The Search for Justice (43 page)

On March 17, juror Tracy Kennedy was dismissed because it was discovered that he, too, was preparing a book. He had denied
to Judge Ito that he had compiled a list of jurors ’ names. When the bailiffs, with Kennedy ’s permission, examined his
personal computer and discovered juror information in the disk storage, Kennedy said, “Oh, I thought I got rid of that.” In
his book, published some months later, Kennedy reported that he ’d suffered great depression both while on the jury and after
his release, and in fact he ’d attempted suicide.

He was replaced by Anise “Ann” Aschenbach, an alternate we had some uneasiness about. She had once sat on a criminal trial,
was the sole jury member to vote for conviction, and had managed by sheer force of will to turn the whole jury around.

Earlier that morning, which was St. Patrick ’s Day, the police disarmed—i.e., blew up—what they believed to be a pipe bomb,
which had been left in a newspaper rack outside the courthouse. Near it was a note reading “Fenians Arise,” which pointed
to some kind of link to Irish terrorists—a nice St. Patrick ’s Day touch.

Ironically, the explosive device had been discovered by my driver, Keno Jenkins, who spotted it when he went to buy a paper,
and then alerted the police on the car phone. Some days truth really is stranger than fiction.

One day in court, I wore a blue-ribbon lapel pin signaling support for the Los Angeles Police Department. It had been given
to me two weeks before by Dennis Zine, the president of the Police Protection League. I ’d been wearing it off and on since
I got it, but nobody noticed—or objected—until the day I crossexamined Detective Philip Vannatter.

Since the trial began, Vannatter ’s appearance had been scheduled and rescheduled, which gave me time to study everything
he ’d said so far. And he ’d said a lot. There were his investigative reports, for one. In addition, he ’d testified at the
grand jury, at the preliminary, and at the hearing on our motion to suppress evidence, when Ito found on the record that Vannatter
had “engaged in a reckless disregard for the truth.”

Phil Vannatter was a seasoned detective as well as a shrewd, cagey, experienced witness. He liked to look jurors in the eye,
to make a connection with them while he proved that he knew what he was doing.

No one does a job perfectly. People forget rules or they take shortcuts to get the job done. The best witnesses are those
who acknowledge this and tell it like it is. “Did you make mistakes?” the lawyer asks. “You bet I did,” says the smart witness,
the implication being that everybody makes mistakes. The jury is full of human beings who understand that very well. It ’s
when you try to justify a position that is not justifiable that you get into trouble.

I had no bombs to drop on Vannatter, no sweeping moment of impeachment. Just a few, simple questions, which he could not and
did not answer to my satisfaction. Why was so much time spent at Rockingham, at the expense of the Bundy crime scene? Was
there a rush to judgment, a decision in the early morning hours of June 13 that O.J. Simpson was absolutely, positively, irrefutably
the murderer? And why, when O.J. Simpson ’s blood was drawn minutes away from the police laboratory on June 13, did Vannatter
then carry it in his pocket for three hours?

The detective contended that he was following procedure by delivering the blood directly to the criminalist, Dennis Fung,
at the crime scene. It was my hope that the jury heard his contention with some skepticism.

In contrast to Detective Tom Lange, whose demeanor had been stoic and whose answers had been direct, Phil Vannatter ’s attempt
to outthink me—in combination with a visible reddening of his face when he was challenged—enabled me to present him to the
jury as someone whose credibility was flawed. He was the kind of old-school cop who was too impatient to go by the book, who
believed even as he shaded the truth that the end justified the means. He wasn ’t beyond adjusting or tailoring his testimony
to make evidence, and his behavior, look better than it actually was, and I had to get the jury to see that.

That night, Linell told me she felt sorry for Vannatter and was disappointed in me for the way I ’d cross-examined him. He
was a decent, hard-working cop, she said, whom I ’d made to look much worse than he was. Maybe he was an old school cop who
bent the rules now and then, maybe he was a little loose with the truth. But he was hardly in the same league as Fuhrman.

As for Tom Lange, I always figured that he didn ’t take it personally. We both had our jobs to do, and like me, Lange had
been around long enough to know that that ’s the way the system works. Actually, I liked him. In fact, Lange is the kind of
man I could sit down and have a drink with. Whether he ’d want to have a drink with me is another question.

Ever since the beginning of this case, my younger son, Grant, and his friends had been fascinated with Kato Kaelin. There
was something benign and nonthreatening about Kato. Linell said he was kind of like a Barney for the preteen set.

She had tried to keep the more grisly information about the case from the boys, but now Grant wanted to come to court for
my cross-examination of Kato. I assured Linell that there wasn ’t likely to be anything brutal either spoken or seen in the
courtroom during that session.

Grant came to court on March 21, but Marcia Clark ’s direct examination went long, and my cross wasn ’t scheduled until the
next day. I took Grant back to meet Judge Ito, who spent fifteen minutes talking with Grant alone in his chambers. When Grant
told him he had to go back to school the following day, Ito said, “You should see your dad work, Grant.” He then issued and
signed a “court order” to Grant ’s teacher, requesting that he be given permission to take the following day off from school
to attend court.

Back the following day, Linell and Grant sat next to Carmelita Simpson-Durio, O.J. ’s sister. Carmelita, a warm, strong woman,
had managed the delicate task of being supportive to her brother while still maintaining her close relationship with Nicole
’s family. During a break in court, she said to Linell,
“Don ’t think that Dale Cochran [Johnnie ’s wife] hasn ’t noticed how that Marcia Clark and Johnnie flirt. She told him to
cut that out!”

As Linell sat there with Grant beside her, Lee Bailey turned around at the defense table, and they made eye contact. Caught
off guard, Linell made a slight gesture of greeting. She told me later that he “stared a hole through my eyes,” turned his
back, and refused to acknowledge them the rest of the session. It was hard for Grant not to notice the snub. “Why is he acting
that way to you, Mommy?” he asked.

“He ’s very busy, Grant, just ignore it,” Linell responded.

I ’ve always assumed that people have integrity and are worthy of my trust until I ’m proven wrong. Linell is more cautious,
more of a skeptic than I am, and she doesn ’t give her trust easily. Once that trust is betrayed, for her it ’s over. That
day, she decided not to come back for any more of the trial. “I can ’t stand to sit behind the defense table anymore,” she
told me.

O
n Wednesday, April 5, juror Jeannette Harris was dismissed, because allegedly she ’d once been shoved by her husband, which
constituted abuse and which she hadn ’t disclosed on her questionnaire. Her replacement was Brenda Moran, the juror who would
be so outspoken the day after the verdict was announced.

Jo-Ellan Dimitrius had been convinced that Harris was one of our most sympathetic jurors. In fact, when Harris spoke with
the press, she told them that she didn ’t believe the jury would vote for conviction. To date, six jurors had been excused;
of those, three were black, one Latina, one part Native American. With the jury sequestered, their names a tightly guarded
secret, how could these anonymous tips keep coming in about their conduct or their history, some of it going back many, many
years? After Harris was excused, we requested an evidentiary hearing. We wanted to know how the anonymous complaints about
these jurors were being forwarded to the judge, and who the tipsters were. The hearing was denied.

A few days before Harris was dismissed, a female juror alternate asked to speak privately to the judge. The judge asked one
lawyer from each side to attend. Cochran attended for us, Marcia Clark for the prosecution.

It turned out that the juror, an attractive woman with long blond curly hair and an air of glamour, felt she was being shunned
by the black jurors and criticized for her fashion, for her attention to her appearance. Due to her answers in voir dire and
the fact that she was married to a black man in the L.A. fire department, we had thought she would work well with the black
jurors. Now, Jo-Ellan Dimitrius was speculating on the possibility that the jurors were unconsciously viewing her as a Nicole
substitute.

Ito asked her to stay on, knowing that he would be excusing Jeannette Harris within days, and not wanting to lose her if he
could help it. She said she would do her best.

Once Harris had been excused, she went immediately on television and reported what we ’d been suspecting: There was a split
in the jury. She hastened to add that she didn ’t mean in voting, because of course there was to have been no discussion of
the trial itself. She meant in friendships, or tension in the absence of friendships. I didn ’t expect or welcome jury bonding
at this point; this jury still had a lot of work and deliberation ahead of them. But a schism this early might be difficult
to repair, and might influence jurors to vote for or against
each other
rather than for or against the defendant. In addition to the interjury tensions, Harris reported that some of the guards
from the sheriff ’s office were being unkind to black jurors and showing favor to the white ones. Since we hadn ’t heard this
from anyone else, we dismissed it.

The day after Harris was excused, we arrived to find there would be no court that day. Two jurors were sick with the flu,
one of them actually hospitalized, on an intravenous line for dehydration. Later that day, a third juror fell ill with the
flu. This trial seemed to have a penchant for sending people to the hospital.