Just one paragraph, Marcia, to respond to the central thrust of the defense’s whole case? Just one paragraph in your entire opening and closing arguments to convince the jury there was no police conspiracy in this case? One minute to knock down nine and a half months of conspiracy allegations?
And it wasn’t as if Clark didn’t realize the police conspiracy argument was the defense’s main argument. She even told the jury: “They have got to make you believe that the blood was planted. It is the cornerstone of their defense. If you don’t buy the planting theory, he’s guilty.” And throughout the trial, she acknowledged her obvious awareness of this reality. For instance, on August 1, 1995, she told Judge Ito about the prosecution’s need to “disprove the conspiracy theory and refute the planting theme that the defense has carried throughout this case.” Yet in an opening argument and a rebuttal by her that consumed close to four hundred pages of transcript, Clark spent less than one page,
less than one four-hundredth of her argument
, responding to and trying to knock down the main argument of the defense. (Elsewhere in her argument, Clark did deal briefly [see later discussion]
not
with the conspiracy argument [a conspiracy requires
two or more people
, in this case many
LAPD
officers allegedly plotting to frame Simpson], but with whether Fuhrman,
by himself
, planted the
lone
item of the glove.)
Darden was even worse. Out of his approximately 170 pages of opening argument and rebuttal, he devoted one-sixth of one page,
about one one-thousandth of his argument
, to rebutting the main argument of the defense. I know this sounds impossible, but unfortunately it’s true. His only words on the subject in his opening argument were: “They want to tell you the police conspired against O. J. Simpson. Nicole says they had been out there eight times before and never did anything to him. I don’t know.” And in rebuttal, referring to the testimony of black police photographer Willie Ford (who Cochran, in his summation, told the jury was the
only
member of the
LAPD
who was
not
a part of the conspiracy to frame Simpson), Darden said: “You heard that brother testify. Did he look like a coconspirator to you?”
So neither Clark nor Darden, in their four collective final summations to the jury, even begin to come up with any kind of a response to the heart, the centerpiece, the core of the defense case.
What I’m saying is that unbelievably, for all intents and purposes, Clark and Darden conceded the conspiracy issue by default in their summations. Because of their extreme incompetence and abysmal lack of preparation,
they virtually did not contest what had turned out to be the main issue at the trial
. They treated the issue that was most responsible for the not-guilty verdict in this case as if it didn’t even exist. Yet to my knowledge, not one reporter or talking head covering this trial mentioned this perfectly obvious point. In fact, recall what one of the most prominent talking heads of all, the former prosecutor from back east, said about Clark and Darden: “I think they did a damn good job.”
None of this surprises me, however. Lincoln said, “You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” But there should be an addendum to that: “You can fool most of the people most of the time.”
The essence of Clark’s few words to rebut the conspiracy frame-up argument was the
difficulty
of pulling it off. It would have been “impossible,” she said. That is an argument she should have worked on for hours and hours, and in which she should have explained and spelled out in detail and depth to the jury, for at least a half hour or so, what would have been involved in such an enormous endeavor, not merely state the one-word conclusion of how “impossible” it would be. And as I’ve indicated, the entire counterconspiracy argument should have taken at least an hour or two to deliver, consuming one hundred pages of transcript, at a minimum.
Among the seven, eight, or nine arguments Clark should have made in this area, in addition to telling the jury how difficult or impossible such a frame-up would be—which only suggests how tough it would be to pull it off, not how absolutely repugnant to the officers such an idea would be in the first place—don’t you at least also tell the jury how preposterous, on its face, the whole idea of a police frame-up is?
Don’t you tell the jury something like this?
“To believe a frame-up, in addition to the many people who would have had to be involved, you’d have to believe that the two teams of
LAPD
detectives in this case—Lange and Vannatter, Fuhrman and Phillips, who were from different divisions of the
LAPD
and didn’t work with or even know each other—arrive at the murder scene in the middle of the night and all four suddenly agree that whoever killed these two poor people, they didn’t care, they were going to let the true killer or killers go free. And instead they all decided—there were no dissents—to frame someone they believed to be innocent, O. J. Simpson. And in the process, not only jeopardize their careers, but also risk their very lives, since if you plant evidence and testify falsely in a capital case in California, as we have already pointed out to you folks, under some circumstances you can get the death penalty yourself. Take Detective Vannatter here. Twenty-six years on the force. Not one single citizen complaint was ever filed against him. Due to retire in just a few months with his wife, Rita, to a farm of theirs in Indiana. And he’s going to risk his good name, his pension, and possibly his life to frame O. J. Simpson? That’s what the defense in this case wants you folks to believe.
“And why were these officers willing to risk going to the gas chamber to frame Simpson? What was their motive? What was in it for them? Oh, I guess they were upset that Simpson was born black. Or maybe it was because he married a white woman. Anyone who would believe an incredible fable like that would believe someone who told him he had seen an alligator doing the polka. Is there anyone in this courtroom who doesn’t realize how absolutely and utterly and completely insane it is to suggest, as the defense in this case has, that all four of these detectives, or even one, would be willing to risk their lives, risk going to the gas chamber, to frame someone for murders they believe he didn’t commit? It’s so insane a thought I hate to even utter the words. I wouldn’t believe a story like that if you screamed it in my ears for one hundred years.
“Incidentally, it’s an enormous, ridiculous leap to suggest that just because Fuhrman is a racist, as we know so many people are, he’s going to go around framing innocent people of murder. That doesn’t follow at all. And even if we make the crazy assumption, for which there is not one speck of evidence to support it, that Fuhrman tried to frame Simpson because he was black, what’s the defense’s explanation for Lange, Vannatter, and Phillips doing so? The defense hasn’t even suggested they were racist. Why would they be willing to participate in an act that couldn’t possibly be more sick, perverse, and evil?
“How dare these defense attorneys accuse these officers of framing an innocent man for murder, the foulest, most reprehensible deed, short of murder itself, that one human being can do to another human being? I mean, where do they get the guts to make a charge like that? Where do you buy guts like that? I haven’t seen any on display in storefront windows here in L.A. Are they for sale back east?”
Cochran, in fact, did come up with a motive for the LAPD’s framing Simpson. And it was even more laughable than the ones I hypothesized about. And naturally, the prosecution let him get by with it. Either he or one of his many associates must have realized that maybe one, just one member of the jury might be bright enough to ask himself why
all
the police, with no dissents, would get together and decide to frame someone they believed to be an innocent man. So buried within the millions of words the defense had uttered in this case for almost a year, Cochran, after strongly suggesting in his opening statement, throughout the entire nine-and-a-half-month trial, and through his entire summation that the
LAPD
had framed someone it believed to be innocent, squeezed in just seventeen words (two lines) to cover himself. This is what he said in answer to his own question “Why would all these police officers set up O. J. Simpson?”: “They believed he was guilty. They wanted to win. They didn’t want to lose another big case.” Unbelievable. Johnnie had come up with a new twist. Everyone has heard of framing innocent people. My
Random House Dictionary
, for instance, defines the word “frame” as “incriminating an
innocent
person through the use of false evidence, information, etc.” But according to Cochran, the
LAPD
thought it was framing a guilty person.
Shouldn’t the prosecution have come back and told the jury, in rebuttal, that Cochran was speaking out of both sides of his mouth at the same time, being as twofaced as a tower clock? If we’re to believe the other 99.9 percent of the defense’s case, the
LAPD
must have believed it was framing an innocent man. How could they possibly have felt he was guilty
if they thought it was necessary
to plant his blood on the rear gate at Bundy and inside his Bronco and home, plant his and Nicole’s blood on socks in his bedroom, plant a bloody glove on the grounds of his estate, etc.? By definition, if the
LAPD
felt they had to plant
all
that evidence against him, they must have felt he was innocent. That’s just common sense. There would only be a need to start planting evidence against someone you believe is guilty if the existing evidence doesn’t already do the job for you. But here, it did. Yes, the
LAPD
did believe, did know, that Simpson was guilty, but that was because
all
of the evidence they already had, without exception, pointed to his guilt. What Cochran was trying to do, of course, was to have it both ways, and as I said, the prosecution let him get by with it. The entire thrust of the defense case was that the
LAPD
was framing someone they thought was innocent.
Shouldn’t the prosecution, in rebuttal
to Cochran’s seventeen words which he slipped under the door
, have argued:
“So the reason all these officers would risk going to San Quentin’s gas chamber was that they didn’t want to lose another big case? Has this man Johnnie Cochran no shame? After a whole year to think about it, is this the best he and the other members of Mr. Simpson’s million-dollar defense team can come up with as a motive for framing this defendant?
“And if he’s going to make such a wild and absurd allegation, don’t you think he should at least have the common decency to tell you folks what other big cases the
LAPD
has been losing recently? Is he talking about the Menendez case? The
LAPD
didn’t handle that case. That was a Beverly Hills Police Department case. It should be noted that every single juror in that case voted to convict the two defendant brothers of some degree of criminal homicide, from first-degree murder down to voluntary manslaughter, but because the jury couldn’t agree on the degree, it was a hung jury, and that case is going to be retried, so it’s still very much alive. The Damien Williams case? Let Mr. Cochran tell Damien Williams, who’s presently behind bars, that the
LAPD
lost that case. Williams was convicted of mayhem and is presently serving ten years in the state prison. The Rodney King case? You mean all the officers who framed Simpson in this case were
upset
that four other members of the LAPD—two of whom, as you folks know, were in fact eventually convicted—were found not guilty in Simi Valley? If they were upset, then they were pretty good people, right? Not the kind who are racist. Not the kind who would frame a black man, right? And if he’s going all the way back to the McMartin child molestation case in 1990, that wasn’t the
LAPD
either. That was the Manhattan Beach Police Department.
“I want to know. What other big cases was Mr. Cochran talking about? Even though this is my time for argument, I’m going to give Mr. Cochran the opportunity to stand up right now in front of you folks in this courtroom and identify, without a speech, what other big cases he was referring to that the
LAPD
lost within the past four or five years that caused all the
LAPD
officers in this case to risk going to the gas chamber for, just so the
LAPD
wouldn’t lose another big case. Mr. Cochran? I’ll give you the amount of time it takes you to name these other cases.”
Since there were no other cases, Cochran would have looked almost pathetically foolish in being unable to name one case. His silence would have been so deafening that courtroom spectators would have been begging for earmuffs. Instead, Cochran got by with his ridiculous and profoundly flawed argument. (For instance, juror Lionel Cryer bought Cochran’s argument 100 percent. Right after the verdict, he told reporters that he believed that because “the
LAPD
had such a bad track record with their high-profile cases in the past, they pounced on this case to try to not blow it at all costs. ‘No matter what, we’re going to make this case.’”)
And don’t you at least, in your one-or two-hour argument on this issue of a police conspiracy and frame-up, go on and make this follow-up argument to the jury?
“Even if the police were to frame a black man, Simpson would have been one of the last black men on the face of this earth they would have framed. Here’s someone who had always been a friend of the
LAPD
, someone they had always liked, even pampered.”
I’d then remind the jury of the many examples of this, e.g., Nicole’s anguished cry to the officers when they responded to her 911 call in 1989: “You come out, and you talk to him, but you never do anything to him” the fact that many officers from the West Los Angeles Division of the
LAPD
attended parties at Simpson’s home, and several used his pool and tennis court; his usually attending their Christmas parties and autographing footballs for them; etc. Isn’t this an obvious argument you make? But the prosecutors never made any such argument.