Outrage (6 page)

The question I had at the time—and the trial only confirmed my need to ask it—was, how do you take a lawyer who has never tried a murder case before (Shapiro), another who isn’t even primarily a criminal lawyer but a civil lawyer who may have never won a murder case before a jury in his career (Cochran), and another who lost the last big case he tried over twenty years ago, and convert them into the Dream Team, the best that money can buy? Under what bizarre, convoluted logic or theory do you do this? I’ll tell you folks the theory. It’s called the willy-nilly theory. Only the media people could come up with nonsense like “Dream Team” to describe these lawyers.

The term “Dream Team” is only properly used to describe the best in the field, like the 1992 Olympic basketball Dream Team consisting of players like Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, and Magic Johnson. The
NBA
itself has the best basketball players, by far, in the world, and the Olympic Dream Team was the best of these great players who night in and night out perform at an incredible level of skill above their contemporaries. The 1995 U.S. Davis Cup tennis team was called the Dream Team, but the team consisted of Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi, the two top tennis players in the world. It wouldn’t bother me as much if the media who called these lawyers the Dream Team used the term tongue-in-cheek. But they were very serious about it. Dead serious.

Even an editorial in the
Los Angeles Times
referred to the defense lawyers as “the best that money could buy.” Can you imagine that? This is the intellect of people sitting on the editorial board of one of the major papers of the world, the opinion-makers of our society. Wouldn’t you think that at least one of these geniuses would say to another: “George, I understand this Cochran fellow has been practicing law in Los Angeles for thirty-two years. We’ve had countless murder cases throughout the years, many we’ve covered in fair depth. I can’t recall ever seeing his name associated with even one of these cases. Have you?” I realize that thinking is hard work. That’s why, as they say, so few people engage in it. But how much thinking is required to produce this type of question?

The point is, no one had to check. Being on a big case was enough. To hell with one’s record. Don’t confuse me with the facts, I’ve already made up my mind. On those occasions when reporters decided to do puff profiles on the backgrounds of Cochran and the others, they committed a cardinal error that is exasperatingly common among professional writers. How many times have you read a magazine or newspaper article with a dramatic or bold assertion in the caption or opening paragraph, only to search vainly for the support in the piece? Isn’t it just common sense that when you set up a burden for yourself you at least have the decency to try to meet it? In a January 29, 1995, cover story on Cochran in the
Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine
, the
Times
reporter typically and predictably and breathlessly described Cochran as a “brilliant” lawyer, and said that “his effect upon a jury seems to be magical.” He quoted unnamed lawyers as saying, “Cochran has an approach with the jury that is unbeatable,” and “If Johnnie tells the jury that a turkey can pull a freight train, they’ll look for a rope.” Fine. But unless you’re an incompetent writer, don’t you say to yourself: “Since I’m accepting all of these candied observations as true, I had better get the evidence to support all of this.”

But the writer proceeded to name only one—let me repeat,
only one
—felony jury trial Cochran had ever won (I’m sure he’s won other felony jury trials), the acquittal of actor Todd Bridges in 1989 for an attempted murder inside a “rock house” in the South-Central section of Los Angeles. Bridges, who was using about fourteen grams of cocaine a day at the time, testified at his trial that he was so intoxicated after a four-day cocaine binge that he could not remember shooting the victim. Most of the article was about Cochran’s civil cases (two are mentioned, one of which he lost), the Pratt murder case, which he lost, his representation of Michael Jackson on the child-molestation civil lawsuit, which was settled, and the well-connected life he led. And that was it. The writer felt he had met his burden of proof.

Time
magazine, which almost consistently was more mature, disciplined, and sensible than its competitor
Newsweek
in its reportage on the Simpson case, fell down in its January 30, 1995, edition. In another puff piece on Cochran, after the author made her obligatory reference to Cochran’s legal “brilliance,” she spoke of his “remarkable” talent in the courtroom, but only cited one case to support what she was saying—again, the Todd Bridges case. Then the writer really outdid herself, telling how “extraordinary” Cochran’s successful representation of Michael Jackson was. I don’t know if any of you readers recall, but the Michael Jackson child-molestation case was a five-month jury trial, and the evidence was overwhelming against Jackson, but Cochran gave a brilliant four-hour summation, turning the jury completely around and gaining an acquittal for Jackson. If you don’t recall this it’s because the brilliant and extraordinary way Cochran got his client off in this case was
not
by winning in a court of law (I was just being facetious earlier, of course) but by having Jackson pay the young lad reportedly around $20 million. Yes, you read right—$20 million. This requires, of course, the ability of a top-notch trial lawyer before a jury.

Listen to
Newsweek
’s early (July 11, 1994) puff piece on Simpson’s main lawyers at the time, Shapiro, Dershowitz, and Bailey. These were “powerhouse” lawyers,
Newsweek
proclaimed to its readers, and to support its point (finally, with
Newsweek
, we’re in the big leagues now; it knows it has to meet the burden it sets up for itself) said the three had defended such clients as Claus von Bülow (Dershowitz, as indicated, did not defend von Bülow at his trial), Patti Hearst (lost by Bailey), Leona Helmsley (not defended by Dershowitz, who did represent her on appeal and lost), Marlon Brando’s son (pled guilty by Shapiro, and up until recently was eating prison food), and the Boston Strangler (who was never prosecuted for the eleven murders he was suspected of committing; he was prosecuted, instead, for several felony sexual assaults, Bailey defended him, and Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler, was convicted). Some support. So much for quality of research and reporting by one of the two leading national news magazines in America.

I realize that even if you lose a case, it may not be attributable to anything wrong you did, i.e., you may have been “brilliant in defeat.” But I assure you the writers of the
Newsweek
piece did not have this on their minds, any more than did the media reporters who
immediately
called the lawyers on the Simpson case “the best that money can buy” and “the Dream Team.” The only thing they knew was that these lawyers had been “on” or somehow associated with these big cases. That was enough for them. Again, who am I to quarrel with such powerful logic? I know when I’m out of my league.

It should be noted that I wouldn’t be making so much out of this if such shoddy research were confined to the Simpson case. But it’s not. It’s typical. If any of you readers want to see how little the opinion-makers of our society know whereof they speak, become very knowledgeable about a subject (as I have about the drug problem in America), and then read the articles they write on the subject. You’ll be shocked to learn they rarely know their posteriors from a hole in the ground.

Now that we know from their backgrounds and records that to call the defense attorneys in the Simpson case the best that money can buy is not only silly but approaching a sacrilege, how did they perform, nonetheless, at the trial? In my
Playboy
interview before the trial, I said, “I’ll guarantee you this. If the outcome of the trial ends up being favorable to the defense—such as a hung jury—the result will have nothing to do with anything special the
principal
lawyers for the defense did. And the favorable result for them will have to be traceable to dynamics other than Simpson’s innocence, since he is quite obviously guilty.” I said these other factors could be things like “race, celebrity, and bogus allegations of police misconduct.” I stand by that original assessment.

Whatever substantive yardage the defense made in this case during the trial (I’m excluding final summation, which I will discuss later) was achieved almost exclusively by the two lawyers from New York in their attack on the reliability of the prosecution’s scientific evidence, particularly the
DNA
evidence. Also, because the defense team had almost unlimited funds, they could vigorously contest every issue, split every hair, and then proceed to split the split hair (almost all of this done by the New York lawyers), as well as hire expensive forensic experts, one of whom, Dr. Michael Baden, they paid in excess of $100,000.

But setting aside the two
DNA
lawyers (top-flight technicians rather than top-flight lawyers), as far as the principal lawyers for the defense were concerned (Cochran, Shapiro, and Bailey), they were spectacularly ordinary throughout the trial. If I were to grade their performance on a relative basis, i.e., vis-à-vis other defense attorneys, I’d give them a B. But were I to grade them on an absolute basis I’d have to be in a very generous and magnanimous mood (you know, the sun is shining brightly in the morning and the orange juice is good) to give them any higher than a D or C©. In fact, the only thing they did (with Shapiro’s alleged disapproval; more on this later) was to improperly and fraudulently inject race into the case. Believe it or not, several of the inane talking heads thought this tactic was “brilliant.” But thugs out on the street with IQs of 80 play the race card. I will have much more to say on the actual performance of the defense lawyers in the Epilogue.

And what did the media say about the prosecutors in the Simpson case? They depicted them in the same, stereotypical way that prosecutors are always depicted by the media. The almost automatic adjective to describe a prosecutor is “tough,” that for a defense attorney, “brilliant.” In this case, even
before
the trial, when Clark was at her best arguing in front of Judge Ito during pretrial hearings, and clearly outshone Cochran, over and over the media described Cochran as “brilliant,” Clark “tough and steely.” They attributed to the defense lawyers star-celebrity qualities, while treating the prosecutors dismissively. Two representative examples from right at the beginning of the trial. In the February 6, 1995, edition of
Time
magazine, the prosecutors were described (again, by the same silly writer referred to earlier) as “scrappy, overworked state employees who appear to be just that when set against the silver-tongued [of course], moneyed and remarkably personable defense lawyers.” Here’s the
Los Angeles Daily News
, in its January 29, 1995, edition: “The trial puts the high-priced, smooth, charismatic and experienced defense lawyers, the legal Dream Team, against the workmanlike, civil-servant prosecutors.” The prosecutors, in fact, were much more experienced in criminal homicide cases than Cochran and Shapiro, though not Bailey.

How is all of this relevant to the verdict in this case? It contributed to it on two levels. One, the most obvious level, is that people, particularly relatively simple and uneducated people, as most of the Simpson jurors were, lionize celebrities. In fact, I think we all know that if Simpson weren’t who he is—a football star and legend—nothing about this otherwise mundane case would have been the same, including, most likely, the verdict. And the media had made the defense attorneys in this case celebrities in their own right, though only Bailey was prior to the trial. Implicit in the lionization of celebrities is wanting to be near them, to talk to them, and if ever lucky enough to be afforded the opportunity, to treat them specially, to help them. One manifestation of this childish but extremely common idolatry of celebrities, even though there may not be an ounce of substance behind the fame, is the interview of TV or motion picture stars on television by the station’s Hollywood reporters. Watch for the virtually incessant obsequious grin on the interviewer’s face throughout the interview. We’re a nation of celebrity and hero worshipers, so much so that we make heroes out of those who aren’t, such as John Wayne, a patriotic, red-blooded, two-fisted American who spent the Second World War in the trenches on the movie lots of Hollywood. In our passion for heroes we have bastardized the meaning of the word beyond recognition. The word “hero” has always implied courage to me, and courage, in turn, implies a choice. When the young American fighter pilot Scott O’Grady was shot down over Bosnian Serb territory last June and hid in a Bosnian forest for six days until he was rescued, under what conceivable definition does this fine young man’s effort to survive qualify as the conduct of a hero? Yet he was treated like one by this country and feted by the president at the White House.

When Captain O’Grady, eschewing the hero status he had suddenly achieved, told a gaggle of reporters that “all I was was a scared little bunny rabbit, trying to survive,” the media would have none of it. What did the pilot know? We know a hero when we see one, they said to themselves. “An American hero came home to an emotional Main Street welcome,” the
Los Angeles Times
and other papers gushed. “He is an American hero,” President Clinton proclaimed.
Time, Newsweek
, and
U.S. News and World Report
all had cover stories on the incident. “One Amazing Kid” and “The Right Stuff,”
U.S. News
and
Newsweek
trumpeted on their covers.

But a hero, I always thought, was someone who had risked his life to help another. The four American helicopter pilots and their crews who flew into enemy territory and withstood deadly enemy ground fire to rescue Captain O’Grady were the real heroes in this piece, but hardly a word was said about them.

Most of the Simpson jurors, of course, knew about the “Dream Team” before they were selected to serve, and undoubtedly continued to hear of this nonsense through conjugal visits and, as I’ve suggested, osmosis. And consciously or unconsciously, people want to be on the side of the celebrity, the side of glamour. That’s just the way it is.