Without a Doubt (29 page)

Scott! I felt a pang of guilt for having ducked him every time he tried to get me moving on the domestic violence issue. My neglect of the issue was, of course, all the more ironic in light of my current predicament. I was about to become poster girl for the battered women’s movement, for no good reason.

“I’m going to help you out as a favor to the D.A.‘s office,” Mark told me. “I’ve always admired you guys and I’m going to take this opportunity to put my money where my mouth is. There will be no fee for my services.”

Had I heard correctly? A lawyer was going to take on a client who might give him nights and weekends of grief—absolutely gratis? The man was a freaking saint.

“We’re probably not going to persuade them to leave you alone,” he warned. “Only time and some new scandal will do that. But we
can
discuss the possibility of a lawsuit. We don’t want to come at them unless we feel fairly sure of winning. That means I’ll need you to do some homework.”

Homework. Exactly what I did not need at this moment. The Simpson case was already threatening to bury me under an avalanche of paperwork. Every night I’d carry home a couple of satchels of documents. Then, after the usual bedtime routine, I’d spread my papers out on my bed and work into the early hours of the morning.

“I want you to get one of those little pocket recorders and document each article and how it affected you,” Mark continued. “It would be best if you could manage to do that every day. The more detail the better. Spare yourself nothing. This will describe the emotional distress and the damages we ask for.”

He told me to keep the tapes in a secure place. And if I didn’t have one, I should give them to him to put in his office safe.

“When am I going to do all that?” I asked him.

“You spend a lot of time in your car, don’t you?”

I did as Mark asked. I bought myself a microcassette recorder. It sat for a few days on the dashboard of my Maxima. Finally I picked it up and made my first faltering attempts.

“Well, Mark,” I began, “here goes. It is… what
is
today? September thirtieth, and I’m leaving the courthouse. It’s about ten after nine and I’m exhausted… .

“The stress has been building and building and building… the stress of this trial… and, of course, going through a divorce and everything… I always feel like I’m being pounded. And it’s real hard to focus because when I’m at work during the week there’s always people coming in my door and calling on the phone, just one after another… . I feel like I’ve been beaten to a pulp… . The only time it really feels good to go to work is on a Saturday or Sunday when there’s no one there to bother me and I can focus on my job… .

“There’s so much to organize. I just wish I could stop the clock for about three weeks and put everything together in a nice, neat, tidy order. Do all the things that I usually do to prepare for a trial. I am beginning to [be] very pessimistic about my ability to put it together the way I ordinarily would. And in this, of all cases, where I need to do more than I usually would—it’s frightening… . Ah, God. I don’t know how I’m gonna survive this… .”

When I replayed the tape, the distress in my own voice took me aback. I was also surprised by the relief it gave me to vent my frustrations. I continued to record, not every day, but every few days. I found that getting into my car was like entering a confessional. I talked, and talked, and kept on talking to that mute, whirring confidant. I reflected and I flamed.

A tape recorder is a patient listener. It passes no judgments.

D
ouble Solitaire

CAR TAPE.
October 2, 1994. Everything’s coming back to him. He’s got her blood on his socks in the bedroom. We’ve got her blood and Ron’s blood in his Bronco. We’ve got her blood and Ron’s on that glove at Rockingham, and maybe Simpson’s blood too. After we finish the testing we’ll know more. Now it seems we’ve even pinned down the shoe print to a style of Bruno Magli shoe
. . . .
The same size as the defendant’s shoe! I mean, it’s just unbelievable!

The defense is gonna come up with their space invader theories. It’s gonna be like something out of the
National Enquirer.
You know, police bungled and fumbled and goofed everything up. And so, right, that’s how the evidence all came back to him. If it’s a frame-up, why frame him, of all people? Couldn’t you think of somebody less likable to frame? I mean, who wants to try a case against Yogi Bear?

You shoulda tried this case in Santa Monica
.

Gimme a break.

Ever since the verdict in the criminal trial, TV and radio commentators, print pundits, old armchair warriors with a whole lot more ego than common sense have weighed in with their theories about what went wrong. First off, they would have you believe that we blew it by not taking this case to the suburbs. What they mean—but never have the guts to come right out and say—is this: “Why didn’t you go shopping around for a congenial, white jury who’d convict the son of a bitch?”

The grumblers are usually people who should know better—former prosecutors like Vincent Bugliosi, who actually faulted us for
moving
the trial
from
Santa Monica. Gil Garcetti filed this case
exactly
where he should have filed it: downtown L.A.

Regardless of where a crime occurs, long-cause cases, as they’re called, virtually always end up downtown. In June of 1994, when the Bundy murders took place, this was not even discretionary; it was
policy
. Set by the Superior Court. Several years earlier, a panel of assignment judges put their heads together to try to figure out how to clear the backlog in the branch courts. One of the tougher measures the judges took to rectify this problem was to require that any case that stood to go on for longer than four weeks be filed Downtown, where the D.A. has deputies, clerks, and support services to handle it.

(People have asked me why the civil trial was tried in Santa Monica. The answer is simple: Civil litigants get to pick their forum. They don’t get directed to a particular venue at the command of the bench the way criminal cases do.)

Only by a fluke does a long-cause criminal case ever end up in one of the branch courts. The trial judge in the Rodney King case, for instance, was downtown but transferred to Simi Valley and dragged the case along with him. The results were disastrous. An all-white jury acquitted four white LAPD officers of beating King even though the crime was immortalized on videotape. Los Angeles erupted into a race riot.

Every time I hear about Bugliosi or some other clown mouthing off to the press, I have to grit my teeth and count to ten.
You shoulda tried this case in Santa Monica
. Do they realize what they’re saying?

To suggest that the D.A.‘s office should have ignored standard procedure and filed this case elsewhere for purely tactical advantage is, in my opinion, a shameless and inexcusable display of racism. It presupposes that only a white, upscale, West Side jury can deliver justice. Wrong. Dead wrong. I’ve seen Downtown juries made up of poor blacks and Hispanics do justice time and time again.

By the time the Simpson case landed on my desk, I’d been trying cases Downtown for more than ten years. I’d had defendants and juries of all races. I’d tried twenty homicides and won nineteen of them. I’d tried scores of lesser felonies. Won most, lost some. None of the verdicts seemed completely off the wall to me. Whenever I’d gotten to talk to jurors who’d delivered unfavorable verdicts, I found they’d had their reasons, usually good ones.

To Vincent Bugliosi and those who share his worldview, a good prosecutor is apparently a slick operator who works the angles. And the prescribed angle in this case would have been to steer clear of dark skins, particularly those belonging to middle-aged black women. Sounds ugly—because it
is
ugly. As well as impractical, unethical, and unconscionable.

One of the proponents of this embarrassing thesis seems to have been none other than our own jury consultant, Don Vinson. After the trial, he apparently met Bugliosi for lunch at—where else—the California Club. Like Cassandra spurned, Vinson wailed that he’d warned the D.A.‘s office of the dangers of picking middle-aged black women as jurors. When word of this got back to me, I just shook my head. I would like to take this opportunity to ask Don Vinson, “Exactly what would you have had me do?”

It must have been apparent even to someone as stubbornly ignorant of the law as Vinson that you cannot mount a campaign to target black women. It’s illegal, for God’s sake. And assuming for the moment that it was not illegal, excluding them would be an impossibility. Blacks accounted for over half of our eventual jury pool. A full three quarters of those blacks were women. Like it or not, black women were going to be a powerful presence on this jury.

I didn’t need Vinson to tell me that black women—or at least certain black woman—would be a tough sell. As I mentioned earlier, our grand jury adviser, Terry White, had let me know that a couple of middle-aged women among the grand jurors had seemed maternally inclined toward Simpson. Terry is a black man and had been one of the prosecutors on the Rodney King trial. He is infinitely better informed on issues of race and the law than Don Vinson. The fact is, Terry thought we could bring them around. We’d both seen many juries of black women who were more than willing to convict black men.

For my part, I was perfectly confident that if O. J. Simpson had been some black sanitation worker who had killed his white wife in a fit of rage, a jury of twelve middle-aged black women would have convicted the jerk in a heartbeat. The bedrock issue here was not race—but race coupled with celebrity. It was not so much that Simpson was a black man; he was a famous black man. And a well-loved famous black man. Black jurors of either sex were going to feel reluctant to knock an African-American icon off his pedestal. And in combination with race, celebrity complicated this case in ways that none of us had ever before had to consider.

That’s why so much was riding on the jury questionnaire.

Jury selection in the Simpson case was set to begin on September 26. Ito had ordered up an unusually large pool, one thousand candidates. He clearly foresaw a long, drawn-out contest and wanted to make sure we had the bodies to cover it. The first step was elementary triage: he would call in the whole bunch and hand out a one-page screening questionnaire to determine if serving on a long case would cause them hardship.

I always hated this phase. It was during hardship questioning that a lot of the better-educated, solid-citizen types would find a way to get themselves excused from service. People with steady jobs and career commitments can’t afford to take time off, because employers won’t cover their salary for more than ten days of jury service. Once they heard the estimated trial time for a long-cause case, as many as 70 percent of them would walk right out the door. These people, the ones with with steady jobs and career commitments, are usually pro-prosecution jurors. It was so ironic. The lengthy cases were by and large the most serious ones, often death-penalty cases where you want the most intelligent jurors possible. And yet if one candidate with a college degree ever made it through hardship and the gauntlet of defense challenges, we always regarded it as a miracle.

The survivors of hardship questioning—in this case a pool of three hundred—would receive the full-blown questionnaire containing questions submitted by both the prosecution and the defense. The questions themselves had to survive a rigorous weeding-out process: both sides would submit questions and, after a lot of angry rhetoric and head-banging, the judge would decide which ones made the cut.

By the time we got to drafting questions, Bill and I had already given the questionnaire a lot of thought. Our questions had to be blunt enough to hit the hot-button issues head-on: “Have you ever been beaten by a spouse?” “Have you ever been arrested by the LAPD?” “Do you fantasize about being O. J. Simpson’s date at the Rose Bowl?” That sort of thing. They had to be tactful enough to avoid offending anyone we might have hoped to win over. They had to be sly enough to trip up anyone who was lying. Usually you’ll find people who’ll lie like crazy to avoid serving. But here we had to entertain the possibility that the opposite would occur; at least some opportunists out there might be looking to cash in on their stint in the jury box at the Trial of the Century.

After we’d spent God knows how many hours clinking glasses with Don Vinson, I expected that he would at least send us a list of questions, if not a completed questionnaire, for our review. Jo-Ellan Dimitrius, after all, did the entire thing for the Simpson team. But the deadline for submitting our draft to the court was approaching, and Vinson had sent us nothing.

“What’s he waiting for,” I groused to Bill, “an engraved invitation?”

Bill promised he’d give Vinson a nudge; I assumed he did. But days passed. Nothing came by winged messenger from DecisionQuest. What Bill finally received was one question scribbled on a piece of legal paper. I don’t even recall what it was. I do recall it was not even remotely useful.

In the end, Bill and I just had to knuckle down and do the thing the way we normally did it: by ourselves. We recruited our DV experts, Scott Gordon and Lydia Bodin, to work on domestic violence. Our DNA expert, Lisa Kahn, oversaw the science part. Everyone pitched in on the celebrity issue. Question on the table: How do you get at the issue of fame? It’s one thing to prosecute a defendant who’s notorious—someone who’s well known but not particularly well liked, like Charles Keating, or the prosecutor’s dream defendant, Charles Manson. With a flaming psychopath in the dock, all you have to do is get up and recite your Social Security number to win a conviction. This was not the case with a sympathetic figure, one idolized the way O. J. Simpson was. I didn’t know of anyone who’d ever tackled a problem of this magnitude. Somehow we’d have to get the jurors past the defendant’s public image and get them to acknowledge that all they knew about O. J. Simpson was a slick facade.

We all agreed that we should seed the questionnaire throughout with celebrity questions, some direct, others indirect. First we’d ask jurors where they got their news: TV, radio, print? A juror who got most of his news from tabloids and watching evening news magazines like
Hard Copy
would obviously be a problem for us. Not only would he have been fed a steady diet of misinformation, but his viewing preference might show that he had a more than average interest in the cult of celebrity itself.