Murder in Brentwood (30 page)

Although we know of some of the conflicts between Shapiro and other members of the team, I have often wondered what made Bob sever ties with his two prominent colleagues, one of them the godfather of his son. What did Bailey and Cochran say or do that would make an experienced defense attorney so angry and disgusted?

I know he’d be crushed if I didn’t at least mention him, so I suppose I should talk about Alan Dershowitz. From his ivory tower in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Dershowitz spun his theories and fantasies, regardless of what relevance they had to the case or what connection they had to reality. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen Dershowitz on television, but he always has something to say, and it’s often a complaint about the police. He was one of the biggest promoters of the planted glove theory. Of course, Dershowitz frames his argument so that all he can actually claim is “doubt,” which means he never actually has any proof, just wishful thinking and innuendo.

The only piece of supposedly hard evidence Dershowitz had against me was an experiment he performed at home with a pair of gloves, a plastic bag, and a bottle of wine. After spilling wine on both gloves, he put one inside the plastic bag, and the other he left out. Miraculously, the one in the bag stayed damp, while the other soon dried. Of course, the conditions in no way matched the physical evidence at Bundy and Rockingham. And Dershowitz’s experiment would hold up only in the court of his own fevered mind, where evidentiary standards are non-existent. But I’m glad he had fun performing his experiment.

Dershowitz is a real piece of work. Here’s a guy who, to my knowledge, has never participated in gathering evidence at a crime scene or analyzing evidence in a crime lab, yet he uses such evidence to spin his weird theories. He spends his time in a university, a courtroom or a television studio, not on the front lines where the real policework is conducted and the real facts are uncovered. But people were intimidated by him because whoever challenged Dershowitz or the other Simpson defense attorneys could be branded a racist.

Simpson either is a murderer or he isn’t. But Dershowitz couldn’t face such a clear choice. He preferred to obscure rather simple issues in academic cow puddles. For him, a trial is not a search for truth, but a game played by advocates.

Just days after Simpson’s arrest, Dershowitz appeared on his favorite legal forum-television. On the June 20, 1994, Charlie Rose show, Dershowitz said, “The case may end up not with a bang but a whimper. I mean, this may end up something like a hung jury. It may end up in a plea bargain.”

The day after Dershowitz made that statement, Robert Shapiro hired him for the defense team. Was that the only way Bob could get Dershowitz to shut up? Now he seems to acknowledge that his client was guilty, or at least that reasonable people would think so. Of course, he doesn’t want to alienate significant portions of his television audience or future client base, most of whom realize that Simpson killed two people. But Dershowitz also doesn’t want to admit that he knows his client is guilty. So he makes the distinction between “legal truth” and “factual truth.” According to Dershowitz, a factual truth actually happened, and a legal truth is what can be established in court. In his convoluted reasoning, legal truth has nothing to do with morality or the facts. Legal truth is whatever lawyers can get away with.

Dershowitz says that cops supposedly lie all the time, in search warrants, in police reports, and on the stand. Does this mean that defense attorneys always tell the truth and we should always trust defense attorneys? I have a question for Alan Dershowitz and everybody else who says they don’t trust cops. Who are you going to call if your house is broken into? The fire department? The PTA? Ghostbusters? No, you’re going to call the police. Why do you call the police? Could it be that you trust them to protect you? So, you do trust them when it is in your best interests. But you don’t trust them when it is not in your best interests. Like, when you’re a defense attorney and you have no other defense for your client.

Alan Dershowitz is not just a defense attorney. He’s an appellate defense attorney, which means he usually deals only with convicted criminals. Most of his clients are in prison or out on bail. But can he trust them? Are they all telling the truth? I forgot, they’re only legally guilty.

Criminals often come from a life of poverty, broken homes, or lack educational or economic opportunity. While I can’t condone what they do, at least I understand how their deprived backgrounds led them to crime. But what excuse does a defense attorney like Alan Dershowitz have? I have so much more respect for criminals whenever I stand next to a defense attorney like him in court.

Bailey got a lot of media mileage out of his cross-examination, even though it was a failure. He told Time magazine the cross-examination gave him “very good vibes” and claimed that Norman Mailer, famous writer, pugilist, and friend of Lawrence Schiller, said his work was flawless.

“We met the objectives that we set out lo meet,” Bailey said

on the Today show, which at times seemed like a special access program for the defense. “But we dug him in the hole that we wanted to dig and he jumped into it.”

Bailey bragged that he would prove I planted the bloody glove at Rockingham. But he failed to offer one scintilla of evidence to prove that I did, or even could have done it. This famous trial lawyer’s complete, abject, and pathetic failure concerning the planting of evidence should have ended all speculation about the Rockingham glove.

Chapter 22

DEFENDING THE INDEFENSIBLE

Now, every trial attorney has his or her particular quirks when it comes to picking juries. I, for example., excuse any man who shows up wearing either white socks or a string tie.

JOHNNIE COCHRAN

UNABLE TO SUCCESSFULLY CHALLENGE the evidence I found at both crime scenes, the defense attacked me. Johnnie Cochran knew that a racial defense would immediately put the prosecution on the defensive, and switch the focus away from his obviously guilty client. Tactically, he was right. Morally, he was indefensible.

Johnnie Cochran has been playing the race card for much of his professional life. He made a virtual career out of suing the LAPD for civil rights violations and use of excessive force. Over a period of about ten years, Cochran s clients were estimated to have won more than $40 million, of which Johnnie himself probably pocketed around $15 million. Was Johnnie Cochran really concerned with racism, or just money?

One of Cochran’s more infamous cases was the suit of Reginald Denny, a white truck driver who was beaten during the Rodney King riots in 1992. Of course, Cochran didn’t sue the black thugs who beat Denny half to death, but claimed the incident was the LAPD’s fault for not providing enough protection in the dangerous neighborhood of South Central Los Angeles. As this book went to press, there was still no verdict in the case, but the sheer audacity of Cochran to sue the police instead of the perpetrators shows his perverse sense of justice.

Before the Simpson trial, I had no personal or professional contact with any of the defense attorneys who handled his case. I had heard about Bob Shapiro s work on the Christian Brando murder case because it occurred in the West LA division, but I had never worked a case that he was involved in. Neither had I been involved in a trial where Johnnie Cochran represented the defendant, and I was never the defendant in any of his numerous lawsuits against the LAPD and its officers.

Since I had never faced them before, I didn’t know how the members of the defense team would conduct themselves. I expected them to be tough, but I also expected them to be fair. I had no idea that they would go after me in such a personal and inflammatory manner. I expected them to hammer me on the facts, but not try to brand me as a racist.

How ironic that out of the whole team, the defense attorney with the lowest profile and the least experience conducted himself in the most professional manner. I’m talking, of course, about Carl Douglas. He worked hard, knew the law, and stuck to the law. Throughout the trial, Douglas avoided all personal attacks against anyone, even me. In the court and to the media, he remained a responsible and honest professional. If every member of the team had been like Carl Douglas, the trial of O.J. Simpson would not have become a travesty.

In reading Lawrence Schiller’s American Tragedy, I came across one comment Carl Douglas made concerning race that was eye-opening, to say the least. The remark made it appear that Douglas seemed to think that because Simpson was a black man, he must have been innocent. Yet even with this public comment, I feel the same way about Douglas that I did during the trial. His personal thoughts are his own, and his professional conduct was always of the highest level. This is all we asked of any member of the defense.

The other defense attorneys used a tactic that sometimes is used as a diversion in robberies. You start a fire or set off an explosion nearby, and while the police are preoccupied with the crisis, you complete the crime unnoticed. They used the planted glove theory, the blood in the Bronco theory, the planted blood at Bundy theory, the bloody socks theory, the LAPD is incompetent theory, the LAPD knows everything the-the unreasonable search and

[Johnnie Cochran was going to get his client off no matter what it took, no matter who he hurt or even ruined.]

seizure theory, the cross-contaminated blood evidence theory, the Colombian hit men theory, the disappearing-reappearing Stiletto, the wandering alibis, and countless other explanations or speculations that had only one thing in common-an utter lack of plausibility.

The defense had an answer for everything, but none made any sense. The defense had no defense except for smoke and mirrors.

To anyone who gave it a moment of honest thought, the planted glove theory was ridiculous, but the obvious absurdity of this theory didn’t stop Johnnie Cochran from spinning it. He was behind the entire race defense and was responsible for turning the trial from an examination of O.J. Simpson’s guilt or innocence into a campaign of slander against me.

Cochran had a very narrow and clear agenda. He was going to get his client off no matter what it took, no matter who he hurt or even ruined, no matter how far he had to twist or even disregard the truth. In doing so he played a lot of people for fools.

He misstated evidence throughout the trial. In his opening argument, he referred to the testimony of fourteen different witnesses whoso identities and statements he hadn’t made available lo the prosecution during the discovery process. Even though some of these witnesses were never used, he gave synopses of their testimony as if it were gospel. One of the witnesses, Mary Anne Gerchas, said she saw four men in knit caps fleeing the murder scene. She proved to be completely unreliable, and the defense never used her testimony. But Cochran’s reference to it remained part of the record.

Cochran told the jury that Simpson s arthritis was so bad he couldn’t deal a deck of cards the day of the murders. Then he said that Simpson was chipping golf balls at the time of the murders. Meanwhile, Simpson had already told limo driver Allan Park that he had been sleeping. And he told Lange and Vannatter that he was running around trying to get ready. Simpson’s alibis flowed in different directions with each and every new discovery of evidence or new prosecution witness. But since these alibis came not from the client himself, but from his mouthpiece attorney, he was never nailed down to a single, consistent story. To this day, we don’t really know how Simpson accounted for his movements on the night of the murders. And as his lawyer, Cochran could say just about anything, claiming that he was merely stating what he thought to be correct at the time. The story sometimes changed from one day to the next, but no matter. The spin was fixed, and the defense would set off on another tangent.

Throughout the trial, Cochran pushed Judge Ito to see how much he could get away with, and to see how far Ito would allow him to go when it counted. Knowing about my past friction with Margaret York, and making it clear to Ito that he knew about it, gave Cochran leverage over the judge.

Cochran aligned himself with all the right people and always said the right things. But his professional conduct was abominable. He constantly relied on underhanded tactics, including every possible technique of character assassination he could think of. Taking advantage of racial sensitivities, he made everyone in the courtroom and the press afraid of being branded a racist. That’s precisely how he got away with his absurd and inflammatory tactics.

He used religion the same way he used race, in order to gain sympathy with the jury. I have no personal knowledge of Cochran s religious beliefs, but I have seen him play up his own religion in the courtroom, the media, and particularly his own book, which is phony and self-serving even by the standards of O.J. books. I find his use of religion especially distasteful, because he played on the sincere beliefs of the jury and the black community. Having worked much of my career in black neighborhoods, I know how religious most working-class black people are, particularly women. Black churches are a powerful force in the community. Cochran worked this fact to his own advantage, peppering his courtroom speeches and media pronouncements with quotations from the scriptures. But there is one passage from the Bible that he seemed to have forgotten: “Thou shalt not kill.”

Now that the trial is over, Cochran won’t let go. He’s had his moment in the spotlight and he can’t bear to leave it. Most defense attorneys can move on to other cases, but Cochran has decided to make a career out of the Simpson trial. He steadfastly argues that his client was innocent. If he truly believes that, he’s not very intelligent, and if he doesn’t believe it, he’s not very honest. Either way, he should never have used a defense that ruined other peoples lives in the process.

The irony of the Simpson defense strategy is that if they had stuck to the material issues and evidence, they would have had some strong arguments. Whether or not those arguments would have resulted in an acquittal is another question. The Robbery/Homicide detectives, SID criminalists, and prosecution made significant mistakes throughout the investigation and trial. And the lawyers and experts who critiqued these mistakes often had very good points, which were unfortunately taken too far. The detectives had made mistakes that the prosecution would later compound. But the defense team assembled around their celebrity client, uniquely situated to take advantage of these blunders.