Outrage (63 page)

Even Fuhrman pampered Simpson on prior occasion:
Inasmuch as malicious mischief (smashing the window of Nicole’s car) is a misdemeanor, as opposed to a felony, Fuhrman did not have the authority to place Simpson under arrest, since absent an arrest warrant, a police officer cannot arrest someone for a misdemeanor unless it was committed in his presence. Here, it wasn’t. However, Fuhrman could have patted Simpson down, asked him for his identification, interrogated Simpson about the incident, and attempted to persuade Nicole to sign a crime report (which could have possibly led to a criminal complaint and an arrest warrant based thereon), things Fuhrman might very well have done if he hadn’t given Simpson special treatment. But he did nothing, not even filling out a police report of the incident. The prosecution knew all these things, eliciting testimony from Fuhrman on them during the trial, yet they failed to craft and deliver one word of argument on this point in their summation.

Some legal commentators have said the Mercedes belonged to Simpson, and hence it was no crime for him to damage his own property. But the Mercedes was owned by Nicole. Even the defense, in a January 23, 1995, written motion (page 2) filed with the court, concedes this fact.

The defense argued at the trial that in a January 18, 1989, letter Fuhrman was asked to write about the car incident at the time of Simpson’s no-contest plea to spousal battery against Nicole, Fuhrman said the incident was “indelibly impressed” in his memory—evidence, the defense contended, that Fuhrman had harbored a hatred for Simpson all the years leading up to his opportunity to frame him in June of 1994. But in his 1989 letter, Fuhrman explains why the incident remained so firmly in his memory. “It is not every day that you respond to a celebrity’s home for a family dispute,” he wrote.

“Motive is never an element of the
corpus delicti
of any crime”:
The
corpus delicti
of a crime, contrary to what is believed by many laypeople, does not refer to the dead body in a homicide. It means the body (or elements) of a crime, which (in addition to the identity of the perpetrator) has to be shown by the prosecution in order to secure a criminal conviction.

“…a war he called Helter Skelter”:
Early in the summer of 1969, Manson told those close to him that “the spades” (blacks) were about to come out of Watts (the Watts riots were just four years earlier) and go into the homes of Bel Air and Beverly Hills, up in the “rich piggy district,” and commit some terrible murders, cutting bodies up and writing things on the wall in blood that would “really make whitey mad,” and that would start the war. But as the summer wore on and nothing happened, he said, “We’re going to have to show blackie how to do it.”

In Manson’s bizarre motive of Helter Skelter he envisioned himself as taking over the leadership of the world:
Truman Capote, commissioned by the
New York Times Magazine
to do a feature story on the Manson case, thought he would come to L.A., sit in on the trial for a few days, and get a handle on the case for his article. But after three days, he gave up on writing the piece, telling me in the hallway outside the courtroom, “This case is just too bizarre. I’m going to Palm Springs for a few days to relax.”

“Helter Skelter” is the title of a Beatles song:
There were several other words I found in the lyrics of Beatles songs which I connected to Manson, tying him in further to the murder scene. The Beatles’
White Album
came out in December of 1968, and Manson considered it prophetic, playing it over and over, believing the Beatles were sending messages to him and other tuned-in people beneath the lyrics of their songs. Two examples: In the song “Piggies,” the Beatles say the piggies need a “damn good whacking.” Manson interpreted this to mean that the piggies, the white establishment, should be murdered. The word “pig” was printed in blood on the front door of the Sharon Tate residence, and the words “Death to Pigs” on the living-room wall of the residence of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. In the song “Blackbird,” there is the lyric: “All your life you were only waiting for this moment to
arise
.” Manson interpreted “blackbird” to mean the black man, and the black man was supposed to rise up against the white man. The word “Rise” was printed in blood on the living-room wall of the LaBianca residence.

It may have been Paula Barbieri’s idea to redecorate Simpson’s home:
In a December 14, 1995, pretrial deposition in the wrongful death civil action against Simpson, Barbieri testified that at 7:00 a.m. on June 12, 1994, the day of the murders, she left a “Dear John” message for Simpson on his answering machine, saying she no longer wanted to see him, that their relationship was over. Since Nicole was also through with him, Barbieri’s rejecting him just fifteen hours before the murders would certainly have been relevant evidence for the prosecution to use against Simpson, showing his state of mind on the day of the murders. Detective Tom Lange told me the police and the DA were unaware of Barbieri’s call to Simpson on June 12, 1994. He said that a week or so after the murders, he conducted two brief telephone interviews with Barbieri (she was at her Florida home), but she was “afraid and uncooperative.” When he persisted in his efforts to interview her, the defense got a court order from Judge Ito requiring that any further attempts to talk to her be cleared through her attorney. The attorney, Michael Nasiter, informed Lange that Barbieri did not wish to be interviewed. In a criminal (as opposed to civil) case in California, the prosecution cannot subpoena a witness and take his or her deposition before trial. The only way the prosecution can achieve the same end in some situations is through the grand jury. Barbieri, in fact, testified at the grand jury before the Simpson trial, but the proceedings and inquiry were limited to the investigation by the DA to determine whether he would seek an indictment against Simpson’s friend Al Cowlings for being an accessory after the fact to the murders. The DA decided not to. Parenthetically, Simpson, in his pretrial deposition in the civil case, denied having knowledge on the night of the murders that Barbieri had called off their relationship earlier that day, saying he hadn’t checked his phone messages that day. He apparently forgot what he told Lange and Vannatter the after noon after the murders. Following the dance recital on the day of the murders, he said, “I called her [Barbieri] a couple of times, and she wasn’t there, and I left a message,
and then I checked my messages
.”

“…fourteen uniformed officers arrived at the Bundy murder scene before Fuhrman…”
Officer Robert Riske and his partner Mike Terrazas, were the first officers to arrive, getting there around 12:15 a.m. on June 13, 1994, about two hours after the murders. Fuhrman and his partner, Ron Phillips, arrived around 2:10 a.m.

“…could have resulted in his own execution”:
The defense was claiming that virtually all of the
LAPD
officers and employees involved in the investigation of the Simpson case were either part of the conspiracy to frame him or participated in the conspiracy to cover up. But Fuhrman was the
only
officer who Clark pointed out to the jury would be taking a risk by violating the law if the defense charges were true, and even then she did so very weakly, not mentioning the possible penalty of death.

Members of defendants’ families lying under oath to help them:
In fact, some European nations, by statute, go further and specifically exclude family members from prosecution for harboring their loved ones to help them evade apprehension by the law. For instance, the family of Dr. Joseph Mengele, the notorious Nazi “Angel of Death” who was responsible for the extermination of about 400,000 people, mostly Jews, in Poland during the Second World War, helped him avoid apprehension from the law for thirty years, and the authorities knew this. The family even later admitted it. But West German law protected them from being prosecuted.

If any readers are surprised by this, perhaps you shouldn’t be. As a sign of their intellectual maturity, these European nations have simply enacted into law what we are doing over here without laws governing the situation. These statutes recognize that just as you cannot legislate morality, all the laws in the world cannot tear asunder the bond of blood and love that unites human beings to one another. These relationships, of course, are the protoplasm, as it were, of all human existence, without which there would be no laws, without which there would be no civilized society as we know it today. In other words, there are laws other than those written in our law-books: laws, emotions, and feelings as indestructible and imperishable as human nature itself, and which no system of jurisprudence has ever yet been able to ignore.

“…thrusting my crossed fingers into the air”:
Little could I possibly know (or even wildly imagine) that just six months later in London, England, in an exact replica of a Dallas federal courtroom, and after nearly five months of preparation as intense as I’ve ever done for any murder case in my career, I would be “prosecuting” Lee Harvey Oswald for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The twenty-one-hour British television “docu-trial” had no script, no actors, a real United States federal judge and Dallas jury, the actual lay and expert witnesses in the case, and a prominent defense attorney (Gerry Spence) representing Oswald.

Manson jury had to decide on life or death for Manson and his co-defendants:
Manson and his three co-defendants, as well as Charles “Tex” Watson, were all sentenced to death in 1971. But in 1972, the United States Supreme Court, in
Furman v. Georgia
, 408 U.S. 238, ruled that the death penalty was unconstitutional as it was then being implemented by the states. They made their ruling retroactive, and the sentences of everyone on death row throughout the country (over 600 at the time) were irreversibly reduced from death down to life imprisonment.

People admit lying without realizing it:
A February 1996 poll by the Josephson Institute of Ethics found 47 percent of adults who admitted they would accept an auto body repairman’s offer to include unrelated damages in an insurance claim, and 65 percent of high schoolers who cheated on an exam in the past year. The pollster said the real numbers are probably higher. And it’s been estimated that over 90 percent of Americans cheat (lie) on their income tax.

Prosecutors, in summation, focus mainly on Dr. Baden’s testimony that Simpson cut himself on night of murders:
Clark, at one point in her argument, also very briefly mentioned that “Kato Kaelin saw some blood drops in the foyer” of Simpson’s residence on the morning [7:30 a.m.] after the murders.

“…and we drip blood?”:
Recall that Baden had only testified that Simpson got a slight cut on one of his fingers, not that he had dripped blood in his car, home, and on the driveway.

A prosecutor should have a complete command of the facts of the case:
The Simpson prosecutors’ sloppiness, imprecision, and poor grasp of the facts can only be categorized as shocking, and the defense nearly always pointed out their misstatements of the evidence, which some on the jury undoubtedly had already noticed. A few representative examples of Clark’s misstatements of the evidence: Clark told the jury in summation that both of Nicole’s jugular veins had been severed, but the coroner had testified that the left one was “almost transected” (severed) and the right one had only been nicked. Clark argued that when Alan Park, the limo driver, left with Simpson from the Rockingham gate just after 11:00 p.m. for the airport on the night of the murders, he saw Simpson’s Bronco parked near the gate on Rockingham, but Park had testified that he didn’t pay any attention to whether or not Simpson’s Bronco was parked near the gate when he left and he couldn’t be sure if the Bronco was there. With respect to Simpson’s cutting himself on the night of the murders, as we’ve seen, Dr. Michael Baden, the defense pathologist, testified: “He said he recalled seeing some blood after trying to retrieve his phone
or
some material from the Bronco…. He had gone to the Bronco to get something and may have somehow cut himself while getting stuff from the Bronco to bring with him to Chicago.” With this testimony, Clark argued to the jury: “So he [Simpson] comes up with a story that he gives to Dr. Baden, which is ‘I went into the Bronco and cut myself on that razor-sharp cell phone.’” (Of course, Clark wouldn’t have had to mockingly misstate the evidence if she had introduced Simpson’s statement to the
LAPD
on the day after the murders where he said he had no idea how he cut himself.) She told the jury that all of the officers who arrived at the murder scene before Fuhrman (fourteen) saw only one glove, but only two of these officers (the only ones she called) had so testified. Arguing about the physical advantage Simpson had over the victims which would have enabled him to overpower them, Clark said Ron Goldman was “only five feet five,” but the coroner’s report clearly states that he was five feet nine inches tall.

Cochran receives help from many sources for his summation:
A local Los Angeles criminal defense attorney, per the September 30, 1995, edition of the
Los Angeles Times
, prepared the first draft of Cochran’s final argument, Cochran giving the lawyer, who was not a member of the defense team, an outline to work from.

“…he should not be penalized for exercising it”:
Last year, after a heated debate in Parliament, Britain enacted legislation allowing the prosecutors for the Crown to draw adverse inferences from an accused’s failure to testify in his own defense.

There are rarely eyewitnesses to a premeditated murder:
Clark argued premeditation well, pointing out, among other things, that the killer arrived at the murder scene wearing gloves and a dark watch cap, and armed with a knife.

Marcia Clark makes inadequate comment on Dr. Henry Lee’s testimony:
With respect to Lee’s third shoe print, a real one, Clark added in her summation: “The only shoe print that did not match the Bruno Magli shoes was the one shoe print [Lee] found on June 25th after police officers had walked through the crime scene.” Even on this third shoe print, Clark failed to remind the jury of the photographs taken of the spot on June 13 that did not show the print, proving that the shoe print was not left there at the time of the murders.