Brown has had measurable success with many young street blacks and convicts, who, of course, look up to him. Last year, the Los Angeles chapter of the Urban League honored him for his contributions in helping troubled black youth.
The football legend works closely with the very toughest black cats, none of whom, however, get tough with Big Jim, who at six feet two and just a few pounds over his football playing weight of 230 remains an imposing physical figure. In fact, in 1991, when the first edition of my drug book came out, I had a meeting with Jim at his Hollywood Hills home to try to enlist his support with black congressmen for my proposals, and as I was leaving, who starts walking in the door but the leaders of the Crips and Bloods, two notorious black gangs, for a summit meeting with Brown, which, upon Brown’s invitation, I stayed to attend. There were around twenty gang members at the meeting, and although they may be the toughest dudes in the world out on the street, young men with names like Chopper, Wig Out, T, Jawbone, Playmate, Hannibal, and Twilight (now all
former
gang members, Jim told me) acted almost (not quite) like reverential choirboys around Brown.
Brown and Simpson have always maintained a friendly but not close relationship, being rivals for the title of greatest running back ever. But according to what I read, as great as Simpson was, most knowledgeable fans consider Brown to be the greatest running back ever. In yards per carry, probably the most meaningful statistic, only Brown, at 5.2 yards, is at 5 or over. All the other great runners, including Simpson, are in the 4’s. Brown told me once that the reason he retired in 1965, when he had a few good years remaining in him, was that he had broken all the records at the time, including total yards gained, and was only “competing against myself.”
The professional rivalry between Brown and Simpson dates all the way back to when Simpson was establishing himself as a promising runner at San Francisco’s Galileo High School. One Sunday afternoon after attending a pro football game between the 49’ ers and the Cleveland Browns, Simpson and his friends went to a nearby ice cream shop. To their surprise, in walked Jim Brown, the NFL’s leading rusher. In a biography of Simpson,
The O. J. Simpson Story
, Simpson is quoted as saying: “The other kids were really awed but, you know, I was the leader of the gang and so I had to say something.” He told Brown, “Jim Brown, you ain’t so great. When I get to play pro ball, I’m gonna break all your records.” Brown, who revels in competition, replied: “We’ll see what you do when you get there.”
Shortly after the murders, Brown, who has always been extremely outspoken and candid, remarked on television that everyone knew Simpson had a cocaine problem. He later explained that he wasn’t trying to hurt Simpson, only to comment on the possible availability of an insanity defense.
When I called Brown to talk about Simpson, he was out of town on Amer-I-Can business. I left a message for Jim to call when he returned.
In the meantime, I got in touch with Celes King, the California state chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality (
CORE
) and for over forty years a well-known black activist. I had spoken to him a few times in the early 1970s. When I asked him if Simpson had ever helped his group, Celes said no.
“Celes, did you ever ask him?”
“You learn not to ask useless questions,” Celes said.
“Are you saying Simpson never helped the black community?”
“The only group I’m aware he’s ever helped out is a black sorority his daughter, Arnelle, is a member of, the Angel City Links. And she drags O.J. to some of their functions. You know, like when children drag their parents to the park on weekends.”
And this is what Cochran had said (and got by with) to convince the black jury Simpson had been generous to black causes. And even with the Angel City Links we can’t be sure Simpson had been giving them $5,000 annually, since Cochran told the jury that “the only condition of his gift [to them] every year is it has to be anonymous, that he doesn’t want them to know he does this.”
Beyond calling Celes King, I just made a few calls to knowledgeable staff members of the major black civil rights and charitable organizations. For the most part, they were reluctant to talk freely. Here’s what my limited research disclosed. A staff employee at the Los Angeles chapter of the Urban League, asking that I not use her name, told me that in the seven years she has been with the organization, to her knowledge Simpson had not contributed to it or been involved with it in any way. But the previous week (early December 1995), she said, a representative of Simpson’s had called the group and Simpson had then sent a contribution, the amount undisclosed. I got the very distinct impression from an
NAACP
staff member—who was purposely more vague than his counterpart at the Urban League—that Simpson had not helped the
NAACP
, at least during this person’s tenure, the length of which I never learned. When I called the fund-raiser in Fairfax, Virginia, for the United Negro College Fund and asked her whether the rumor was true that Simpson had refused to participate in the annual Lou Rawls telethon to raise money for the college fund unless he was paid a fee, she answered brusquely: “I don’t want to stir up any debate in the black community on an issue like this.” When I nonetheless repeated my question, she said it was not true.
In the August 29, 1994, edition of
Newsweek
, the reporter wrote: “Simpson often appeared at tony charity events and visited so many sick kids in the hospital he began to refer to himself as ‘the Angel of Death.’ But he did not give much back to African-American causes. He would promise to appear at community centers or youth programs in South-Central Los Angeles, then bow out at the last moment.”
I did learn from a black acquaintance of mine, Michael Zinzun, chairman of the Coalition Against Police Abuse in Los Angeles, that for several years at Thanksgiving time Al Cowlings has delivered a truckload of turkeys from Simpson to his group, so we cannot say that Simpson has completely ignored the black community.
When Jim Brown called upon his return from back east and I asked him if he had ever called Simpson to help him out with his efforts in the black community, Big Jim chuckled and said, “I’m like Celes”—I had earlier repeated to him Celes’s remark that you don’t ask useless questions. Brown added: “I don’t ask people I know aren’t going to help.” When I asked Brown for an assessment of Simpson, he said: “O.J. is the modern representation of the house Negro,” who, he said, dressed well and lived much better than the plantation workers. “O.J. is not unique,” he said, explaining that many blacks who have made it are like him. He lives a life, Brown said, “below whites [his white country-club contemporaries] but above blacks.”
Brown, who keeps very current on what’s going on in the black community, said that throughout the years,
“there was no evidence of O.J. in the black community.”
He added that this neglect was “not mean-spirited on O.J.’s part.” It was just that Simpson had left the community behind and it was no longer a part of his life. Brown said, “The tragedy of white America is that they find a comfort level in elevating so-called good Negroes, but this is always going to end up in disappointment, because it’s false. The blacks that will make a positive difference are the ones who make the whites uncomfortable by telling the truth.” He said the Simpson case had “caused confusion among blacks and whites because the African-American community tried to get behind O.J.’s cause, but he doesn’t care about that community. And the white community is angry because he let them down.”
Jim Brown would, of course, have responded to a subpoena in the Simpson case, and his testifying that Simpson “never had any presence in the black community” (along with all the other evidence of Simpson’s exclusively white and affluent lifestyle, and testimony from witnesses in the black community whom the “Uncle Tom” investigation would surely turn up that Simpson had no time to help out poor black youth, even reneging on promises to do so), would probably have gotten the jury and the black community to actually dislike Simpson. Information like this coming from any black leader would be harmful to Simpson, but particularly if it came from someone like Brown, a football player, easily Simpson’s equal, who not only did not turn his back on the black community like Simpson but has now devoted his life to it.
The bottom line is that the prosecution, like absolute fools, permitted the defense to depict Simpson to the mostly black jury—without any opposition or even attempted rebuttal on their part—not only as a football hero, but as a hero to
blacks
, which he never had been before the trial, and never deserved to be. Just another example of the terribly and pathetically incompetent prosecution of this case by the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office.
T
his chapter, like the previous one, concerns the DA’s incompetence during the trial, but because final summation is such a unique and critical part of the case, I am dealing with it separately.
I’ve always considered final summation the most important part of the trial for the lawyer. It’s the climax of the case, where the lawyer has his last and best opportunity to convince the jury of the rightness of his cause. Consistent with their poor performance throughout the trial, both prosecutors (Clark and Darden) gave exceptionally bad summations, particularly in their rebuttal arguments.
Before I make some observations on the substance of the lawyers’ arguments in the Simpson trial, particularly those of the prosecutors, let me tell you how I feel about final summation.
Usually, the very first thing I think about when I get on a case and begin to learn the facts is:
What
am I going to argue, and
how
can I best make the argument to obtain a favorable verdict? In other words, I work backward from my summation, the exact reverse of what is normally recommended. Since final summation has to be based on the evidence at the trial, virtually all of my questions at the trial, and most of my tactics and techniques, are aimed at enabling me to make arguments I’ve already determined I want to make. In fact, before the first witness at a trial has even been called, I’ve usually prepared my summation to the jury. As soon as I learn the strengths and weaknesses of my case I begin to work on how I’m going to argue these strengths and what I’m going to say in response to the opposition’s attacks on the weaknesses. Getting an early start on my summation, and continuing to expand and modify it during the trial, gives me ample time to develop arguments and articulations.
I realize I have almost an obsession about the preparation of a final summation. For instance, in the Manson case, I put in several hundred hours working on my opening and closing arguments. Of course, I was dealing with 28,354 pages of transcript. Conceding that I probably go to an unnecessary extreme, I still feel it cannot be wise to go to the other extreme and wait until the last second. You’ve all heard of Melvin Belli, of course. Here’s what Mel says about final summation in an interview he gave for a book called
The Trial Masters
. “The night before you give your summation, when you go to bed, think in your mind’s eye about what you are going to discuss the next day.”
This thinking and disregard for adequate preparation of final summation is very common in the legal profession, and one of the main reasons most lawyers give terrible summations.
Louis Nizer, who passed away in 1994, was a celebrated lawyer who had always been known in the legal profession for the considerable preparation he used to put into all of his cases. His motto was that “preparation is the be-all and end-all in the trial of a lawsuit.” Yet even Nizer apparently shortchanged final summation, relegating it to a relatively minor role.
I say that because in his most famous trial, in which he represented newsman Quentin Reynolds in a libel suit against columnist Westbrook Pegler, a case that Nizer was involved in for over a year, taking depositions around the world, he apparently literally waited until one second before midnight to prepare his summation. On pages 153–154 of his book
My Life in Court
, he describes the night of the last day of testimony, the night before final summation. This is what he says: “With my assistants I culled the citations from the record and
organized
a summation that would predigest the enormous amount of testimony without sacrificing emotion or lucidity. A few of my associates found themselves in grotesque postures of slumber on the edge of a sofa or on the carpet before the sun rose.”
As great a lawyer as Nizer was, I have to differ with him on this point. I just don’t think that’s a good practice, if for no other reason than you want to be fresh for the jury when you give your summation. And yet there are so many lawyers who start working on their summation the night before they give it. (In fact, this is apparently what the two prosecutors in this case did for their rebuttal argument. See discussion later in this chapter.) I was with Nizer about ten years ago in Chicago, and after drawing his attention to this paragraph in his book, I said, “Louie, is that
really
your practice?” When he replied it was, I asked why. Nizer proceeded to tell me something that at least to me was almost as unbelievable as what one of the prosecutors in the Simpson case had told me in explaining why they didn’t introduce Simpson’s statement to the police at the trial. Nizer said: “Vince, you just never know what’s going to happen on the last day of testimony.”
I don’t think Nizer had been watching too much Perry Mason, but I can tell you that his position makes no sense at all. In the first place, even if something Perry Mason-like does happen on the last day of the trial which turns everything around, unless you decide to fold your tent and give no summation at all, you still have much to argue about in the case you’ve been putting on for weeks or months. But secondly, when does such a thing ever happen in the real world? Has any lawyer reading this book ever had it happen to him? And even if it has happened, it’s so extremely rare that it surely shouldn’t govern your way of handling final summation in every case you try.