In his opening, Darden went right to the heart of the prosecution’s theory. “The answer to the question is, Yes, O.J. Simpson murdered Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman. And I’m sure you will be wondering why as the trial proceeds on, and I’m sure you are wondering why right now.… Why would he do it? Not O.J. Simpson. Not the O.J. Simpson we think we know.… But that is another question.… Do you know O.J. Simpson?…
“We watched him leap turnstiles and chairs and run to airplanes in the Hertz commercials, and we watched him with a fifteen-inch Afro in Naked Gun 33 1/3, and we’ve seen him time and time again, and we came to think that we know him.” Here Darden paused.
“What we’ve been seeing, ladies and gentlemen, is the public face, the public persona, the face of the athlete, the face of the actor. It is not the actor who is on trial here today, ladies and gentlemen. It is not that public face. Like many public men … they have a private side, a private life, a private face. And that is the face we will expose to you in this trial, the other side of O.J. Simpson, the side you never met before.…
“When we look upon and look behind that public face … you’ll see a different face. And the evidence will show that the face you will see and the man that you will see will be the face of a batterer, a wife beater, an abuser, a controller … the face of Ron’s and Nicole’s murderer.” Darden recited the litany of abuse in their relationship: “domestic abuse, domestic violence, stalking, intimidation, physical abuse, wife beating, public humiliation.” He said at one point, “Please keep in mind that all of these different kinds of abuse were all different methods to control her.” And yet the list of incidents, on close analysis, was rather thin. In Simpson’s trial, the prosecution could point to only a single example of “wife beating,” the 1989 incident for which Simpson was arrested and then pleaded no contest. There were no other proved examples of physical violence between them. Nicole had referred to several more incidents in the diary she prepared in connection with her divorce proceeding, but Ito had ruled (correctly) that that document was inadmissible hearsay evidence. Here, the Simpson case illustrated one of the larger tragedies of domestic violence—that it usually takes place without witnesses.
Still, with the district attorney having made the Simpson trial into a domestic-violence showcase, Darden pressed on, even lapsing into a kind of California psychobabble at times. “He stripped her of her self-esteem,” Darden said. “He was so controlling that he attempted to define her identity. He attempted to define who she was.” Darden’s theory even turned what others might call Simpson’s generosity against him. Darden said with disdain that O.J. gave Nicole money. “By the time she was nineteen, she was driving a Porsche. He got it for her.” That, too, according to Darden, was evidence of his desire for control.
Everything Darden said was probably true, but his opening could also be interpreted as a great edifice of rhetoric built on a foundation of little evidence. The prosecution’s problem was exacerbated, of course, by the makeup of the jury, which was filled with people predisposed to admire Simpson and to discount evidence of domestic violence.
Darden finished with the story of Sydney’s dance recital on the night of June 12. The prosecutor had picked up confidence as he spoke, and he now addressed the jury instead of his shoes. O.J. arrived late at the recital, bearing flowers for Sydney, Darden said, and he greeted everyone in the Brown family—“except Nicole.” Simpson moved a chair to the corner of the auditorium, and “he sat there facing Nicole, and he just stared at her. He just sat there staring at her.… This was a menacing stare, a penetrating stare. It was an angry stare, and it made everyone very uncomfortable.”
The Brown family, Darden said, had decided to have dinner at the Mezzaluna restaurant, and “as they left, they made it clear to the defendant that he was not invited, and he wasn’t invited. And by not inviting him, it was a reaffirmation of what he had already been told, and that is that it was over. He was no longer being treated as a part of the family. He was no longer the central centerpiece of every family outing. Nicole was getting on with her own life.
“And as the Brown family left, they looked toward the defendant and they saw him, and he was angry and he was depressed, and they were concerned, and everyone wondered, What is he up to now?
“Ms. Clark,” Darden muttered quietly, “will tell you exactly what the defendant was up to as the day proceeded on.”
His conclusion was almost elegant in its simplicity: “She left him. She was no longer in his control. He could not stand to lose her, and so he murdered her.”
Marcia Clark’s style differed from her colleague’s. Businesslike, almost chipper, she stood behind the podium and moved only when she had somewhere to go—as opposed to Darden’s nervous pacing. She began by introducing all of the lawyers on the prosecution team, the traditional duty of the lead counsel. And that, in part, was her mission on this day. A good prosecutor commands the courtroom, orchestrates the case. She wanted to show the jury who was in charge.
Darden had spoken without exhibits; Clark employed a series of elegantly integrated photographs, slides, and charts in her presentation. This in itself was unusual. Most district attorney’s offices cannot afford to give their prosecutors much more than a blackboard. But even though Clark had dismissed DecisionQuest from jury selection, the prosecution did continue to accept the company’s pro bono assistance in making charts and other visual aids. DecisionQuest ultimately made hundreds of these state-of-the-art exhibits over the course of the trial, an effort that would have cost a paying client nearly $1 million.
Picking up the story on the evening of June 12, Clark introduced the jury to “Kato,” whose last name would scarcely ever be uttered during the trial, and she told of his trip to McDonald’s with Simpson, which ended with their parting around 9:40 P.M.
Her pace quickening, Clark turned to Nicole’s movements in the hours before the murders. After the dance recital, Nicole and her family had dined at Mezzaluna. They returned home and then, also at 9:40 P.M., Juditha Brown called her daughter to say she had dropped her glasses on the sidewalk outside the restaurant. “That was the last time Juditha ever spoke to her daughter Nicole,” Clark said. Nicole then called Mezzaluna and asked that her friend Ron Goldman, a waiter there, bring them to her house. He left for his home, and then Nicole’s, at about 9:50 P.M.
It was a very specific opening statement, with a multitude of times and places identified for the jury. This is risky business for a prosecutor, for an opening is nothing more (and nothing less) than a promise to the jury of what the evidence will show. Broken promises, even on relatively innocuous subjects, can embarrass a prosecutor—or worse. There was, in fact, no real reason to lay the story out with such precision; no jury could be expected to remember such details over the many months to come. But it was a measure of Clark’s confidence that she thought she had the story so thoroughly nailed down.
Clark’s precision extended even to the animal world—that is, to the subject of barking dogs. “At approximately 10:15 P.M.,” she said, “Pablo Fenjves, who lived diagonally across the alley behind Nicole’s condominium, heard a dog begin to bark.” A moment later, Clark even repeated the time, this time without the qualifying “approximately.” The dog barked at “10:15.” Clark thus committed the prosecution to a theory of the case that had the murders taking place shortly before 10:15 P.M. As Clark knew even before her opening statement, other credible evidence put the time of the murders about fifteen minutes later. Placing the murders at 10:30 or even shortly after—or, better yet, leaving the time somewhat vague at that early stage in the case—could still have served the prosecution’s purposes. But again Clark’s arrogance led her to an unwise commitment.
Speaking with few notes, Clark gracefully integrated the disparate strands of the story. O.J.’s whereabouts were unaccounted for after 9:40 P.M., when he and Kato parted, until Allan Park, the limousine driver, saw him at 10:55 P.M. hustling into the house. During that period, Kato heard loud thumps o
utside, near the air conditioner, which was precisely where the bloody glove was later found. (Never in her opening did Clark mention the name of the detective who had found the glove, Mark Fuhrman.) Even though it was a cool night, Clark noted that O.J. asked Park to turn up the limo’s air conditioner as they raced to make Simpson’s 11:45 P.M. flight to Chicago. She turned, at last, to the discovery of the bodies.
“Now I’m going to show you what Sukru Boztepe saw when Nicole’s dog took him to 875 South Bundy,” Clark said, and then she nodded toward Jonathan Fairtlough, a junior prosecutor whose role it would be throughout the trial to control the video and slide projections on the large screen that was bolted above the witness stand.
“P-7,” said Fairtlough, calling out the exhibit number.
The photograph had been taken from the sidewalk, looking toward the stairway that led up to Nicole’s front door. The young woman lay in a fetal position in a pool of blood. Clark had shown these photographs to the family members before so that they wouldn’t have to see them for the first time in the courtroom. But Juditha and Lou Brown still shuddered, steeling themselves as they saw again the scene of their daughter’s death. Clark then described how Officer Riske crept up the walkway, trying not to disturb the trail of blood, “to a point where he was able to see … that it was not just Nicole, but also Ron.”
“P-11,” said Fairtlough.
The Browns—the parents and the three surviving sisters—heaved their shoulders as one when the photograph of Ronald Goldman came up on the screen. It was a far more gruesome image: his body wedged into the corner of the fence, his shirt pulled over his head, and his exposed torso—so muscular and young—marred by obvious knife wounds filled with congealed blood. Clark’s words added to the horror: “He was literally backed into a cage where he had nowhere to run and that is how his murder was accomplished in a very short amount of time.” A cage—the phrase was so awfully right for the place that Goldman had died. Clark next moved to a photograph of Nicole taken from the top of the stairs. Her body was curled, and no wounds were visible, but the quantity of blood was shocking.
Clark turned now to the last and most powerful portion of her opening statement: the story of the blood. She offered a brief, homey introduction to the subject of DNA testing—“Some of you talked about Jurassic Park and they used DNA to make dinosaurs”—and then she offered a preview of the results. Fairtlough put up the slides of the various blood spots:
By the left door handle in O.J.’s Bronco: “Matches the defendant,” said Clark.
On the center console of the Bronco: “Consistent with a mixture of the defendant and Ron Goldman.”
The socks in Simpson’s bedroom: “The blood on one spot matched the defendant. The blood on another spot matched Nicole.”
Each one of the blood drops to the left of the bloody size-twelve shoe prints leaving the murder scene:
“Matches the defendant.”
“Matches the defendant.”
“Matches the defendant.”
“Matches the defendant.”
“And the results of the analysis of that blood confirms what the rest of the evidence will show,” Clark said, “that on June the 12th, 1994, after a violent relationship in which the defendant beat her, humiliated her, and controlled her, after he took her youth, her freedom, and her self-respect, just as she tried to break free, Orenthal James Simpson took her very life in what amounted to his final and his ultimate act of control.” She then paused a beat.
“And in that final and terrible act, Ronald Goldman, an innocent bystander, was viciously and senselessly murdered.”
Shortly after Clark finished her opening statement, a producer for Court TV, which ran the camera in Ito’s courtroom, advised the judge that the camera had accidentally shown the face of an alternate juror for about a second. A furious Ito said categorically, “I’m going to terminate the television coverage as a result of that.” But in what would become characteristic of his style throughout the trial, Ito cooled off and changed his mind the following morning. No one enjoyed the attention more than the judge; the cameras could stay. He even praised Court TV for its candid acknowledgment of the mistake. Then he called for Johnnie Cochran to begin his presentation for the defense.
Cochran wore a periwinkle suit. Vertical white stripes ran the entire length of his tie, and there were blue and white vertical stripes on his shirt, too, to go with a contrasting white collar. Somehow it looked right, all that exuberance in Cochran’s dress. He stood before the same podium the prosecutors had used, but he radiated a confidence that they could not hope to equal. Cochran’s chest looked like it was ready to burst out of his formfitting double-breasted suit.
Anyone wondering what place race would play in the defense of O.J. Simpson had only to wait about one minute into Cochran’s opening statement. The jurors, Cochran said, would hear a lot of talk about justice. Searching the jurors’ faces, he went on, “I guess Dr. Martin Luther King said it best when he said that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, and so we are now embarked upon this search for justice, this search for truth, this search for the facts.” Cochran then paused to pay tribute to the jurors. “We are very, very pleased with the fact that you have agreed to serve as jurors, to give us your time, to leave your lives, to be sequestered as it were. That is a remarkable sacrifice,” he continued. “Abraham Lincoln said it best when he said that the highest act of citizenship is jury service.”
Having enlisted King and Lincoln in the cause, Cochran went on to discuss parts of the case that Clark and Darden “didn’t talk about yesterday.” He started with the tale of the maid who lived next door to Simpson on Rockingham: Rosa Lopez. On the night of the murders, according to Cochran, Lopez “heard something very strange. She heard a prowler.” When Lopez came out to walk her dog at 10:15 P.M.—ostensibly the time of the murders—she saw the Bronco parked in the same place it had been earlier in the evening. From Lopez, Cochran moved on to Mary Anne Gerchas—“a very interesting lady”—who was apartment hunting on Bundy Drive on the night of the murders. Shortly after 10:30 that night, Cochran said, Gerchas was walking on Bundy, and “she sees four men who come within ten feet of her, two of which gentlemen appeared to be Hispanic, I think the others are Caucasians, several of which I believe have knit caps on their heads. The two who are behind apparently have something in their hands they are carrying.”
Cochran charged that these witnesses had been ignored by the police and prosecution. Cochran noted with disdain that Lopez had been interviewed by one Mark Fuhrman. “Detective Mark Fuhrman will play an integral part in this case for a number of reasons. Now, it is very interesting that the prosecution never once mentioned his name yesterday. It is like they just want to hide him, but they can’t hide him. He is very much a part of this case. We can only ask ourselves, Why didn’t they mention him? I think that answer will become very clear to you as the case progresses.” And as for Gerchas, Cochran said she had called the police hot line about the case and was told, “ ‘Excuse me, I’m talking to a psychic right now, and I will get back to you.’ ” Cochran shook his head at the lack of respect for the “very interesting” Mary Anne Gerchas.
But the treatment of these witnesses all fit into a larger pattern. “This case is about a rush to judgment,” Cochran asserted, “an obsession to win at any cost and by any means necessary.” Invoking Malcolm X’s most famous phrase, “by any means necessary,” Cochran declared war on the LAPD. The case against O.J. Simpson, in other words, was really about the conspiracy to convict him.
It was about something else, too. Like the prosecution’s juror research, the defense focus groups had also found hostility among black women toward Nicole Brown Simpson. In his opening, Cochran gave the jurors every reason to reinforce their presumed predisposition to view O.J. as an icon and Nicole as a tramp. Cochran took issue with Darden’s assertion that O.J. had “exercised all this control over her and picked her friends.… The evidence will show that Miss Nico
le Brown Simpson is a very strong, independent woman,” Cochran went on. “She picked and chose her own friends, [neither] O.J. Simpson or no one else could tell her who her friends were to be. She had whatever friends she wanted, she did whatever she wanted.”
Cochran then regaled the jury with tales of Nicole’s fast life. Though nominally aimed at refuting the charge of stalking, Cochran ran though a catalogue of her sexual exploits. Sex on a couch with Keith Zlomsowitch while the children slept upstairs … Sex with one of Simpson’s best friends (Marcus Allen, though Cochran did not name him)… One man “sitting astride Miss Nicole Brown Simpson, giving her a massage or something in her shoulders”… “Miss Nicole Brown Simpson came over to the Rockingham house and said she had found a boyfriend, somebody different than Keith.” But with these examples, Cochran was just warming up for his main point about Nicole’s sordid personal life—that the sinister figure of Faye Resnick was at the center of it.
“Let me say this about Faye Resnick,” Cochran said gravely. On June 3, 1994, her boyfriend, Christian Reichardt, had thrown her out of their house because she was freebasing cocaine. “They ran in this circle out there in Brentwood. And when she was put out on June third,… she then moved over and lived with Nicole Brown Simpson.”
Cochran implied that Nicole and Faye were doing drugs together: “Because they were friends, they would go out at night. The evidence will be these ladies would go out two, three, four nights a week and stay out until five o’clock in the morning. Nobody was controlling these women … They go out dancing, they would do whatever they would do, and we know Faye Resnick was using drugs during this period of time.” Cochran went on to say that Faye’s drug problem got so bad that on June 8, her ex-boyfriend and ex-husband forced her to enter a drug treatment facility. Cochran then said Faye Resnick was “one of the people that called Miss Nicole Brown Simpson on the night of June 12, perhaps after nine o’clock, that particular night, from this drug treatment facility.” After a pause, Cochran said darkly, “We will be talking about that and her role in this whole drama.”
The Run of His Life Page 29
