The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson (59 page)

Still, the results of the more precise RFLP type of DNA testing were striking. For one of the blood drops on the path at Bundy, the odds were 1 in 170 million that it came from anyone other than Simpson. For the blood on the socks found in Simpson’s bedroom, the odds were 1 in 6.8 billion that they came from anyone other than Nicole Brown Simpson. (There are about 5 billion people on earth.) The results from the less exact PCR tests were less impressive only because of the overwhelming numbers from the RFLP testing. (The PCR odds in the blood evidence mostly came back as one in several thousand.)

In every one of several dozen tests, the DNA results matched the prosecution’s theory of the case: O.J.’s blood to the left of the bloody shoe prints at Bundy; Ron Goldman’s blood in the Bronco and on the bloody glove found at Rockingham; O.J.’s blood again in the foyer of his home on Rockingham. In the case on which Marcia
Clark and Phil Vannatter had first worked together, they had won a conviction based on a single fingernail-size drop of blood found in a car truck. The Simpson case, in contrast, probably featured more DNA evidence than any criminal trial in American history.

But the possibility of evidence planting cast a pall over all of these prosecution numbers, impressive as they were. If police had swabbed Simpson’s and the victims’ blood at the crime scenes, then of course the numbers would be overwhelming. It was Barry Scheck who succeeded in undermining the significance of this evidence for the jury.

Whatever the jury may have thought, the DNA testimony had a shattering impact among O.J. Simpson’s wealthy friends in West Los Angeles. At this stage of the trial, his most prized supporters melted away—among them Allen Schwartz, a clothing wholesaler and probably O.J.’s closest friend in Brentwood, and Alan Austin, a boutique owner and O.J.’s most frequent golfing partner. Now they finally knew what they didn’t want to know—that O.J. had killed Nicole, whom many of these men had grown to care for over the years. The DNA testimony shrank Simpson’s coterie of white friends to a lonely pair: Don Ohlmeyer, president of NBC’s West Coast operations, and Craig Baumgarten, a movie producer.

It was perhaps because of this abandonment that O.J. Simpson, seemingly the only person in the courtroom to do so, took the DNA evidence so hard. As Robin Cotton or Gary Sims, the California Department of Justice DNA expert, gave their reports, Simpson greeted them with nervous monologues to Cochran or Shapiro or whoever happened to be seated next to him at the defense table. Usually impassive, Simpson greeted the enormous DNA numbers with scowls of derision. Though the jury had yet to speak, at this point Simpson knew with certainty that his former life was over. The friends, the hangers-on, the world of “being O.J.,” was now, clearly, gone forever.

The length and complexity of the DNA testimony pushed the trial toward a kind of giddy exhaustion. Though Ito had originally told jurors the case might end in February, the marathon now appeared headed well into the summer. The principals coped. During Fung’s
testimony, Marcia Clark changed her perm to a more natural hairstyle—a much-admired transformation that landed her hairdresser on
Oprah
. Darden meanwhile seethed in quiet frustration, his distress compounded because his beloved older brother, Michael, a former drug addict, lay dying of AIDS near their hometown of Richmond. Every hour in court was time that could have been spent with him. Cochran, cheerful as always, read his office mail as the other lawyers droned.

Ito floundered. Courtroom discipline fluctuated according to the judge’s press clippings. When, as happened periodically, a big story in the
Los Angeles Times
or on one of the networks chided him for letting the case drag on, the judge would snap to attention for a day or two, refusing to hold sidebars and generally pushing things along. His resolve would then fade until the next critical story. After
Newsweek
put Ito’s picture on the cover under the headline
WHAT A MESS
, the judge lashed back at the press by permanently evicting two reporters from the courtroom, ostensibly for talking. Gale Holland of
USA Today
and Kristin Jeannette-Meyers of Court TV paid the price for Ito’s pique. When
The New York Times
published a hostile editorial entitled “Bankers’ Hours for the O.J. Case?” Ito lengthened the court day. Fundamentally, though, nothing much changed.

The families of the victims dealt with the stress in strikingly different manners. For many months, the Goldman family simply bore witness at the trial and said little in public. Denise Brown used the occasion of the trial to embrace the cause of domestic violence. She and her family created the Nicole Brown Simpson Charitable Foundation, devoted to the issue of spousal abuse. It was launched at a press conference at the Rainbow Room in New York, sponsored by No Excuses sportswear, best known previously for some scandal-scarred spokeswomen, among them Donna Rice, Marla Maples, and Paula Jones. As the first president of the foundation, the Brown family named Jeff C. Noebel, a forty-year-old Dallas businessman who was awaiting sentencing for lying to federal authorities in a savings-and-loan scam and who had been named in a domestic-violence restraining order for posing a “clear and present danger” to his estranged wife and two children. (Noebel stepped down when these facts about his past became public.)

19. STOCKHOLM SYNDROME

T
heir greatest humiliation, the jurors remembered later, came right before bed. At 11:00 every night, one of the deputy sheriffs would walk around the fifth floor of the Inter-Continental Hotel, knock on the jurors’ doors, and demand their room keys. This ceremony went on every night for months before anyone even asked about it. This was how the jurors behaved—trusting, accepting, even passive about the many embarrassments of their quasi-custodial living arrangements. Finally, someone worked up the nerve to ask why they had to surrender their keys for the six and a half hours until the deputies returned to wake them up.

“It’s so you don’t go into each others’ rooms,” the sheriff’s spokesman replied.

That was that. The jurors were to be trusted to decide whether O.J. Simpson murdered two human beings but not to sleep with the keys to their own rooms. As usual, there was no protest, and the jurors continued to yield the keys until their last night in confinement. As with so many petty insults, the jurors lived with this one, too.

By summer, they were struggling. Twelve jurors and twelve alternates had reported for sequestration under the twenty-four-hour-a-day supervision of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department on January 11. With the exception of occasional weekend outings—a much-enjoyed group ride on a blimp, a disastrous boat ride to Catalina Island, on which almost everyone got seasick—the jurors’ world was circumscribed by the courthouse and the Inter-Continental,
about a mile away. Their rooms had no telephones or televisions. Deputy sheriffs dialed and monitored all telephone calls from a central “telephone room,” and screened newspapers for references to the case, clipping them out. Blockbuster supplied an unending stream of movies for the pair of “video rooms,” dubbed Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 by Judge Ito. The jurors ate their meals as a group. One night a week, from 7:00 to midnight, the jurors were allowed unsupervised conjugal visits with their spouses or significant others.

Not surprisingly, these arrangements produced immediate and lasting stresses on the jurors. The strain showed itself in trivial ways. Like summer campers (or, more relevant, prisoners) everywhere, the jurors complained about the food. As Armanda Cooley, who eventually became foreperson, once put it in a meeting with the judge, “Same thing, repetitious, too many particles walking, crawling, talking in the food.” Movie selection produced enduring tensions, as did movie-watching behavior. Ito devoted a great deal of time to mediating between jurors who wanted to talk and those who preferred silence during the videos. The alleged foot odor of one juror, Tracy Kennedy, was another problem. There was also what Judge Ito bemusedly referred to as the “famous Target/Ross shopping incident,” which involved one juror’s complaint that one group of jurors had an hour to shop at the Ross discount store and thirty minutes at a Target emporium, whereas other jurors had only a half hour at each.

The aggrieved shopper was Jeanette Harris, a thirty-eight-year-old African-American employment interviewer and a divisive force on the jury from the first day. In light of Harris’s answers during voir dire, it was bewildering that the prosecutors had left her on the jury at all. When Clark asked Harris about the low-speed Bronco chase on June 17, Harris said, “My family is comprised mostly of males, so I know that females have this real desire, you know, to protect their young men.… My heart just went out.” Asked about Simpson’s plea of no contest to domestic-violence charges in 1989, Harris said, “I guess if I was a celebrity, there probably would be times when I would say no contest … because the media is so vicious.” Less than a month after the jurors were sequestered, Harris put Ito and the lawyers on notice that tensions
were brewing among the jurors over something much more important than videos. In a secret closed-door session on February 7, just a few days into the taking of testimony, Harris told them that the jury was splintering along racial lines.

Harris had requested the meeting ostensibly to complain about the “famous” shopping incident and her difficulties with another juror. She said the deputies had intentionally given the white jurors the extra half hour to shop at Ross while hurrying the black jurors through the store. Harris also asserted, improbably enough, that she had been pushed by Catherine Murdoch, a sixty-three-year-old white legal secretary and only the first of several jurors Harris would accuse of striking her. “In the last week or so there has been like a major division,” Harris said in the judge’s chambers. Meal tables had become segregated by race, with Murdoch at a table with “all the white jurors and anybody that is not African-American.” Shocked by the accusation, Murdoch denied any malign intent, and Ito believed her. Nevertheless, the very existence of the accusation put everyone on notice about just how fragile the jury was.

A full-fledged crisis was averted because Murdoch was removed from the jury on February 7 for an unrelated reason: Her arthitis doctor, who also treated Simpson, had been listed as a defense witness (though he never testified). Several other jurors also left the case in the early weeks, one because she was found to have covered up a history of domestic violence, another because he worked for Hertz and had apparently met Simpson. After Murdoch, Michael Knox was dismissed on March 1 for failing to report that he had been arrested for kidnapping a former girlfriend. Next came Tracy Kennedy, who was removed on March 17 because Ito believed he was keeping notes for a book. (Both Knox and Kennedy did manage to parlay their brief tenure as jurors into books.)

But it was Jeanette Harris who continued to absorb the attention of the lawyers on both sides. In March, the judge received an anonymous letter suggesting that Harris had been a long-term victim of domestic violence. Sheriff’s deputies followed up on the lead, and they learned that in 1988 Harris had sought a restraining order against her husband. In voir dire and in her questionnaire, Harris had specifically denied any personal involvement with domestic violence. The prosecutors wanted her off the jury, asserting
that she had lied during the course of jury selection. The defense lawyers wanted Harris to remain, arguing that her answers during voir dire amounted only to innocent mistakes. In the argument over Harris, Ito made a revealing observation: “The one thing that’s interesting to me is that, were one to look at this case in the abstract and what we have here, it would seem to me that the defense would want her off in the worst way, that the prosecution would want to keep her. And I see the diametrically opposed position.”

Ito was probably being coy, for by this point in the trial he knew how much race had trumped gender. The defense wanted to keep a black juror even if she had been abused by her husband. Through all the jury controversies, the one constant was the prosecution wanting to shed black jurors, the defense seeking to evict whites. In any event, on April 5, Ito dismissed Harris for her lack of candor about the domestic violence in her past—and she, in turn, promptly created an uproar in the case.