God's lonely man
Christopher Darden was a black militant. He grew up in Richmond, California, which in some ways is the ultimate “wrong side of the tracks.” In this case, it was the wrong side of a bridge and a body of water. Richmond and Marin County are two communities that stare across a section of San Francisco Bay called San Pablo Bay, right at each other. Marin County is one of the wealthiest, whitest, most affluent suburbs in the world; bedroom community of San Francisco with multi-million dollar homes perched atop spectacular hills and mountainsides, offering breathtaking vistas of bay, ocean, and skyscraper cityscapes. Its privileged children attend the best public and private schools, in preparation for higher education at Cal or Stanford; USC, the Ivy League; or wherever their hearts desire. It is one of the most liberal, totally reliable Democratic voting blocs in the United States, a place where President Barack Obama is nothing less than a great hero.
However, racial tolerance is in some ways mere lip service in Marin. Blacks are rare sightings. Those few blacks who do live in Marin are normally upscale, well dressed, well mannered, and professional, the “right” kind of African-Americans. There is one black community in the county, a tiny enclave called Marin City, which is tucked away behind a freeway, next to a mountain, in such a way as to be de facto segregation. The good liberals of Marin County do not seem to have anything to do with Marin City in any way, and while they are too politically correct to verbalize it out loud, stare at all-black, crime-ridden, gang-infested Richmond, just a quick jaunt across the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, and pray to whatever secular icon they pray to, thanking her for separating them from this menace to society.
Christopher Darden stared out across the bay every day at luxurious Marin and elegant San Francisco. He saw two worlds unavailable to him. His first reaction was to blame the white man, and assume a militant stance. He had no use for the “white liberals” of a place like Marin, who he knew might offer platitudes and good feeling for the plight of the urban black, but no solution was ever forthcoming. By the time he came of age in the mid-1970s, the fact that the Great Society had failed Richmond, as with all other black communities, was well recognized. So, he turned to the Black Panthers, headquartered next door in Oakland, another once-white, now-blighted black community.
But a funny thing happened along the way. Christopher Darden was smart. He also had something few other blacks had: a father. An actual biological father who married and stayed with his mother, raising a family.
While Richmond in the 1960s and early 1970s was a wasteland, it was also not nearly as horrendous as it is today. When critics of the Iraq War were howling the loudest, some of George W. Bush's supporters pointed out that, by and large, most of Iraq was far safer than most of Richmond or Oakland.
So Darden had values. He went to church. He believed in God. He played sports. He stayed in school. He stayed out of trouble. He did things the right way. He graduated from high school, then went to San Jose State, a commuter school. He graduated and dreamt big dreams: to be a lawyer. He was accepted - possibly via some “affirmative action,” but maybe not - into the fairly prestigious UC, Hastings College of Law in San Francisco. It was tough and he never felt particularly accepted, but he fought through it and graduated, then passed the bar. He moved to Los Angeles and joined the district attorney's office in 1995. Over the next nine years, he handled varied cases, but one of his specialties was investigation into accusations of racism in the L.A.P.D. The department had its share of racist cops. It was not the perfect, glorious force Chief William Parker, and TV shows like Dragnet, had long promoted.
A lot of Southerners, or people with Southern roots, had always gravitated to Los Angeles, ever since the family of George S. Patton, whose ancestors were Confederate War heroes, had helped settle the place in the 19th Century. Many people over the years purposefully chose L.A. instead of San Francisco, because San Francisco was too liberal, too morally casual, for their tastes.
L.A. also had a huge black population. They came for gold, for opportunity, for the war, to build ships, and a better life. Many ended up in the ghettos of Watts and south-central. They seethed. In 1965 and 1991 they rioted out of racial hatred and anger. The ghettos were cesspools of crime. The white - and black - cops on the force knew full well that crime ran rampant in these neighborhoods. The worst parts were war zones, like the modern day Richmond Darden once had lived in, but escaped from.
Darden's initial obsession, like Ahab of Moby Dick, was the Great White, but he was not a whale, he was a race. However, Darden's Christianity, his work ethic, and his good character were recognized. He was promoted, and worked closely with many whites. He respected them, they respected him. Whites could no longer be called “devils,” a term many black militants, but not Darden, used for them. The old sayings, be-littled by the Left, were pretty obviously true. If you worked hard you really could succeed. Darden did just that.
Now, in 1994, the biggest murder case of the 20th Century had occurred right here in paradise, the tony Brentwood section of Los Angeles. A female prosecutor named Marcia Clark was assigned to it. She was feisty and attractive. She was also a friend and close associate of Darden. She asked Darden to be part of the prosecution.
Unquestionably, he had earned this confidence through good performance and effective lawyering, but it would be stupid to assume the color of his skin was not a major factor. They needed a black man to prosecute a black man. Darden was now thrown into a boiling pit of racial animosities that would try the souls of the best of men.
Christopher Darden lived in Carson. Every day, he drove to work in downtown Los Angeles. There may not be a commute that encompasses the entirety of diverse Los Angeles more than the route he drove each day. Carson itself is perhaps the most multi-cultural city in the country. It is the hometown of famed film director Quentin Tarantino, who invented characters straight out of this experience: blacks, whites, Latinos, Pacific islanders. Carson sits at the cusp of what many refer to as the south bay, a stretch of coastal land from the Los Angeles International Airport south to the Palos Verdes peninsula. This includes towns like El Segundo, Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach, Redondo Beach, and Torrance. The Beach Boys grew up on the endless strand, mythologizing the surf culture and classic California blonds . . . like Nicole Brown Simpson.
The Beach Boys grew up in Hawthorne. Once upon a time, towns like Hawthorne, Inglewood, Gardena and Carson were considered part of the south bay, a state of mind as much as a place. Working class white families populated them. Many policemen lived there. But the 1965 Watts riots, which were almost next-door, created total “white flight.” The Carson Christopher Darden lived in was an entirely different place from what The Beach Boys experienced growing up in the 1950s and early 1960s.
The drive from Carson to downtown L.A. was gnarly. Sometimes Darden would take surface streets to avoid gridlocked freeways, but there were no real short cuts. Whether he drove on the streets or the Harbor Freeway (110), the drive afforded a good view of life in the underclasses of L.A. Neighboring Gardena, once a suburb, was now gang territory, and it only got worse from there. Picking up the Harbor Freeway, the driver literally looks down from high overpasses upon the ravages of Watts, south-central, and a few miles to the east, the war zone known as Compton. The driver, especially at night, is struck by the pervasive fear of his car breaking down, of being somehow forced off the freeway into these mean streets. For a white man or woman, such a fate is fraught with peril. For a black man in a nice car wearing a suit, his chances are not much better.
But Darden noticed that in the summer of 1994 – the summer of Simpson – the freeways were more gridlocked than normal. He chanced it, each day driving 20 miles through the ghetto, then the garment district, past skid row. Finally, like a beacon of hope, the driver sees the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum approaching, and next to that the gleaming spires and buildings that make up the University of Southern California, a bastion of wealth, affluence and influence – not to mention O.J.
Simpson’s greatest stomping grounds - until finally arriving at the L.A. County Criminal Courthouse. For Darden, the Richmond native who once dabbled with the Black Panthers, who joined the D.A.’s office to track down racism, to use his gifts to help the unfortunate, it was a lesson in social disparity: graffiti, gangs, gun-toting teenagers, violence and filth. The greatest nation in the world, the most prosperous of all countries, had failed these people and there was no hope in sight.
He drove on Main Street, one stretch of which was so violent it was called Dodge City, home of the Bloods, the Rollin’ 60s, the 8 Trey Gangsta Crips, and the Seven Deadly Dwarves. He would pass a Catholic Church that was usually shuttered from drive-by shootings when they tried to hold services for murdered black teenagers. A “civilian” accidentally wearing the wrong gang colors in the wrong neighborhood was likely to be the dead child being memorialized. Burned-out businesses lay unbuilt after the 1992 Rodney King riots.
“Even the cops won’t go in without backup,” Darden stated of some of neighborhoods.
The ‘hood in L.A. is a conundrum of sorts. It is not the grinding lack of existence that South African Apartheid was, or the cardboard shantytowns and “shotgun” shack life of the old Jim Crow South. The worst neighborhoods in L.A. were once fairly nice, blue-collar suburbs where factory workers made a living and supported families. Many people live in single-family dwellings with a front porch, a yard (with a tall, wrought-iron fence), and a driveway, on cul-de-sacs and wide, palm-tree lined streets with plenty of parking. The easy racist answer as to why they are war zones is that black people cannot succeed; when blacks move in, everything goes to hell. The conservative answer is different: when liberals create a welfare state, all goes to hell. One fact backs up this assertion. The less racist America has become, the worse off black neighborhoods became.
To a thinking man like Darden, these and other sociological questions swirled around his head as he made this daily trek in 1994. He also was puzzled by a section of the “suicide note” O.J. had Robert Kardashian read. “I’m sorry for the Goldman family. I know how much it hurts.”
“I wondered, why apologize to the Goldman family if he was innocent?” Darden thought. “And why write a suicide note at all?”
Darden thought of O.J. as more than a suspect. Here was a successful black man from the San Francisco Bay Area, just like himself. He thought of Roman Polanski, who had escaped a child rape charge by fleeing to Europe, and wondered why Juice had not done that. Perhaps the drive in the white Bronco with A.C. had been done with this purpose in mind. O.J. did not have to leave by crossing the Mexican border or by plane, either. He could have grabbed a boat.
At some point that summer, word came down that Darden might be assigned the Simpson case. He told his father, Eddie Darden. “Black folks ain’t gonna convict O.J. Simpson,” he told his son. “Black folks want two kinds of justice, like everyone else. One for them and one for the other guy.”
Darden knew then and there he was up against it. His own father had seen the future. Darden tried to convince himself that blacks were fair, blacks would follow the law, blacks wanted justice. He tried to convince himself of this over and over.
“You’ll catch hell if you work on that one,” Mr. Darden told Christopher. “There’ll be hell to pay, you work on that one.” He asked his dad whether he should do it. “You have to do what you think is right,” he was told.
Shortly thereafter, Marcia Clark did assign Darden key responsibilities on the case, although she would be the main prosecutor. Both of them represented symbolism: a woman pursuing justice in the death of a battered woman, and a black man tasked with looking beyond race in the murder trial of another African-American. Largely forgotten was Ronald Goldman, the pretty Jewish kid trying to get break into the plastic world of Hollywood and L.A.’s westside.
One of the first things that concerned them was a complaint filed against Officer Mark Fuhrman in an earlier case, alleging that he had planted evidence. There were other rumors, that he was a racist, even a collector of Nazi memorabilia.
Clark asked Darden his opinion. “Well, to be honest, black people don’t think he’s guilty,” he told her. “But black people will do the right thing if the evidence is there.” He did not sound confident.
In the beginning, the government considered prosecuting Cowlings, too, for aiding and abetting a fugitive. He had been warned by cell phone during the slow speed chase that he was in violation of the law for driving O.J. Darden was given the task of addressing the grand jury. He reminded them that O.J. needed neither cash nor a passport to commit suicide. He wanted to convey the impression that the white Bronco chase had been all about his escape from justice, making Cowlings his guilty accomplice. At his own preliminary hearing, O.J. told the court he was, “Absolutely, 100 percent not guilty.”
The prosecution wanted to question Kardashian, who had stopped practicing law several years earlier and might not be able to assert attorney-client privilege. Kardashian applied for and was granted re-instatement of his law license after the murders, but the legal conclusion was that, licensed or not, he had acted as O.J.’s attorney, giving him privilege. Of all the people involved with O.J., including Al Cowlings, Kardashian may have known more than anybody except Nicole. He knew all about his pal’s battering of Nicole, and very likely was given a full confession in the days after the tragedy.
O.J.’s attorney was a notorious race-baiter named Johnnie Cochran, a black graduate of UCLA and Loyola law School who handled mostly-black, mostly-guilty black celebrities. Mostly, he used tricks and sleight of hand to get his clients off. These included Michael Jackson (child molestation), actor Todd Bridges (bomb threats), rappers Tupac Shakur (sexual assault) and Snoop Dogg (murder), boxer Riddick Bowe (assault), and Black Panther Geronimo Pratt (kidnap, murder). He also represented the only running back, prior to Walter Payton, who might have been considered greater than O.J. Simpson. That was Jim Brown, African-American (assault).
Darden was frustrated early to discover that Cochran had surrounded O.J. with a tight inner circle of close friends and advisors who kept their mouths shut, and when pressed insisted on legal representation even if not accused of crimes.
“I felt the emptiness I’ve experienced so many times, the feeling we were fighting for Nicole and Ron and that everyone else was protecting this murderer,” Darden wrote in his 1996 memoir, In Contempt with Jess Walter.
One day early in the case, a call came into the prosecutor’s office from an anonymous local news reporter saying that she had received a phone call stating that Cowlings and O.J. had planned to slip into Mexico, but had to change plans when the “Christmas lights” (police) appeared behind them. A.C. had concocted the cemetery story. This tipster also said Kaelin had seen O.J. behind the bungalow, not just heard a bump. The tipster’s name was Jennifer Peace. A phone number was provided.
Darden called and arranged a meeting. She did not show up. A search warrant was obtained for her residence, a West Hollywood duplex. With a TV reporter nearby, Darden and the police made contact with her. She let them in. Peace was an adult movie actress, known to have dated A.C. Her stage name was Devon Shire, after a street in the San Fernando Valley – where 99 percent of porn films are shot - called Devonshire. She was 23, and came from Kentucky at the age of nine.
“She didn’t look like I thought a porn actress should look,” recalled Darden. “Jennifer was very pretty, perhaps five feet, five inches tall, with dark hair and large brown eyes. It was clear, even with her loose-fitting dress, that Jennifer Peace was pregnant.”
The residence was in disrepair. The smell of dog feces was present. Reporters had gotten wind of her story and were prowling outside. For this reason, her windows were closed shut in the mid-summer heart. The smell was God-awful. She was trapped. It was a picture of fallen man.
One of the law enforcement personnel opened a window. He also noticed a booklet about AIDS, “which made me shiver.” Veteran porn actor Ron Jeremy
had set her up with A.C. She said all A.C. ever did was talk about O.J. Simpson. Cowlings told her about arguments O.J. had with Nicole. Cowling apparently saw Peace as a conduit to the world of porn, and asked for phone numbers of at least one other adult actress. Jennifer told Darden they had a “monogamous relationship” and she was not bothered by it.
A.C. told Peace that Nicole used racial slurs during arguments with O.J.
“I can’t believe I married a n----r,” Nicole supposedly had told her husband. “I knew this would happen to me.”
She said this did not “enrage” O.J. any more than he already had been. In the months prior to the murder, Cowlings expressed extra concern over his friend. Something was more wrong than usual. “I don’t know what he’s up to,” he told her.
After the murder, Cowlings met Peace at a hotel. He was crying, saying Nicole did not deserve such a fate. He told Peace that O.J. stalked Ron Goldman two nights before the killings. The slow speed chase was intended as an escape to Mexico, then the Bahamas.
Peace’s testimony was both good and bad for the prosecution. She had been urged to tell her story and did so freely. There was no indication that she tried to sell information. To Darden, she was sincere and, in his mind, this “iced it for me.” But she was also an “awful witness, a porn actress . . .” On top of all that, Peace told Darden she “didn’t want to be the one to convict Simpson.”
There were also tabloid offers, so even if she did not initially intend to tell what she knew for money, it was inevitable that she would be accused of it. She changed the story, as well, and would be “worthless at trial.” But she knew things that had not been released to the public. Clearly, she knew what Cowlings knew.
Darden followed one thread, the Bahamas destination. He discovered that O.J. had friends in the Bahamas with a boat who were alerted “that O.J. was coming . . .” After the “slow speed chase” word filtered that he was not. Darden went there personally and learned that practically the whole island had expected him. As Darden was learning more and more, however, he discovered that some witnesses, previously open, began to clam up . . . as if Bob Kardashian had paid them off. Darden was concerned that so many key witnesses – Peace, Kardashian, Cowlings, others – would protect a murderer that he might not get to the bottom of the case. There were no accomplices, nobody who could be “turned” as in most gang-related trials. He was frustrated, in that he was discovering circumstantial and hearsay evidence convincing him of O.J.’s guilt, but knowing he could not use much if any of it.
By October, Darden was the case manager. He was still in the background, meaning he was not yet a highly visible public figure, and thus subject to the increasingly polarized racial divide falling like a pall on the case, and on the city. He did not – yet – have to worry about “every homie in Southern California” wondering if “I was betraying my race.”
Darden pointed out that he prosecuted “thousands of black men,” and wondered why all the poor black criminals of Inglewood “deserve less support than one from Brentwood?” He began to see a “deep, illogical prejudice” enveloping the case, but this was coming not from racist whites, but racist blacks. Johnnie Cochran was “rarely subtle” about stirring this pot, and he began to realize that if he did not take the case, he would be letting Cochran win. The defense was afraid of Darden. He was both a skilled attorney as well as a symbol, like a black conservative politician with the power to unite both whites and blacks into a single voting bloc.
Darden concluded that there was “an abundance of evidence here” and, as a veteran prosecutor, felt the L.A.P.D. – despite numerous assertions of error later made by Fuhrman – had done a good job investigating. He firmly believed “nobody is above the law.” His own background, a poor kid rising up from the streets of Richmond, made him naturally want to seek the same justice for the wealthy as the “minimum wage earner in Compton.” He was an idealist about to be thrown into a world that would strip him of his cherished idealism. He knew it and was “torn” by his “responsibilities as a black man.” Despite the pervasive belief by many that the color of his skin was a major factor in his being chosen as case manager, Darden was convinced this was not the case. But would he be seen as “a brother putting another brother in jail.”
Darden again convinced himself that African-Americans would be fair. He admitted to being “naïve” in this hope. He told himself there were black cops in black neighborhoods, black judges, and black politicians. He used this logic to justify his place as a black prosecutor of a black criminal.
“Should blacks take themselves out of the justice system because it is unfair?” he asked. “Or should we work within the system to change it?” Darden freely admitted there was plenty of racial bias in the judicial system; that was one of the reasons he joined the district attorney’s office in the first place. But he was also a Christian man, and he knew he was in a battle with “evil.” He thought about Nicole lying in a pool of blood; a lily white blond, so proud of her own lack of racial prejudice who, after being beaten time and time again by a black man, finally uttered the N-word herself, as if forced by experience in a sinful world controlled by the Prince of Darkness, to discard her God-given innocence. Now he was confronted by the image of a woman with “her throat slit all the way to her spine, and Ronald Goldman, his hands diced by the knife that killed him, finished off with one last plunge of the blade into his chest,” stated Darden. “I had been called to help those two people get some justice; who was I to turn it down because I might be uncomfortable?”
O.J. had nine lawyers flooding the prosecution with meaningless document requests, all meant to tie up their case. Darden himself pointed out that he was chosen out of more than 900 attorneys available to the D.A.’s office. Even if he was picked because he was black, he was by no means the only black prosecutor. He was qualified and, over the previous months, acquitted himself well in his early investigative work.
The blood evidence “was overwhelming,” stated Darden, echoing the view of many on the case that this was seemingly the most cut-and-dried – to use an unfortunate pun – forensics case they had ever seen. His blood was at Nicole’s condo, both victims’ blood was in his Bronco (along with his), which had been missing for an hour at the time of the killings, and seen in a traffic altercation right after them. There was his bloody glove at Rockingham, the same as the bloody glove he left in a hurry at the condo. They were clearly his gloves. He left bloody shoe prints in his size, from $160 shoes he owned. That did not include the circumstantial evidence, the motive, the time line, and of course his past behavior, perhaps the most damning fact of all.
Darden was concerned about Fuhrman, but knew there were too many other officers near him for him to have planted the blood, which would have been an elaborate ruse probably requiring that he kill Nicole and Goldman in order to set it up. A large conspiracy would have been required to carry it out.
“10 racist cops couldn’t have pulled this one off,” stated Darden. Of course, had they done so, it would have been a complete role reversal from a decade of lenient behavior in which the cops favored O.J. time after time, leaving Nicole vulnerable and helpless in the end. “The prisons were full of people convicted on half the evidence we had against Simpson,” he added.
But it would come down to a jury . . . of O.J. Simpson’s peers? Who were his peers? Six ex-USC Trojans and six ex-Buffalo Bills football players? Six members of the Riviera Country Club and six members of the Screen Actors Guild? These and most any other combination of American citizens would have found him guilty. But the one group Darden knew just might let a murderer walk was the one Cochran was aiming at getting, and Darden felt almost helpless in preventing it.
Darden himself agreed that the case should be held at the downtown criminal building. There were L.A. County courthouses all over one of the vastest counties in America, including one on the westside, minutes from his home and the murder sight. A jury of 12 average Americans
and alternates from that pool would have produced a majority of whites, maybe a black or a Latino or two; probably a few Jews; maybe some movie people; likely a UCLA graduate or two, probably more likely than any Trojans. Generally educated, and a good, honest jury.
But the media onslaught was expected to be so huge that it was decided only the downtown courthouse had the capacity to handle it. Despite the logic of this, the defense lost the case because they allowed it to happen. When Darden saw the jury pool, he knew the case was lost. He did not tell himself that, or even admit it in his memoirs, but he did write “as soon as I saw the first-teamers, I could tell it was one of the worst juries – from a prosecutor’s standpoint – that I’d ever seen.” He insisted he was not talking about race, but to dismiss race from this equation would be like the manager of the 1927 Yankees learning both Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig were hurt and could not play in the World series, only to insist injuries were not a factor in his club’s chances.
“These were simply not happy-looking, motivated, or successful people,” stated Darden, who was probably a Democrat then if the case did not steer him to the Republicans. He might as well have described typical Democrats who make up the constituency of Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson, two race-extortionists of the Left who were howling bloody murder in the media throughout the case. Darden knew he had to pick from among people who were “angry at the system . . . 12 people lined up at the grinder with big axes.”
Darden went over all the questionnaires jurors must fill out. They were overwhelmingly black, and most expressed that they had followed the case and felt that blacks were wrongfully convicted time and time again. There is something inherently evil in this view, a big lie that becomes so big it festers into the very essence of a community, of a people. These were blacks who lived in high-crime downtown neighborhoods. They knew blacks and Latinos committed the crimes in those neighborhoods. They were, in fact, the very victims of those crimes.
“I was still clinging to my belief that blacks had a strong sense of morality and justice,” stated Darden, and this would lead them to do the right thing. In his gut he knew this was not true.
“Just give me one black on that jury,” said the smug Cochran, who practically seemed to be listening to Satan whisper instructions in his ear throughout. But it was Satan, and Cochran, who knew human nature better than the idealist Darden.
The jury was almost entirely black, few advanced beyond high school, and was mostly uneducated without college backgrounds, yet the prosecution had to show them sophisticated forensic evidence? Darden continued to insist after the case he had nothing against black jurors, but he knew Cochran would play the infamous “race card,” and these were the kind of people who could be manipulated by it.
That is how the devil would do it.
Darden was stunned that a police department that had “practically looked the other way” while O.J. beat his wife was suddenly a racist force, and that there might just be 12 people dumb enough, or immoral enough, to go for it. Cochran, the great black emancipator, was in fact the man who knew he needed these blacks because apparently no other jury pool would provide such stupidity; the sort of stupidity that could set his client free. It was literally an Alice in Wonderland world in which white was black, and black was white. Nothing made sense, except to the puppet-master Cochran . . . or whoever his master was. Yet that is what Darden saw happening, like a slow speed train wreck unfolding before his eyes, O.J. Simpson’s “innocence” declared as “bogus retribution for past injustices.”
While most people think the D.A. blew it, first by allowing for a downtown jury, then for the people selected, veterans of the case insist that as bad as they seemed, “They were the best of the lot,” said Bill Hodgman, an experienced prosecutor and part of the team Clark assembled. Darden read questionnaires for those on the second tier, and realized Hodgman was right. Typical answers included statements like “black men get picked on quite a bit,” that this was the reason O.J. was arrested, that jurors did not know a single person who had not been hassled by the cops . . . although in truth most people in America would probably answer yes to that question, most referencing some “unfair” traffic stop.
Other potential jurors had criminal backgrounds. Others claimed the justice system “cheated” them. One had a brother in jail for a killing, but claimed he had been railroaded . . . despite having pleaded guilty to murder. Others said “innocent” people are convicted of “things they didn’t do.” They all seemed to voraciously read the tabloids, in addition to People and the L.A. Times, yet apparently not articles about the evidence accumulated against O.J. Simpson.
“There was no way to win with this group,” Darden concluded.
Unlike most jurors, a majority appeared to want to be on this jury. Their motivations ranged from doing their part to free an unjustly accused black man, to being in the same room with a celebrity, to maybe catching his eye and have him smile at them. Blacks were in “shock” that he was a suspect. One remarked of O.J.’s “friendly image.” After hearing Nicole scream for help in a 9-1-1 call just one year earlier, another said it seemed like normal relations. Where, in the black community? Others thought it occasionally appropriate to hit ones’ wife, and that family violence needed to be handled internally. Asked if domestic violence was warranted, one juror replied, “Hell yes.”
If these answers reflected a true picture of African-American society, they tell the story of why an entire race of people have in large measure failed to achieve even a semblance of the American Dream. Certainly, these answers reflect a new morality, post-Great Society. The black America prior to 1964-1965 was Christian, consisting largely of fathers raising families. They were discriminated against but banded together, finding strength in overcoming obstacles. Seeing their men abused and their women disrespected by white racists, they never would have justified hitting each other. Now handed welfare checks and told by guilt-laden liberals the fault was not theirs, they reverted to the worst side of themselves. This microcosm of society was playing itself out before the horrified eyes of Christopher Darden, who was now the modern version of Thomas Wolfe’s “God’s Lonely Man.”
Another juror expressed admiration for the defense team. They seemed to love F. Lee Bailey and wanted to talk to Cochran, their hero. They smiled at Shapiro. They looked at Darden as if he was the enemy, their stares piercing his soul. Black jurors took the prosecution questions, know as voir dire, as if they were police interrogations. Complaints about restaurant service, police stops, and beatings were repeated.
“It was a nightmare jury pool, a stagnant, shallow pool of bitterness and anger, and I couldn’t say I was the least bit surprised,” recalled to Darden, referring to the white Simi Valley jury that largely exonerated the police who beat Rodney King in 1991. It was obvious this was the black communities’ chance at revenge. President George H.W. Bush had insisted that the cops be “re-tried” on federal civil rights charges, basically un-Constitutional, tantamount to “double jeopardy.” If he thought Republicans or whites would get the slightest bit of “credit” for allowing this injustice to happen, they were wrong. Blacks gave the pandering Democrat Bill Clinton – “the “first black President” – 90 percent of their unearned vote. The truth was nowhere to be found, much less setting anybody free.
Darden, who grew up with these “same” people in Richmond, understood down deep what he was up against, and that it could not be overcome. Not with DNA evidence. It was a perfect storm blowing entirely against his legal team. Cochran and O.J.’s defense saw it building and played its momentum for all it was worth.
Darden went so far as to call the perfect prosecution juror “an upper-middle-class, college-educated Republican, living in the suburbs because he had to get out of the crime-ridden city; a law-and-justice type, a person who had no use for criminals or those charged with a crime.” Since 1994, downtown Los Angeles has undergone revitalization. It was just beginning under Mayor Richard Riordan in 1994, but had
not taken hold yet. Today, many educated white professionals do in fact live in luxury downtown high rises, and might have made up some portion of the Simpson jury pool. But this percentage was too tiny to make any difference at O.J.’s trial.
These jurors were men and women raised on rap and hip-hop. They came from a “gangsta” culture. In 1994, the Los Angeles Raiders “escaped” from the Coliseum because their silver-and-black color scheme had turned their home games into gang territory. Drug dealers, criminals and misogynists were the heroes of these people. To expect them to have sympathy for a couple of whites living on the westside was ludicrous. Again Darden tried to convince himself there was enough of a “healthy black middle class” and “conservative, tough-on-crime blacks” to convict O.J. Simpson. Maybe such people lived in Ladera Heights (not part of the downtown jury pool), or could be found within the small category successful enough to have moved into the suburbs. Whether he was right or not, the celebrity status of the defendant, combined with the extraordinary manipulation of racial emotions Cochran was already engaging in during voir dire, made this a pipe dream.
Downtown juries had “more sympathy for the gangsters than the cops,” according to Darden. Veteran prosecutors recited a litany of horror stories to Darden, from past cases, one after the other, of downtown juries making “outrageous” decisions, letting murderers and cop-killers go free despite airtight cases against them. “Jurors will assume the cops are lying,” was the general downtown rule. Darden knew he would have to put Fuhrman on the stand. His heart sank.
Darden’s post-mortem, in which he addressed the accusation that he “lost the case” by allowing it to be tried downtown instead of in the Santa Monica courthouse, showed that he was too honest and ethical to try such a case, just as many felt Mitt Romney was too decent a person to go head to head with the Chicago machine that opposed him in 2012. Darden was “dealing with the devil,” and like the CIA in mortal struggle with Godless Communism, needed to play by a different set of rules.
“If the prosecutors had moved the Simpson case out of downtown to avoid black jurors, I would not have worked on it,” he wrote in his memoir, In Contempt. As noble as this statement may be, any prosecutor faced with a similar case in the future would be crazy to follow this same line of thinking.
When Cochran and his black protégé, Carl Douglas, learned Darden was on the Simpson case, Darden felt “like a dying man being eyed by vultures.” He knew the defense would use the media to make him part of the case, to excoriate him as an “Uncle Tom.” As a God-fearing man, he needed to gird his strength, drawing from Jesus’ courage in the face of Pontius Pilate’s judgment. When the press found out, his phone rang incessantly. His mother said she was “proud,” but his own father “was a bit more reserved.”
Cochran, the black lawyer who was hired for practically every case he had handled specifically because he was black, accused Darden of having been brought on board for the same reason. Cochran said the defense was “concerned about it. Why now?” After that, death threats against Darden started rolling in. He felt like a man without a country.
Talk radio was now filled with discussion of Darden. A black attorney named Leo Terrell, who has made a living out of being a Left-wing media maven for years, essentially said Darden’s responsibility was to blacks (read: let O.J. go free), or at least to reject the case. Darden wanted to do interviews, defending himself, but District Attorney Gil Garcetti did not want him to. Darden knew what whites did not; the case was being decided not on the CBS Evening News, but in black barbershops and black Baptist churches.
At the time, white conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh was having a field day making fun of the black Democrat Mayor of Washington, D.C., Marion Berry. He had been caught on tape smoking crack, among other things. To most blacks, whites had a responsibility to somehow not know what they knew about blacks. All the normal rules of society did not really apply to the conduct of blacks. All the evidence and interviews in the world were not going to change that.
The great American revolutionary Thomas Paine, author of Common Sense, wrote, “There does not exist in the compass of language an arrangement of words to express so much as the means of effecting a counter-revolution. The means must be an obliteration of knowledge; and it has never yet been discovered how to make man unknow his knowledge, or unthink his thoughts.” Strangely, black public opinion seemed to discard the very notion of Original Sin. Once knowledge of sin is possessed, it cannot be undone, yet Johnnie Cochran, the man doing the bidding of . . . who, or what?, was counting on human weakness, which was to reject truth in 1994-1995 just as they had 2,000 years before when He manifested Himself as the Son of Man.
In the mean time, Christopher Darden was alone with the images of two murdered human beings haunting him.
Around this time, Darden received a credible tip that somebody in the crime lab was “assisting” the defense by placing O.J.’s blood on a clean swatch. They examined every possible angle regarding the chance that Fuhrman had planted blood, but that was airtight in their favor. They also knew the defense would argue it anyway. Truth was not their ally. Cochran would plant in the jury’s minds the possibility, and they would use their own prejudices in processing this possibility.
Dozens of book proposals making outrageous claims were also being spread throughout Los Angeles and to the tabloids by “authors” hoping to make a buck by landing some kind of scoop. Even some of the jurors were said to be working on book deals. One proposal, by a Colorado writer named Stephen Singular, claimed Mark Fuhrman was Nicole Simpson’s “special cop” since the incident he investigated at North Rockingham in the mid-1980s, and that he was motivated by this event to get O.J. Singular painted an elaborate scenario describing how Fuhrman could plant evidence to set O.J. up, but failed to explain that if Fuhrman were Nicole’s “special cop,” then in order to “set O.J. up” in advance, it would require his having Nicole killed. According to Singular, Fuhrman worked with somebody in the crime lab to set this all up. Darden began to realize that O.J.’s “dream team,” praised in the press as the greatest legal eagles in the nation, costing the defendant millions, were actually relying on a theory proposed by a man Carl Douglas had dismissed as “a nut.”
As Darden waded into the case, he became convinced that O.J. had a psychological disorder that more or less allowed him to “blame” women for his beating them. He definitely had a form of “transference,” in which a person blames all of his faults on another person by attributing his behavior to the other. This appeared to be the locus of his “battered husband” defense, although Nicole had in fact struck him, getting physical with him, albeit normally if not at all times only in self-defense. “How dare she hit me after I hit her.” Whether he was capable of living a delusion, killing Nicole and Goldman yet actually not knowing he had done it, seemed incongruous yet not impossible. Darden also seemed to get to the heart of O.J.’s rage, which was that he had “raised her from her youth”; she owed him everything she had; all the material possessions she had were earned by his talents and abilities; even her family owed much of their financial gain to his benevolence; yet she was ungrateful. He could not buy her love or gratitude.
In the mean time, Darden was stunned to read a National Law Journal survey of lawyers that revealed only 27 percent of them thought O.J. would be convicted. These people had read the evidence and knew it was rock solid, but they felt as Eddie Darden did that blacks would not convict one of their own.
“We have found the unconvictable client,” famed defense lawyer William Kunstler, a foul perverter of the law who was in his day what Cochran was now.
“What the hell have I gotten into,” Darden asked himself.
The more Darden researched Fuhrman, the more convinced he was that the officer had strong racist sentiments, “awful beliefs.” He began to formulate a plan, which was to expose Fuhrman’s racial bigotry on the stand, diffusing Cochran’s obvious attempt to do the same, before he got to him. Then,
once that was established, he would take him through the evidence, which was what it was no matter who the messenger was. Prior to the trial, the prosecution still felt there was no way the conspiracy theories about planting DNA and a bloody glove had any credibility. They certainly knew they were untrue. But Darden still did not realize how devious Cochran was. The lead defense attorney would focus as much on Darden himself, literally planting in the jury’s mind the idea that there was “a conflict of interest between being black and being a prosecutor,” that he was an “apologist” for a racist, and other outrages. While Cochran’s assertions were actually racist, essentially saying no black man is qualified or honest enough to handle the responsibilities Darden was handling, a strange psychosis had settled over the African-American population. It was Cochran, not Darden, who had his finger on this virulent pulse.
In truth, the “apologist’ was Cochran. He was an apologist for a man he knew to be guilty, yet of his own free will allowed to drip from his lips the lie that he was innocent. Darden watched Cochran hug O.J. like a brother, the scorn building in his own soul. With it, the last vestiges of what innocence the young boy from Richmond might have had left after a hard-bitten decade prosecuting L.A. criminality.
“If your blood is tracked all over the scene and the victim’s blood is all over your vehicle, if you have motive and opportunity, if there is no way you could have been set up, you are a murderer,” is the way Darden saw it. “All the racists in Los Angeles couldn’t change that.”
Today, two decades later, America has elected a largely unqualified man whose very love of country remains in question among his detractors. He was elected Commander-in-Chief above all other reasons, because is black. In light of this and the post-O.J. events leading up to it, Darden’s assertions, made shortly after the 1996 trial, appear utterly naïve. He was yet unaware that the O.J. Simpson murder case was part of a larger mosaic that Ronald Reagan once warned about; that choices and events were happening that would lead a nation that was once the “last best hope of man on Earth,” and thus “sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness.”
Darden did, however, sense something awful, which was that “first step into a thousand years of darkness” had a name: Mark Fuhrman. Attitudes about him varied. He was personable and intelligent, definitely good at his job. A lot of people liked him. If he was a racist, he had hidden it from most, but not all. Darden reached a chilling conclusion that speaks to racism, which was that it was easier to categorize racists as “ignorant fools. There is nothing more unsettling than a smart racist.” If a man’s attitude was based on facts, anecdotes, experience, were they not valid? Certainly more so than an ignorant hillbilly who knew not what he spake. On the other hand, Adolf Hitler’s attitude about Jews had been based on anecdotes, personal experience, over the course of many years in Vienna, in the trenches of the Great War, and in depression-era Germany.
But when they finally met, Darden had an uneasy feeling about him. He was immediately impressed with his size. Fuhrman was an ex-athlete who had once been an amateur bodybuilder. Asked about the N-word, he replied “I’m not gonna say that I never used a racial slur.” He claimed he had never used the word on the job. Among his listed sports heroes were George Foreman and Magic Johnson, both black. He also liked Larry Bird. If O.J. Simpson had once been his guy, he no longer was, but of course Fuhrman did not grow up in L.A., rooting for the Trojans, like so many other cops.
Darden admitted to what Darden already knew, but the prosecutor felt he was being evasive about any “skeletons that we don’t know about.” But Darden was deeply concerned about something that seemed to pass over the heads of white cops and prosecutors; the effect of the N-word on the black psyche. This is one of the great frustrations of whites. Blacks call each other n----r all the time! It is a common word in hip and rap music. Occasionally, comedian Bill Cosby will publicly express dismay that this is allowed, but his is a voice in the wilderness. Nothing has changed in 20 years; the word is commonplace among blacks, utterly taboo with whites. In the years since the Simpson trial, use of the word by a white, or even a whiff of suspicion, is virtually the end of a career and a reputation.
When Darden met with Cochran in Judge Lance Ito’s back bench, he told his adversary they should not make the case about race. Cochran stared straight ahead. Tben Darden argued that the N-word should not be allowed in the courtroom. He argued that jurors hearing the word would have to ask themselves, “Either you are with the Man or you are with the brothers. That is what it does.” He went on to criticize rap music for its flagrant use of the N-word. He added that Detective Fuhrman was just one of a number of investigators who collected one item out of some 800 collected. He said racial slurs uttered 15 years earlier were inadmissible. He added that Cochran wanted to “inflame the passions of the jury” by asking them to pick racial sides. The “mountain of evidence” was overwhelming against the defendant.
To “blind” people with the N-word would not serve justice, Darden argued. “Mr. Cochran wants to play the ace of spades and play the race card, but this isn’t a race case and we shouldn’t be allowed to play that card . . .” he quoted from The Nations by Andre Hacker: “It will reveal that whites have never created so wrenching an epithet or even the most benighted members of their own race . . . a persistent reminder that you are still perceived as a degraded species of humanity, a level to which whites can never descent.”
Darden appealed to Cochran’s own history, reminding him how he felt when first called a n----r (Darden recalled in his memoirs that he initially heard it from a group of white boys on bicycles in downtown Richmond). The jury, he argued, needed to be directed toward the evidence, not a word that, aside from rumor of a single, passionate instance, never was uttered by O.J. or Nicole to each other, and had no place alongside the events of June 12. Mark Fuhrman was quickly becoming the focus of the case, but Judge Ito had the power to stop it.
Cochran responded with condescension to “my good friend, Mr. Chris Darden.” He called Darden’s remarks “incredible’ and “demeaning to African-Americans as a group.” Then he apologized to the black race in America!
“He was apologizing for me?” Darden asked, knowing the answer.
Trial of the century
Johnnie Cochran said blacks had lived under 200 years of oppression, which is an interesting, semi-false statement. In fact, largely English, Spanish and Dutch slave traders, prior to the birth of America in 1776, had brought them to the North American continent. The United States inherited them. In 1787, while the Founding Fathers hammered out the Constitution, a plan was hatched to end slavery. It was vital to the Southern economy and was politically too difficult to end “cold turkey,” so it was decided that in 1808 they would stop importing them. The theory was that the existing slaves in America would eventually grow old and die. End of slavery.
The “problem” was that, largely unlike any slaveholders in the history of slavery – a thriving institution that had existed as long as man trod the Earth – American slaves were allowed to marry and have families. Thus, they never “died off.” Some 634,000 white Union soldiers were killed or wounded, in essence, so that slaves could be free. Never in history had anything remotely like that ever occurred. When the war started, if somebody predicted such a thing they would have been branded a lunatic, but that is what happened.
According to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade database, edited by professors David Eltis and David Richardson, about 388,000 slaves were shipped to North America. An additional 60,000 to 70,000 Africans originally landed in the Caribbean before being shipped to the United States, bringing the total to around 450,000 African slaves in this nation. Most of the 42 million African-Americans today descend from this small group. Many have said some 30-60 million Africans died during the slave trade. This of course encompasses a period that starts some 300 years prior to the birth of America, includes slaves who died in transport, and the vastly larger number of slaves who
ended up shipped to, and dying in, the Caribbean, Cuba and what is today called Latin America.
Obviously, this means that in studying the slave trade, one must separate and make an exception of the United States, as an entity, as opposed to lumping it in with the larger industry. By the time of the Civil War, slave families had expanded their population to 4 million.
40,000 black soldiers died fighting for the Union Army. 1,161 slaves were executed. How many slaves were “killed” by starvation, malnourishment, mistreatment, violence, or other forms is really just speculation, but it does not appear to be a highly significant number. America was a capitalist system and maintaining healthy slaves was good business. It is probably fair to say 10,000 were killed by other than natural means. Many attribute a far greater statistical number, but this is done by including all who died, including by sickness and old age, which of course happens to all human beings.
The Confederates suffered 358,000 killed and wounded. Using the available metrics, 594,000 white Union soldiers died between 1861 and 1865, compared to 10,000 black slaves between 1776 and 1865. Adding the Confederates numbers, the figures are 925,000 white Americans dying in a cause over slavery, compared to 10,000 blacks over 89 years.
Most significantly, approximately four score and seven years after the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution, a thriving institution that had existed since before Biblical times, in all four corners of the world, was ended on American shores, by Americans using laws written by Americans, and ultimately at the expense of blood shed by 925,000 white Americans soldiers, 40,000 black American soldiers, and 10,000 black American slaves.
Slavery did not end because a foreign power came to America, defeated America, and forced America to abandon slavery. Americans chose to end it, and thus did end it, even when the cost for doing so ultimately reached almost 1 million American lives. When America ended slavery, it was ended once and for all as a legitimate trade between nations, never to return.
But when Johnnie Cochran got up to defend his use of the word n----r before Judge Lance Ito, the last thing on Earth he was willing to do was admit that one single one of those 594,000 white Union soldiers had died so he could be free, and the last thing he would ever do was to admit that America – “the last best hope of man on Earth,” stated Ronald Reagan - was where slavery had come to die.
“At that moment, I hated Johnnie Cochran,” recalled Darden. In so doing, Cochran had won. He succeeded in reducing his foe to his level, and began the process of reducing an entire country, which had made so much racial progress over the previous 30 years, to his level.
When Darden returned to his office, the phones were ringing off the hook. The general reaction from blacks was: “You f-----g sellout motherf----r.” He was called a “disgrace to your race,” accused of being “used” by the Man. Others said he was a dead man if seen on the streets. The abuse came not just from blacks, but also from white racists who called his family “apes.” Darden had once “hated” the white race for calling him a n----r. Now it was all turned around. The word had “power,” he stated, but that power would be “misused” and made to “blind us to reason.”
The media called it “a game,” but to Darden it was no game. Now Darden was out of the shadows and into the forefront of the biggest media sensation, perhaps ever. O.J. Simpson was being turned into a “political prisoner,” an American Nelson Mandela.
“And then, out of my fatigue and anger came prayer,” recalled Darden. “It was all I could do. God Himself placed His hand on my heart, calmed me, and allowed me to rid myself of the hatred and free my spirit from the burden that weighed on me.” After that he had first his good night’s sleep in three months.
If Cochran or O.J. Simpson prayed, did they ask God to forgive them their trespasses?
Cochrane wore “shimmery, Buck-and-the-Preacher suits, trying to contain his smile – the arrogant grin of a guy dealt two aces, who always carries two others in his sock,” wrote Darden. His strategy: deny and scream racism, just as he had done in the Michael Jackson child molestation case. The rest of the “dream team” included Robert Shapiro, F. Lee Bailey, Gerald Uelman, Alan Dershowitz, Peter Neufeld, Barry Scheck, Carl Douglas, Sara Caplan, and off to the side, Robert Kardashian. Each had a specific specialty, ranging from celebrity representation (Shapiro), attack dog questioning (Bailey), research (Uelman), Constitutional law (Dershowitz), DNA (Neufeld, Scheck), a black face (Douglas), law clerk (Caplan), and friendship (Kardashian).
In December of 1994, Marcia Clark and her team discovered the “message from the grave,” Nicole Simpson’s safe deposit box containing photos of her beat-up face from the 1989 attack . . . the one in which O.J. said she was a “conditioned woman” who battered him. Also included was her will, which seemed specifically designed for a young person expecting to die young.
“He continued to beat me for hours as I kept crawling for the door,” she had written. She described O.J. hitting her while having sex with her, the ultimate humiliation, which brings up the very real possibility that he was also a rapist. It described his gun threats and demands to abort Sydney. This led to the unsealing, and discovery of, 62 separate, recorded cases of abuse, manipulation and threats. The police had been called on some occasions, but not most of them. She told the cops she felt O.J. was “going to kill me” in 1993. She told her mother she was scared. People came forward to describe O.J. planning to break into her house, of his many stalkings of her, most of which she was unaware. Faye Resnick said O.J. had warned her he would kill Nicole. His attitude at the funeral seemed oddly guilty to most. Nicole had called the Sojourn shelter in Santa Monica four days before her death, seeking respite.
O.J. Simpson’s reaction to all this? He rolled his eyes, complained, and had to be told to stay quiet. “Simpson couldn’t stand for the world to know the truth about him,” stated Darden. At other times he had the “thousand-yard stare” of a man who had killed too much in combat. The defense called truthful facts about their client’s character a “smear campaign.”
When the trial began, Darden made eye contact with the Goldmans and the Browns. These were his “clients” as much as the people of the state of California. Darden was tasked with the opening statement. He asked the jury if they really did know O.J. Simpson? He detailed the history of his abuse and his controlling behavior. Then Clark addressed the forensics. With each piece of evidence, she intoned from the report the words, “Matches the defendant.” The cut on his hand; the bloody footprint matched to his size 12 $160 Bruno Magli loafers; his bloody glove at the murder scene; his other bloody glove at the house; blood in the house, the foyer, and the Bronco; blood from three different people mixed together, at Bundy, in the Bronco, transported from Bundy to Rockingham in the car; at Rockingham: “Matches the defendant.”
“Blood is where it should not be,” Clark said. There was additional hair and fiber evidence, all pointing to O.J. as the murderer. O.J. had no alibi. Cell phone records from O.J. to Paula Barbieri at 10:02 and 10:03 P.M. showed he was driving around in the Bronco. Barbieri had broken up with him that day, adding to his sense of loneliness and desperation, to his state of mind. Pundits said that from an evidentiary standpoint, it was all over but the shouting. The symbolism of race was the only thing the defense had to outweigh the facts. Darden was hammered in the liberal media for having the temerity to be a black man trying to convict a brother. It was almost as if they wee saying this was traditionally the white man’s role, to railroad the poor Negro; let the Man carry out his traditional oppressive duty. There was no Fox News, which would have been the only network really supporting Darden. Court TV, a fairly new network, was getting huge ratings, and some of its stars would later make up the Fox line-up.
“It was bad for our case, but it was worse for the country,” recalled Darden. “We were being ratcheted back 50 years because of a lying, murdering ex-jock and his unprincipled legal team. And the media, the pundits, and the star struck judge played gleefully along.�
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The prosecution also got the distinct impression that Cochran had access to files he should not have had. He knew everybody in the D.A.’s office and may have had spies. On January 25, he quoted Martin Luther King. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” he said. He went on to skillfully place in the minds of jurors the notion that the injustice of the Rodney King beating and the acquittal of the cops by a Simi Valley jury, could only be made right by acquitting O.J. Naturally, he made no mention of the federal case President Bush immediately ordered of the officers, which had resulted in convictions. That did not fit his narrative. Certainly telling the downtown blacks on that jury that the only justice they had received of late came courtesy of a white patrician Republican was of no value to his cause. If Bush thought it would aid his re-election, he was sadly mistaken, as well.
Polls showed that 80 percent of the black community sided with O.J. Cochran told them they would have to go back to that community, and deal with their decision. This was incredible. Not even the most vile of racists could truly believe that 80 percent of African-Americans, with the evidence already known, could be so dumb as to believe O.J. was innocent. Cochran knew he did not need truthful belief. It was worse than that. He knew that the jury, and an entire race of people, was willing to live, to actually be a lie, in order to get “justice.” This was a lesson subsequently learned by liberals, the Democratic Party, and Barack Obama. It was a template for success in the courtroom, the media, and in politics. It was, as Reagan warned, “the first step into a thousand years of darkness.” Over time, many thoughtful black conservatives would emerge in opposition to this, but in 1994 Christopher Darden felt that none of these people existed. If they did, their voices were drowned out. He was all by himself.
Darden told the jury they were the “conscience of the community,” which seemingly should have pointed towards his client’s guilt, but a dark age, a pall of evil was hanging like a cloud over America. Darden also knew that his remarks were “also directed at me.” He said Darden was “offensive to women,” a ludicrous statement yet effective coming out of his silver-tongued mouth.
Cochran also broke numerous rules of judicial and ethical conduct, most of which were allowed by Judge Ito. He objected to everything. He called witnesses previously not disclosed, including a known liar who had stolen a credit card, ran up $20,000 in charges, then tried to sell a story to the tabloids, who claimed she saw four Hispanic and whit men leaving Nicole’s condo at 10:45. Cochran said the police discovering her story to be fabricated was a “rush to judgment.” Other witnesses, like Dr. Ron Fishman, who O.J. told after the dance recital he was not finished with Nicole yet, were not called. Actual, true facts were of no value to Johnnie Cochran or O.J. Simpson, but they had at their ample disposal plenty of lies.
Cochran in his opening statement said he would call the maid Nicole had slapped. She never was called, because if she had, the prosecution would have asked her about the 1989 beating. Yet Cochran managed to let the jury know that Nicole had slapped a maid. An expert who called O.J. the “classic profile of a batterer,” claimed she would only work for the defense for $250,000. Apparently she got her fee. She wrote a note to Cochran, asking that he tell O.J. he “is doing great.”
Cochran described O.J.’s great attributes, his “circle of benevolence,” which was essentially his habit of paying everybody off with money and gifts. Darden had seen his tax returns, however. He gave to those who could help him or he needed. He gave virtually nothing to charity.
Darden addressed the jury on the issue of O.J.’s past battering. He reminded them of the 1989 incident, in which O.J. told the cops, “You‘ve been here eight times before and now you’re going to arrest me?” This was typical of his arrogance. He was somehow unable to see that the reason the police had been there eight times was his fault. He also told the police, “I’ve got two other women . . .” as if cheating on his wife was some sort of badge of honor, or excuse for hitting her. Darden recounted how a half-naked Nicole ran out and told Officer John Edwards, “He’s going to kill me.”
Nest came Ron Shipp, described by Darden as “honest and forthright.” Perhaps he and Darden stood as exceptions to the general rule, representatives of honesty and decency in the African-American community. While Darden described O.J.’s past violent behavior, he sensed more disturbing body language among the black jurors. He hoped to reach the women on the jury, but they seemed to look at him with stone faces, unmoved. It was if violence, domestic and otherwise, was such a common trait among blacks that to describe a black being violent was like describing a guy who snores loud. So what?
Thus did Darden fear that Shipp’s testimony might fall on deaf ears. A decent, law-abiding black man who cared for all of humanity, without regard for color; was this truly the exception to the rule? If so, the case was lost, but worse, so was the country. A cancer had metastasized and spread, and was inoperable. Evil minions, including one in a Buck-and-the-Preacher suit, were spreading it.
“It was eating me up,” Shipp said on the stand, of his responsibility to testify against his friend, O.J. Simpson. “I knew I didn’t want to tell you guys and be in this position.”
They had known each other 26 years. Shipp did some minor P.I. work for O.J., like running license plate numbers. O.J. showed Shipp an article about “pathological jealousy,” and admitted he fit the pattern. In some ways, Shipp had hurt Nicole by introducing so many police officers to O.J. It made Nicole feel helpless, like law enforcement had not been on her side. It certainly put the lie to Cochran’s “racist cops” defense.
Shipp told the jury that the night after the murders, O.J. told him in person, “You know, to be honest, Shipp, I’ve had some dreams of killing her.” Darden was unable to let the jury know that this had been his response to a possible lie detector test. Such tests were inadmissible in California, so Darden was prevented from referencing it.
Carl Douglass then accused Shipp of lying, complete with a pool of spit spewing out of his mouth. He accused him of having an affair with a blond, of drinking took much, and tried to say that his testimony was a ploy to get “acting jobs.”
Naturally, Shipp was dismissed as a sellout and a snitch. The L.A. Sentinel, a black newspaper, dismissed him as a drunk and said the only people accusing O.J. were “addicts and liars.” Darden realized he was “operating under two different sets of values.” The fact that Shipp was Nicole’s friend as well as O.J.’s seemed irrelevant to African-Americans. The ranks were being closed.
Shipp, like Darden, now faced death threats from all his peaceful “brothers.” He was now afraid of his own people, a “demoralizing” set of circumstances. “The world is different for us now,” Darden told him. The attacks against Shipp were viewed as a warning to anyone “courageous enough to testify against O.J. Simpson,” stated Darden.
The lessons from this strategy were not lost on the Clinton Administration, which discredited and ruined reputations of numerous women who had the courage to come forward with descriptions of Bill Clinton’s philandering, sexual assaults, rapes . . . maybe even murders. Later, Barack Obama’s strategy was to blame all criticism on racism. A compliant media would do all they could to destroy conservatives.
“I can sleep at night – unlike a lot of others,” Shipp stated, but he was wrong. The devil sleeps well, if indeed he sleeps.
When Faye Resnick testified, she became an immediate cause célèbre with her beauty and westside poise. She told the jury O.J. said to her he would kill Nicole if he found him with another man, but the black jurors could care less about the testimony of a sexy, too-tanned white socialite. Women like this were the enemy, white broads “stealing” black men from black women, just as Nicole had done. The resentment against this kind of woman was palpable. All blame was placed on white women who steal black men; never on the black men themselves, who remained blameless.
But many witnesses were going to the tabloids. This made them virtually useless to the
prosecution. One said he was with Ron Goldman at a Starbuck’s with Nicole when they saw O.J. stalking them. Goldman and Nicole were not alive to corroborate this, and when he told it to the scandal sheets he was of no value to Darden. Jill Shively, the woman who barely evaded a traffic accident when O.J. was racing away from the crime scene minutes after committing the murders, had taken $5,000 for a TV appearance. Shipp had never accepted money. His reward was to be “carved up by ruthless defense lawyers while Ito looked on,” stated Darden. Ito was exceptionally impotent, allowing these offenses to go on as if he was being paid by O.J. himself. The porn actress Jennifer Peace (Devon Shire) was lost; her profession and statements to the press eliminated her testimony, which she had reluctantly told Darden, about Cowlings admitting O.J. told him he killed Nicole. An inmate at the LA. jail where O.J. was held said he told him if Nicole had not come to the door with a knife in her hand, she would still be alive. It was inadmissible as evidence.
Even Marguerite, O.J.’s ex-wife, remained loyal to him. She was of that class of black women scorned in favor of a white girl, and the villain in such cases was never the black man. O.J. had beaten her a number of times in the 1970s. Police had been called. She refused to cooperate. Despite a tremendous amount of discovery painting the picture of a controlling woman-batterer, Judge Ito constantly penalized the prosecution, disallowing most of it.
One witness, a screenwriter, described a dog, an Akita, making a “plaintive wail” at around 10:15 the night of the murders. Another witness saw the Akita pacing back and forth in front of the gate to Nicole’s condo. A call to the cops was not responded to. Another witness came across the dog and saw that its paws were bloody. He asked Sukru Boztepe to keep the animal, but it wanted out so, curious, he let it take him to the scene of the crime, where he discovered the bodies. When Marcia Clark showed graphic photos of the carved-up Nicole to Boztepe, asking if that was what he saw, O.J. turned away, Denise Brown started to cry, Tanya Brown covered her face, Kim Goldman wept, while “The jurors looked on impassively,” recalled Darden.
It was unreal. Murder, death, mayhem. All apparently part of the African-American experience. A dead white girl and a Jewish kid? So what. What was that compared to the gangs and the drug dealers? If Darden did not already know the case was lost, this came close to cinching it. These people could not be reached. Where was their humanity?
Ring of Fire
When one of the prosecution lawyers, a veteran named Bill Hodgman who considered Cochran a friend and had always given him extra access, had a seizure and had to be removed from the case, the defense chortled, “We almost killed Hodgman.”
“I guess he couldn’t handle your opening statement,” joked Douglas.
“They laughed like children, the cold, insensitive bastards,” recalled Darden.
He looked over and saw Cochran “sitting there smugly.” Darden walked over to him and warned him that no matter what happened, “I’m gonna be here.”
“I’m sure you will, my brother,” Cochran replied. He said it the way Satan would say it.
The abuse continued for Darden. Blacks would see him on the road and accuse him of being a “sellout.” It got so bad he almost thought his name was changed to “motherf----r,” such a sweet refrain so often heard among the peaceful citizens of the black community. One black ran to his car and said, “Somebody is going to get you all . . .” before spitting all over Darden’s face. This was the new life for the former quasi-Black Panther who joined the district attorney’s office to root out racism.
If the case had not turned already, it did when the jurors were bused to the Rockingham state for a tour of O.J.’s home. First they stopped at Ron Goldman’s apartment at Gorham and San Vicente, near Mezzaluna. Then they went to the restaurant, followed by a tour of the Bundy condo, and finally O.J.’s place. The jury seemed more like football fans tailgating before a big game. One wore a San Francisco 49ers cap, O.J.’s last team. O.J. stayed in the police car. Few if any notes were taken. They were bored by evidence, emotionally unmoved. That is, until they got to the Hall of Fame, which is what the North Rockingham house might as well have been. A plethora of collegiate and pro memorabilia alike. A chauffeur took them on a tour. They oohed and ahed at the sight of signed jerseys, photos of record-breaking games, MVP and All-Pro awards, of plaques an honors worthy of one of the greatest athletes in the history of the world.
Cochran’s team had arranged the house for maximum benefit. Prominent photos of Eunice Simpson and other family members were hung. A Bible was brought out of mothballs and placed next to the bed. A copy of Scott Turow’s bestseller Presumed Innocent was near the fireplace.
“Nice touch,” Darden thought to himself.
Pictures of O.J. with J. Edgar Hoover, Bing Crosby and others were hanging. The grounds were like a national park, or a golf course. “They were sight-seeing,” is how Darden described them. The purpose of the display was to convey the idea that no man would risk such a life by killing his ex-wife or anybody else. Incredibly, O.J. was allowed to point out features of his house as if they were party guests. He wore no restraints and looked to be free as a bird. The jury was led to the front yard, where his defense claimed he was “hitting golf balls” during the murder, their concocted excuse for his sweaty appearance in the cab to LAX.
“I could see right through, right to the evil, and he didn’t like it,” Darden recalled of O.J. that day.
When the police and the forensics experts took the stand, the defense “didn’t ask questions, really,” stated Darden. All they did was accuse the L.A.P.D. of racism and planting evidence. The cops, their image already sullied by the Rodney King beating and aftermath, were on the defensive. Cochran made up stories of Colombian drug dealers. “Their case was a wild spaghetti of theories and racial insinuations thrown against the wall, and some of it was bound to stick,” stated Darden. When not going on a
“wild goose chase” with witnesses, Cochran demeaned Darden to the jury and to Judge Ito, who just sat there like a lump on a log. When Darden complained, Judge Ito threatened him with contempt. Darden was so sick of it all he was ready for some jail time.
“A cruel, double murderer was on the verge of going free and I wasn’t about to hide my disgust, my humanity, behind a law degree,” recalled Darden. “I was going to keep fighting.”
Darden was not the only one at the breaking point. The press was filled with rumors about Marcia Clark. She and Darden were romantic. Details of her past divorce. She was suicidal. She was promiscuous. She was a bad mother. Topless photos of her existed. As a white woman, she elicited no sympathy from the jury. Then the National Enquirer revealed that Darden’s older brother, Michael, a military veteran, was addicted to crack, had AIDS and was dying. She and Darden survived using gallows humor. Judge Ito, in the mean time, was “drunk with media attention,” stated Darden.
Clark and Darden were in the ring of fire.
According to polling, 64 percent of the American public could identify Ito compared to only 52 percent knowing Newt Gingrich, the new Speaker of the House whose Contract with America returned Congress to the Republicans for the first time since Dwight Eisenhower’s first Presidential term. 75 percent knew who Kato Kaelin was. Only 25 percent could identify Vice-President Al Gore.
In a strange way, Darden and the other principals understood something only O.J. Simpson and other major celebrities, particularly sports stars, had experienced. The athlete’s professional work is watched and judged by millions. Most professionals do theirs in relative anonymity, but the total saturation of the global media put Darden, Clark and the others in a spotlight seemingly reserved for a Marilyn Monroe, a Joe DiMaggio . . . an O.J. Simpson. When they went out, people told them they were the most recognized people in L.A. All the while, “I felt as if my constituents had voted me out of the ‘hood, revoked my ghetto pass,” Darden recalled.
The racial animus got worse, especially from black women who suspected Darden was with Marcia; another bla
ck man choosing a white woman. But it would only get worse, for the inevitable involvement of Mark Fuhrman was coming, like the Titanic headed for an iceberg. Darden’s initial reservations about the detective just got worse. He was becoming convinced that regardless of his evolution from an angry, divorced, racist ex-Marine to a seemingly decent member of society, he was a ticking time bomb that would explode his whole case. It was precarious enough is it was.
“Every time I talked to Fuhrman, I wanted less and less to do with him,” stated Darden. Fuhrman was adamant that he had nothing to hide. Darden was increasingly convinced he did and, worse, Cochran already had it. Fuhrman was “smart and smooth,” Darden noted. Was he smart and smooth enough? He worried that Fuhrman might feel he was too sharp to be cornered by a black like Cochran. Darden realized that if all the rumors about Fuhrman turned out to be true, then their names would be inextricably linked. This nightmare he was living, which he assumed would end with the trial, had the potential to be a millstone around his neck forever.
While the prosecution wrestled with the best Fuhrman strategy, Darden discovered a coterie of O.J.’s inner circle, including his maid, his friends, his advisors, and his legal team, had closed ranks to hide evidence, coach witnesses, and conveniently failed to remember incriminating incidents. Questioning Detective Tom Lange, Cochran made sure to mention he lived in Simi Valley, a code word for racism in the black community after an all-white jury from that town essentially acquitted the cops of the Rodney King beating.
If O.J. had been one of Simon Legree’s slaves and Nicole the slave owner’s cruel white daughter, it would not have changed the fact that he had – premeditated or not – murdered her, not to mention the innocent Goldman. For the next eight days, they went after Lange, not so much questioning him as planting more racist conspiracy theories in the jury’s heads. Then they brought in Fuhrman, trying to trip him up on the issue of planted evidence. Phil Vannatter, a respected veteran, went through the same treatment. Had he not come across this case, he probably would have been retired by now.
“26 years and no one has ever accused me of lying,” he told the court in disgust. The jury just stared at him as if to say, “So what, white man. Now you know how we feel.”
Vannatter and Fuhrman had never met. How could they have planned a conspiracy? It was a theory, an argument, and a line of questioning Darden and Clark knew they never would have needed to address if they had a jury they could trust. Now the prosecution was on trial, and the rules were Cuban or Russian: guilty until proven innocent.
A great nation brought low.
Vannatter plugged away at this injustice. He laid out the time line, the blood trail, the DNA, the forensics, and O.J.’s lies. His bleeding hand had gone from a paper cut to “playing golf” to a shard of glass in Chicago.
Clark handled Kato Kaelin, who was obviously covering up for O.J. with alibis. One of his friends said Kaelin told him O.J. had stated, “Thank God, you can tell them I was home all the time.” That was hearsay, however. “Throughout his testimony, Kato played dumb,” recalled Darden. “It was the perfect role for him; he was a natural.”
He seemed to represent a cottage industry of vacuous Southern Californians holding some piece of the puzzle, each hoping to cash that piece in somehow, none of whom cared a whit about justice or, apparently, whether there was a God judging their hearts and minds. Their creed was, “I don’t want to be the one to convict the guy.” There had been a tiny minority of exceptions, such as Ron Shipp, who was excoriated by the defense and the media. They learned that lesson well. Al Cowlings had once told O.J. he would kill him if ever hurt his friend Nicole again, but that had just been talk.
Cowlings himself, who knew everything, invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to self-incriminate himself. This may have been the biggest mistake the prosecution made. They had initially brought a case against Cowlings for aiding and abetting a criminal act, only to eventually drop it. An immunity deal may have forced him to testify. More than likely O.J. paid him off in case he had to withstand prosecution. Either way, it was another part of a larger mosaic in which justice was badly failed.
Aside from Shipp, another honest witness was Allan Park, the limousine driver, who was never part of O.J.’s inner circle. He testified the Ford Bronco was not parked in front of the estate when he arrived at 10:22, when O.J. was “hitting golf balls” in the front yard, as Cochran wanted the jury to believe. Park did not know that O.J. always parked in front, right where he was, but on this night and this night only, he parked out back at a haphazard angle. At 10:55 – Park never saw anybody hitting golf balls – O.J. entered the house, then came out claiming not to have been hitting golf balls, but having “overslept.” Except he was sweating . . . from hitting golf balls? Later O.J. denied he overslept. He needed the golf ball story to explain his sweat. The circumstantial evidence of O.J.’s stalking, wife-battering, and lies on the night in question, may very well have been enough to convict him, absent his having transported the blood of three people, two of them murdered, from one house to another, like a Red Cross truck.
Even Kaelin’s testimony helped establish that O.J. was not home when he claimed either to be “sleeping” or “hitting golf balls.” He had no alibi for the 70- to 80-minute gap that the police knew was when the murders took place five minutes from his house. But criminologist Dennis Fung – think of “blood spatter expert” Dexter Morgan on Showtime’s Dexter, absent being a serial killer - had made some crucial errors, and was a worse witness.
Barry Scheck, O.J.’s “blood guy,” now introduced a new theory, which was that a mistake had been made handling the evidence, or possibly a conspiracy had been carried out to frame the defendant after the fact. For nine days the defense hammered at him. Then, after he was done, Fung went to the defense table and shook hands with O.J. Simpson! Pundits said he had a slight case of Stockholm Syndrome. At that point, many legal experts began to say the trial was out of control, and the defense was winning because of it. One former judge, George Dell, pointed out that many convicted murderers were on death row with far less evidence against them than O.J. . . . but the case “demonstrates that if you have enough money . . . the trail will go differently.” While it may be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to ascend to Heaven, as Christ told his disciples in the Gospel According to Matthew, a rich man could still buy a verdict. That was seemingly far more important to O.J. Simpson, then and now, than to ascend to Heaven. It also appeared to be more important to Johnnie Cochran and F. Lee Bailey. For the jury, it was a marathon. Many had wanted on, but they were getting more than they bargained for.
Be careful what you ask for, you just might get it.
When one juror was dismissed, a young Hispanic woman who had been the victim of domestic abuse was brought in as an alternate, but she was dismissed. As time passed, the attrition rate for the jury became one every two weeks. Darden described them as “stone-faced.” When Denise Brown cried, describing years of abuse her sister experienced at the hands of her eventual killer, the jury “just sat there.” Dull eyes, “seemingly unmoved”, met graphic photos that made grizzled prosecutors gasp. It was as they were mesmerized, distancing them from what had once made them human.
It was a bad year in many ways. That summer, the Major League baseball players struck in the middle of a record-breaking season. The World Series, which had been played through two world wars, for the first time since 1904 was not held. A piece of America died in 1994.
Most of the time, white jurors were replaced with black ones. Darden felt a black juror named Willie Cravin fundamentally changed the jury chemistry. It was apparent to him they were racially polarized. One of the remaining white jurors called Cravin a bully. Through Cravin, a clique developed. Four black jurors gave succor to Cochran, smiling and letting him know they were on his side. There were some dismissals and strange side occurrences, understandable considering the strain they were under. One juror sat for a TV
interview, stating that just because O.J. beat his wife, it did not make him a murderer. Another juror, a pretty young black woman, complained she was being watched through a two-way mirror in her hotel room. Later she posed for Playboy. Cochran helped arrange tickets to a UCLA football game for one juror. One juror heard another call the trial “payback time.” Another carried a book about black rage, which described black violence as “gettin’ some back,” adding that “our random rage in the old days makes perfect sense to me.” A former juror actually published a book in June of 1995 that read, “For black jurors, Simpson was one of our own.” By June, Cravin was replaced. Overall, 10 jurors had been replaced. They now had eight black women, two white women, a black man, and a Latino man. Darden wondered about the “social dynamics,” whether the black women all thought of Nicole as a white whore stealing an available black stud. It was grotesque.
The media went crazy, and it looked like a mistrial might ensue. Darden was now sure the jury could not get past race. They were people “who couldn’t forgive,” supposedly the essence of Christianity. Statistically, the forensics evidence pinpointed O.J. as the killer by a margin of 170 million to one, or 6.8 billion. There was no real reasonable doubt.
“We couldn’t know it, but in their eyes, the case was already over,” stated Chris Darden, God’s lonely man. Still, he and his fellow attorneys needed to carry on, for the Goldmans and the Browns. Fred, Patti and Kim Goldman made the trek to the downtown courthouse almost every day. The Browns had the additional pressure of dealing with O.J. and Nicole’s two children, now in their custody. They despised Johnnie Cochran almost as much as O.J. Simpson. Doggedly, Clark and Darden kept going, rising at six, working until midnight; weekends, holidays, no personal lives. They were amazed to find that even Hollywood liberals supported the prosecution.
With Cowlings pleading the Fifth, the Bronco was also off-limits. The jury did not hear how the defendant bought a fake beard and stuffed an enveloped with almost $9,000 in cash and, with a gun in his possession, headed off to Mexico like Steve McQueen in a Peckinpah film. They knew that Cochran and his “actor” client would present a sob story about wanting to join his dead wife, to visit her grave, to find the “real killers,” or the meaning of life . . . The news footage showing crowds of fans cheering on O.J. would not help Darden and Clark, either.
Incredibly, Judge Ito did not allow Nicole’s phone call to a women’s shelter four days before her murder, calling it hearsay. There was “an inordinate amount of hearsay evidence – stuff that the public heard about, but the jury didn’t,” stated Darden. “It’s difficult for a prosecutor when the media has a better case than you do.”
Nicole’s sessions with Dr. Susan Forward were inadmissible, for reasons that remain unclear. Doctor-client privilege? Hearsay? O.J.’s drug use? Nicole’s conversations with Faye Resnick and others? Much of it was inadmissible. Nicole’s rumored affair with Marcus Allen? Never entered into evidence.
The tab kept piling up: $6 million in taxpayer money.
In the mean time, Cochran warned Darden to “watch out for the brothers.” He was warning his adversary that blacks were out to get him. Then Cochran, like the devil offering Christ all the kingdoms of the world, told him he would “see what we can do about getting you back in.” He presented himself as the sole path that would allow Christopher Darden to find acceptance in the African-American community after his “betrayal” of them. It was one of the most disgusting things that a disgusting man had ever done.
Darden argued that his responsibilities as a human being were greater than his responsibilities to African-Americans, that in fact being a role model for his daughter, being an upstanding citizen pursuing blind truth, was better than the lie Darden had decided to support.
Darden did not tell Cochrane, “Get thee behind me, Satan.”
But he should have. Just as his fellow Jews had betrayed Christ, there was even a report that Darden found himself booed in church.
Meanwhile, O.J. was a “cold, stone-faced bastard . . . a calm murderer,” according to Darden. When one witness testified that he could tell a man was black by hearing his voice Cochran, while “leaning on the podium in his off-white, linen suit, like some angry plantation owner,” acted as if it was racism on par with a slave auction. Darden felt like “I had the urge to beat ass right there in the courtroom.”
Judge Ito seemed helplessly out of control of events in his courtroom.
The case moved to the shoes and the gloves. The prints outside Nicole’s condominium were clearly O.J.’s distinctive $160 Bruno Maglis. Only 300 pairs of this style were sold in O.J.’s size 12. The odds that somebody else wore those shoes were almost as astronomical as the one-in-6.8 billion chance that the blood did not match O.J. as the killer. They discovered O.J.’s hair samples in a hat he wore, then moved to the gloves.
They found the gloves used had been sold in Bloomingdale’s between 1989 and 1992. There was no Bloomingdale’s west of Chicago. They knew O.J. spent winters in New York working as a football announcer. They discovered that on December 18, 1990, Nicole Simpson bought the gloves in question, $55 a pair, when she and her husband were back east. All the bar codes matched up. They were O.J.’s gloves.
Photos of O.J. working the sidelines of cold, wintery football games showed him wearing those very gloves. An expert on the gloves testified they were made to be “tight.”
“It was clear,” recalled Darden. “These were the gloves. But the jury sat there, stone-faced and unimpressed with everything.” Facts were apparently of no value to them. The defense pushed the theory that Fuhrman somehow got hold of a unique set of gloves unavailable west of Chicago, and planted them.
“All the racists in L.A. couldn’t change the fact we were staring at O.J. Simpson’s gloves,” stated Darden. He turned to Clark. “Let’s put them on him now,” he suggested.
Clark shook her head, fearing O.J. would pretend they did not fit. While discussing the possibility with Judge Ito and Cochran, the lead defense counsel used a strange choice of words in describing O.J. putting the gloves on: “performance.” Darden had a strange fear that Cochran had prepared for this moment, even though he was feigning surprise.
“The tension was thick in the courtroom,” Darden recalled as O.J. was called forward to try the gloves on. With a crooked smile, O.J. crooked his fingers, and pretended to try and put the gloves on. He pulled and tugged, not letting his own hands into the gloves. Incredibly, this sham was allowed. To millions of TV viewers, it was obvious he had faked it, pretending the gloves did not fit. To the jury, whether they were dumb or just played dumb, the effort was valid.
The glove expert examined O.J.’s hands and testified the gloves would be large on him, not too small. His testimony might as well have been made in a forest, unheard by human ears. 61 percent of the public said they thought the gloves fit. Rush Limbaugh used a pointer to scientifically demonstrate on his TV show how the gloves fit. None of it mattered. The prosecution now had a defeatist attitude. Experts called the glove incident the “biggest blunder of the case.” The prosecution had done what every law school professor tells them never to do. “Don’t ask a question you do not know the answer to.” Gil Garcetti was grim. Darden told him he took full responsibility. The faces of Nicole and Goldman haunted him from the grave.
“God, what had I done?” Darden recalled asking himself.
Genocide
“Hey, you know anything about some tapes Fuhrman made with a writer? Some tapes where he uses 50 epithets?”
It was “a good source” Darden knew, alerting him that Cochran was trying to find these tapes. The tapes, he was told, were “in L.A. That’s all I know.”
The New Yorker outlined the defense strategy, which was to focus on Fuhrman’s racism. His notes at the crime scenes, Rockingham and Bundy, were excellent. He had all the earmarks of a solid witness, if not for this potential tripwire. More than 10 years earlier, he told a woman named Katherine Bell, “If I had my way
, they would take all the n-----s, put them together in a big group and burn them.”
“Genocide,” thought Darden. “Jesus. What was I getting into?”
Mark Fuhrman, a veteran of the force, was probably still a racist. He had a slightly troubled past. He was from Washington state and had done a tour in the Marine Corps where he reportedly had some trouble dealing with minority Marines, but his alleged remarks to Bell, if true, were beyond racism. This was genocide. The imagery of “burning” an entire ethnic group of human beings evoked Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust, in which 12 million people (6 million Jews) had been murdered in concentration camps, many of their bodies then incinerated in huge, grotesque ovens. It was the kind of crime, like the 35 million killed by Joseph Stalin, or the 60 million killed by Mao Tse-tung, that the narrator in the Ronald Reagan documentary In the Face of Evil called “incomprehensible.”
But this was not necessarily incomprehensible. Fuhrman gave a face, a voice, the color of authority; worst of all, he seemed to drape it all with the American flag. A disturbing parallel also existed. Fuhrman, like Hitler, had wanted to be an artist before joining the military. He saw the last days of combat with the Marines in Vietnam, 1973, just as Hitler saw war as a young soldier, too.
His trouble with blacks and Mexicans came during a time in which the post-Watergate military, which hit that year (1973) was filled with quasi-criminals allowed to join instead of doing jail time, in order to meet quotas. Fuhrman was disgusted that “a bunch of n-----s and Mexicans that should have been in prison” gave him orders.
As a Marine M.P. Fuhrman was said to pull over any car containing a black man and a white woman. He would make up an excuse, and expressed disgust at the prospect that an inter-racial couple could be in love. He joined the L.A.P.D. and made intemperate remarks about “dumb” n-----s and Mexicans.
His police file also was disturbing, indicating that he experienced post-traumatic stress disorder so bad he feared killing someone. Despite having arrived in Vietnam well after the worst fighting, he apparently saw some hairy things that stuck with him. Working 60 to 80 hours a week investigating a Mexican gang (some of the most ruthless killers on the face of the Earth) had exacerbated his tension. Fuhrman had given much of himself to his country, both in the corps and on the force, but felt disrespected and unappreciated. He had told somebody he fantasized about killing criminals when “no one sees him.” He may have even been suicidal going through two divorces.
The Kathleen Bell incident had occurred more than a decade prior, a period Judge Ito deemed inadmissible. This was still very, very dangerous for the prosecution. Cochran and his team were itching to get it into the trial. There were still ways it could happen. If Fuhrman were tripped up, caught in a lie; if some new evidence was presented that somehow made it important, admissible, Darden knew it was a bombshell, a Damocles sword hanging over their heads.
Fuhrman denied the Bell story. Whether he had said what was alleged to Bell or not, he believed it was inadmissible anyway. He stated he had not used the N-word in 10 years, which was the period the judge deemed admissible. Darden knew that even though Judge Ito had ruled this way, Cochran might get him to reverse course and Fuhrman would be like an open sore, exposed to a mostly-black jury. Things got no better when Darden learned a rumor about Nazi swastikas was true.
“The craftsmanship is incredible,” Fuhrman told him. Thousands of World War II veterans had returned with Nazi war items and Japanese Samurai swords, spoils of victory, but no explanation for this sense of conquest would “explain” Fuhrman. Was a Nazi symbol a spoil of war or a political statement? Besides, Fuhrman had not fought in World War II.
An investigation determined that a number of minority Marines who knew the man had positive things to say about him. Fuhrman’s partner, Ron Phillips, adamantly denied that he was a racist. “Mark really dislikes criminals,” he said. Many cops make this blanket statement; they hate “scumbags.” Statistically, most were of color, however. Phillips said he heard of Fuhrman’s past statements, but had not heard them personally. Fuhrman was friends with a black woman deputy D.A. They met for lunch and he baby-sat her kids. He played basketball three times a week at the YMCA with “a bunch of brothers.”
Darden could hear the clichés about basketball and “some of my best friends are . . .” Still, a hardcore racist does not baby sit the children of a black. Fuhrman did not like affirmative action, hardly unusual. He respected hard work, intellect, character. As a cop he dealt with the worst lowlifes on the street. It was impossible not to be jaded, but these experiences often result in a certain amount of respect for law-abiding minorities. One of Fuhrman’s white colleagues with the L.A.P.D., a former USC pitcher named Phil Smith, once described a gang crime that resulted in the death of a little Mexican girl.
“There’s something extraordinarily beautiful about little Mexican girls,” he said, truly having empathy for the loss her family suffered. “I mean, cops don’t hate blacks or Mexicans. We protect the law-abiding citizens, but we do hate scumbags.”
Yet, the white experience and the black experience were very different. Smith’s assertion that they “protect law-abiding citizens” was not the same as the Simpson jurors. Perhaps they appreciated the arrival of a squad car after their house was burglarized, or a quick response after being assaulted, but there was a pervasive sense that young black men doing nothing were rousted and unfairly convicted.
Phillips either did not know about, or denied that Fuhrman collected Nazi paraphernalia. He denied he received white separatist literature. His plans to retire in Idaho, the home of the Aryan Nation, were just a coincidence, he said. “Look,” Phillips said. “Mark is a hot dog and has always been one. He’s not a racist.”
Darden contacted all the black cops who had worked with Fuhrman, and got very positive reports. He told himself Malcolm X had changed after years of virulent racism against “blue-eyed devils.” As a Christian, he knew the redemptive powers of Jesus.
A man named Hodge told the defense Fuhrman used the N-word, but he had a long arrest record. One day Darden was on the phone with a member of the defense team, who admitted that evidence had not been planted, and that O.J.’s guilt “looks bad,” but that did not mean the jury would convict. This was the essence of the Simpson case, of course, then and now.
But the Fuhrman rumors persisted. Darden knew this was big trouble. Then he found out the tapes did in fact exist. Laura Hart McKinney, a screenwriter in North Carolina, made the tapes as part of research for a cop movie. She had taped Fuhrman, and it was less than a decade prior to 1994. It was mid-July of 1995 when Darden learned of this. Cochran was working to acquire them, first in a North Carolina trial court, then in an appellate court. Darden knew it had the potential to “undo all we had done.”
On August 7, the North Carolina court granted the defense motion for the tapes. Darden had worried that the blood evidence was too complicated for the jury. Later one juror spoke of “all the business about blood,” unable to stay on top of it. But the North Carolina ruling meant “it ceased to matter,” Darden stated.
For one thing, the tapes potentially made Fuhrman a perjurer, a liar. If he lied about using the N-word, he could have lied about the evidence. Darden received his copy of the tapes on August 11. There were 17 cassettes. A group of D.A. secretaries transcribed them “and it was a disaster.”
Drinking tequila to ease his pain, Darden read through the “awful pages. It was worse than I had imagined.” Fuhrman called women “split-tails.” He referred to a “n----r driving a Porsche that doesn’t look like he’s got a $300 suit on, you always stop him . . . How do you intellectualize when you punch a n----r? He either deserves it or he doesn’t.” It got worse. Fuhrman talked about planting evidence and lying about cases. He complained about a partner who was “so hung up on the rules and stuff . . . this job is not rules . . . F—k the rules; we’ll make them up later.”
Much of it was from 1985, nine years prior. They went all th
e way up to 1994, when The New Yorker floated the theory of a racist cop planting evidence. Fuhrman read it and told McKinney to stay quiet about the screenplay.
Fuhrman used the N-word at least three dozen times over 10 years. He bragged of beating suspects and said planting evidence was routine. He denied planting evidence in the Simpson case, but relished being in the spotlight.
“I’m the key witness in the biggest case of the century,” he bragged to McKinney. “And if I go down, they lose the case. The glove is everything. Without the glove – bye, bye.”
Many of the meetings were held at Hennessy's, a popular Manhattan Beach watering hole. The tapes, however, could not accurately be described as verbatim quotes and opinions of Mark Fuhrman. In fact, they were the basis for a fictionalized police officer who expressed these views. Fuhrman may have been channeling his true opinions, even desires, into this “character,” but the purpose of the interviews was to create scenarios and attitudes, through his words, that would later be made into the character. This character was undoubtedly a racist, but to create a realistic racist character is not necessarily an act of racism. If so, then Harper Lee would have been racist for creating racist characters in To Kill A Mockingbird.
Laura Hart McKinney was apparently not racist, yet she laughed and joked at many of Fuhrman's racist diatribes. She seemingly understood that the “character” coming through was not necessarily Fuhrman, but Fuhrman giving voice to screenplay dialogue. That said, Fuhrman seemed to relish this chance to let loose, to be given freedom under the cover of an act, or the creation of a fiction, to say what he felt was true, was on his mind, and in his heart. However, just as Harper Lee was not a racist for giving character's she invented racist attitudes, Fuhrman may have felt he was “acting,” or employing what acting coaches called “the method,” which is to get into character and not merely parrot words from a page. This is a major source of disagreement among acting teachers and actors. Dustin Hoffman, for instance, was of “the method,” needing to find his own motivation and place that into his character. Sir Laurence Olivier, on the other hand, felt they were just words on a page, and talent alone transformed those words into believability on stage or screen.
The tapes lasted until 1994. The last timed Fuhrman uttered the N-word was in 1988. If in fact he felt he was “acting,” the question as to whether “he” had ever uttered the word is in question. If an actor, say Sean Penn or Samuel L. Jackson, used the N-word in a role, would he be required to say that he - Penn or Jackson - had ever said it, or qualify it by saying his character in Casualties of War or Pulp Fiction said it?
Furthermore, Fuhrman was a smart man. Nothing could be dumber than for a police officer to say what he said on tape. Absent the O.J. Simpson murder trial or any other trial, if anybody who got hold of those tapes and gave them to his superiors, it would likely result in his being fired or disciplined. Perhaps his superiors would have hidden it for PR purposes, but there was no value in being quoted like that. This adds to the theory that, dumb an idea as it may have been, he really was “channeling” a fictionalized screenplay character.
Darden was not aware that much of what Fuhrman said had been for effect. Any logical person had to ask why an otherwise-intelligent police officer would allow such incendiary things to be taped. The purpose of the tapes was to create a persona, a screenplay character. But it was impossible to separate that character from Mark Fuhrman. It cut too close to home. Johnnie Cochran was certainly not going to give him the benefit of the doubt, and the jury would not, either.
Darden sat in his office, drank some more tequila, despairing. He knew Cochran and his team was poring over these words at this very time; chortling, laughing, seeing the way clear so a murderer could walk.
He stopped reading, but that would not make it go away. Darden was living a nightmare. Not only was he the public face of black betrayal, he would be inextricably linked to the name of a blatant racist. History would judge him culpable, the loser of the biggest case of all time because he had hitched his wagon, in irony worthy of Shakespeare, to the very sort of racist cop he originally joined the district office to put away.
However, whether Fuhrman thought he or a character he channeled “said” this word was immaterial. He had almost surely used the word on other occasions. He had racist thoughts. He freely admitted it and apologized for it. While it was explained that his words were part of a channeling, or acting process, in order to get into a character, he never hid behind this excuse. He later made it very clear he was wrong. These racist thoughts were bad enough that he underwent some counseling, ostensibly over anger management issues, but it is also true that in the 1990s, he seemed to have made vast improvement. Whether he did so in a conscious manner in order to assuage guilt, or as a form of therapy, or strictly because he was changing for the better, he had by 1994 established solid relations with black colleagues, rising early for basketball with fellow black officers. Blacks on the force had no problems with him in the 1990s. There were no racial complaints from citizens. But perhaps most telling, he went out of his way to help free a black man wrongfully accused of killing a white man, after he came across exonerating evidence. Lastly “there is no evidence that his feelings toward blacks ever manifested themselves in any criminal behavior against them,” either before, or as part of, the O.J. Simpson murder case, wrote famed L.A. prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi.
But none of that mattered. What is known of Fuhrman 20 years after the murders indicates that whatever motivated him to tell Kathleen Bell blacks should all be gathered up and “burned,” while unquestionably genuine hatred, was also not a true desire. It was fantasy, a horrible one, but had some cosmic switch been made available to him in which the devil himself tempted him with the power to, in one fell swoop, kill all blacks, surely he would have come to his senses and not doe not.
Through counseling, the healing of wounds, putting divorces behind him, and getting past his Vietnam experiences, by 1994 – the only time that matters as it pertains to the Simpson case – he appeared to have become a pretty normal fellow. Maybe not a “nice guy,” but not a monster.
The beat went on. It turned out Fuhrman had a previous altercation with Judge Lance Ito’s wife. This could mean a mistrial, since it involved a possible conflict of interest for the judge. The murder victims and their families were by now utterly peripheral.
“We were going to lose,” Darden recalled thinking. “We heaped disrespect and dishonor upon the legal profession,” and he was “disappointed in myself for taking part.” The case was now “one long distraction about racism.” But Cochran, who apparently knew about Fuhrman all along, had laid a trap. The prosecution fell for it. The forensics, the circumstantial evidence, the bare facts, that had come and gone, its effect now papered over by racism. Darden was sure the jury knew everything in the media, regardless of sequestration. Cochran feigned more mock outrage.
Then Laura Hart McKinney was called. She was “coquettish and breathless,” as described by Darden. She suddenly expressed “newfound outrage” at the content of the tapes, even though she was heard giggling at Fuhrman’s tirades. In North Carolina, McKinney testified that Fuhrman had represented “a fictitious character.” Now, facing a mostly-black Los Angeles jury, she changed her tune, distancing herself from Fuhrman prattling on about “dumb n-----s” and “Mexicans who can’t even spell the name of the car they’re driving.”
“They don’t do anything,” Fuhrman had said of female cops, managing to offend women and blacks simultaneously. “They don’t go out and initiate contact with some six-foot, five-inch-inch n----r that’s been in prison for seven years, pumping weights.”
42 times Fuhrman used the N-word over nine years, by McKinney’s count. He said it casually, in an ordinary manner. The McKinney tapes opened a Pandora’s box of new discovery. Judge Ito now allowed the testimony of Kathleen Bell and Natalie Singer. It was Bell whom Fuhrman had told he wanted to burn all people to death.
Darden knew what he was discovering, Cochran was discovering; probably had long before. There were rumors that the defense had stolen Fuhrman’s personnel file, which was supposed to remain confidential. Doctor-client privilege had been breached, and it was damaging. His wife claimed he was “hateful” when she left him, and a psychiatrist wrote he had “fond memories of killing and beating up on people without any remorse . . .” He used excessive force. Hurting people was “fun.” He was a narcissist, self-indulgent and unstable. However, the doctor believed much of this was just talk, delusions of grandeur in a sense, and over time he should recover.
On top of that, Darden had worked in the special investigations division, where his specialty was rooting out racist cops. Now he needed to cooperate and coordinate a key part of the prosecution with a guy who would at the very least be suspicious of him. Darden decided that he would not try and argue against Fuhrman’s racism, only that it had nothing to do with The People v. O.J. Simpson. Further, there was no evidence of any racial bias in the case at hand. Was bigotry worse than double murder? That was the question Cochran was hanging his defense upon.
What we hath wrought
Darden had argued against using Fuhrman, but the rest of the prosecution knew they needed his testimony. The Goldman’s approached Darden, concerned about him as well. Finally it was the moment the world was waiting for. Fuhrman’s reputation as a “racist cop,” true or untrue, was firmly planted in the imagination of the public by a media that could not say it loud enough. He was a liberal dream, a picture of every accusation ever leveled at the Right.
Dressed in a navy blue suit and red tie, perfectly coiffed, Fuhrman told Clark he was “Nervous. Reluctant.” He said for the most part he had seen evidence ignored in favor of his personal issues exposed.
Clark asked about Kathleen Bell’s letter, in which he had told he her wanted all the blacks rounded up and burned, a horror scene straight out of Auschwitz. Fuhrman denied it. He believed it had been stricken from the evidence.
Fuhrman then testified that he and Ron Phillips were the 10th and 11th policemen on the scene, hardly the originators of a conspiracy. Fuhrman went on to tell how he saw the blood spots and followed their trail. Clark led him through discovery of the bloody glove.
Waiting on the other side was F. Lee Bailey, a legend but by 1994 over the hill. He was an alcoholic, rescued from a DUI by Shapiro himself. So far, he had not played a major role in the case, but he was reserved for Fuhrman. He bullied witnesses; it was his style. He was “a foul-mouthed, arrogant SOB,” recalled Darden. Bailey hated him.
Bailey went after Fuhrman about Kathleen Bell. Judge Ito allowed it, even though it had nothing to do with the Simpson murder evidence. Bailey, using wordplay, asked if he saw a couple gloves. Fuhrman said he had not seen them, he “found one.” Bailey sarcastically asked whether Fuhrman’s goal was to be alone at the south wall where the glove was found. “It just worked out that way,” Bailey said (not asking), in a derisive tone.
“That’s how it worked out,” Fuhrman replied. This was followed by Bailey rambling, theorizing, and making inappropriate racial statements, all allowed by Judge Ito. Bailey told Fuhrman a former Marine named Cordoba he once served with had told him “Marine to Marine” (Bailey had served in the corps) that Fuhrman once called him either “boy” or n----r. That night, Cordoba told NBC’s Dateline he had not spoken to Bailey. Bailey was apparently lying. Judge Ito allowed it.
“This is the kind of nonsense that gives lawyers a bad name,” Clark told the court the next day after playing Cordoba’s interview.
Then Bailey got nasty, repeating the word “n----r” the way Phillies manager Ben Chapman used it to bait Jackie Robinson in the most infamous scene of the Dodger star’s breakthrough 1947 rookie season. Cochran pretended he had nothing to with it, a total lie. He was the puppet-master of a grotesque display, made even worse by the fact he was literally using the identical strategy of a notorious racist. Newsweek had leaked the prosecution’s preparation of Fuhrman, which included this tactic, even though Clark and Darden had thought it was beneath even Darden and Bailey. It was not.
Finally, Bailey got to the crux of the matter, covering ground many thought was off-limits, deemed inadmissible by Judge Ito. He asked if the policeman had used the word “n----r” in the past 10 years. This was after the Kathleen Bell time frame. Where was he going with it? The drama in the courtroom was something out of A Few Good Men, which also involved Marines. Darden whispered to Clark to object, but she did not.
“No, not that I recall, no.”
Bailey even gave Fuhrman an out of sorts, asking if it was “possible” he had forgotten addressing a member of the African-American race “as a n----r.” During this period of time, Fuhrman could have used the same technique as First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. She testified over illegalities she and her husband engaged in over a land deal in Arkansas called Whitewater. Over and over an over, Mrs. Clinton repeated the same line: “I don’t recall.”
Fuhrman was not as skilled a liar.
There was no evidence Fuhrman had “addressed a member of the African-American race as a n----r.” Nine years earlier, he had told screenwriter Laura
McKinney essentially what he had told Bell; he wanted to see blacks rounded up and burned. But technically he had not said it to a black person, which was the way Bailey phrased the question. Instead of using the evasive tactics of Hillary Clinton, citing lack of memory, Fuhrman just denied it, saying it was not possible.
Darden and Clark were frozen by the possibility that another witness was out there, hidden by Cochran, who had heard him say such a thing to a black. Then Bailey changed his phraseology. He asked if “under oath” he had “spoken about black people as n----rs in the past 10 years, Detective Fuhrman?”
“That’s what I’m saying, sir.”
He had lied, and in so doing committed perjury. History will record that this was the first step towards freeing a murderer. For Mark Fuhrman, his life could never be the same again.
The jury was a bad one, anyway. Clark was positive many had lied on their questionnaires in order to sit on this jury, ostensibly to free a black icon. There was nobody in the city who had not been tainted by coverage of the case. The prosecution’s own jury consultant warned there were people seated on this jury who would never convict O.J. The defense team routinely planted lies and false information in the press to throw the prosecutors off. But despite all of that, Clark and Darden knew truth was on their side, and believed it would set them free.
Yet a conversation a police officer had with a woman in a bar in 1985 was now more important than a burly ex-football star slashing two humans in one location, then transporting the blood of all three people from the scene, into his car, and to his house.
The idea of a conspiracy theory, seemingly cock-eyed before, was now given the weight of great possibility by the media, mainstream and otherwise. The prosecution knew the jurors, despite being ordered not to, were hearing these theories. It was impossible to truly sequester them fully. The system requires some honor and trust. That was not part of the fabric of this jury.
There was a white juror named Francine Florio-Bunten. She was well-educated and understood DNA. “The defense hated her,” recalled Darden. The defense very possibly had one of their outside allies plant a story that she was planning to write a book called Standing Alone for Nicole. Darden investigated and found it to be untrue. Either way, she was dismissed. She might have been Nicole’s last best hope on Earth. Now the jury increased from eight blacks to nine, but the one honest juror who might have held out and caused a mistrial, which might have forced another trial in front of a less hostile jury, was now gone. She never wrote a book.
“You’ll notice I’m smiling. That’s all I’m going to say,” Johnnie Cochran told USA Today, sounding like Samuel L. Jackson’s Jules when he learns “the Wolf” is coming to dispose of an inconvenient body in Pulp Fiction, a movie that came out that very summ
er containing an endless, three-hour flow of the N-word.
How had the tapes been discovered? McKinney’s husband, a film professor, was trying to cash in on Fuhrman’s sudden celebrity, attempting to shop the story to Hollywood. Asked his motive, he adopted the same vapidity of most everybody else involved in this sordid tale. “To sell a screenplay,” he deadpanned. Duh. To make money. Even Fuhrman later said he got into all this trouble “to make money,” to get a screenwriting, story by, or producing credit for whatever movie that came out of McKinney’s work.
Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.
Fred Goldman, alone against the whirlwinds of injustice, raged about a man who “butchered” two people, yet now Mark Fuhrman was on trial. It was disgusting and “not fair!” Fairness? Really. None of this had anything to do with a bloody glove. It had everything to do with a bloody glove. The blood of three people, two murdered, the third the murderer, transported by the murderer from the scene of the crime in his car to his house, separate entirely from the glove . . . that was completely forgotten!
“But he had lied,” Darden said of Fuhrman, summing it up in a nutshell. He had given Cochran just enough. Darden “ached,” watching poor Mr. Goldman, in agony, wondering how a loving God could allow such a travesty. The answer, which is that the Prince of Darkness controls the world, was too theological for any of the principals to grasp at that crucial time, any more than Ronald Reagan’s words from 1964 that we had taken the first step towards “a thousand years of darkness” now rung true upon humanity. As for Reagan, by 1994 he was deep into Alzheimer’s, likely unaware of his prophesy coming true in his lifetime. Liberalism, racism, lies; Satan’s trinity was at hand.
“But I had known that this day would come,” Darden admitted. He too was a prophet, John the Baptist crying in the wilderness. He wondered if somewhere in the after-life Nicole and Ron heard his preachings.
Police – whites and blacks - would approach him and apologize for Fuhrman. The entire white race had been set back, shamed into believing the worst about themselves. An apology was due the black community, and everybody knew the first necessary step was to let a black icon walk free. It was a giant guilt trip and the first step on a path, paved with good intentions, that would someday elect Barack Hussein Obama.
Now, “even Marcia Clark looked beaten,” Darden recalled. When Fuhrman returned to court, several black members of the prosecution team were purposely not there. The man was utterly toxic. Lives – and reputations - had been risked, and all was lost because of this fellow. Darden waited in his office until Fuhrman was gone. He apologized to Kim Goldman, 23 and “beset on all sides by evil . . .” Darden despised Fuhrman. It took all his Christian charity to stay in control. When he returned downstairs, he was stunned to see Fuhrman still sitting in the courtroom.
“I turned to face him and – for a split second – our eyes locked,” Darden recalled. “Then we both looked away.”
Fuhrman was now “drained of his cop arrogance.” Then, knowing he had perjured himself, he plead the Fifth, just like Al Cowlings. When he finally left, Fuhrman mouthed the words, “I’m sorry.”
At 10:00 A.M. on October 3, 1995, the jury delivered their “not guilty” verdict in the murder trial of Orenthal James Simpson. The television replays always focus on O.J., who seems unable to comprehend that he got away with it. Unseen unless one looks for it is the reaction of Robert Kardashian, who looks like he has seen Satan himself; suddenly aware he has enabled the murderer of his friend Nicole.
It was likely the worst injustice ever delivered in an American courtroom, which takes into account all the injustices against blacks over the previous 200 years; innocent men hung for murders and rapes they did not commit, while white killers and rapists were set free. Yet, this statement encapsulates what the Simpson case wrought upon the world. A very large number of American citizens, most of whom are black, consider this statement utterly racist. To say it, or to write it, is racist.
This is where we are today. So be it.
“If the gloves don’t fit, you must acquit,” Johnnie Cochran told the jury in singsong Jesse Jackson-speak. He called Fuhrman a “genocidal racist” comparable to Adolf Hitler, and painted Vannatter with the same brush. Pulling quotations from the Malcolm X playbook, he called them the “twin devils of deception,” a grave disservice to a good police officer (Vannatter). He called the jury’s decision an opportunity to find a long-lost “justice in America” and a “journey to justice.”
(Shapiro later accused Cochran of “dealing the race card from the bottom of the deck.”)
In his closing summation, Darden quoted from Proverbs 16-17: “These . . . things doth the Lord hate . . . a proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood.” Of Cochran, he quoted from verse 19: “A false witness that speaketh lies, and he that soweth discord among brethren . . .”
The jury again “just sat there . . . stone-faced” They could care less. Cochran and O.J. Simpson found no wisdom, no truth. They were not ashamed that the Word of God painted a picture of their duplicity and evil. Nether was with God if ever they had been.
Instead, “12 people could not make an honest assessment of nine months of testimony in just four hours,” Darden write in his memoir.
“Instead, they did just what Johnnie Cochran asked them to do. It was that look in their eyes, the one I recognized from the beginning. It was the juror who gave Simpson a black power salute.
“They sent a message.”
THE REAPING: What the O.J. Simpson Murder Case Did to America Page 6
