. Second-guessing myself. What will the
jury do? And after they do it, what will I do? What will O.J. do?