“Here’s a man,” I told Ito, “who has systematically harassed and intimidated other jurors. Is this the kind of person [who] can actually deliberate with other jurors in a meaningful and adult fashion?”
Lance caught my drift and gave Willie the boot.
The defense was so stunned by this development that they didn’t realize what had happened to them. Half an hour later, when the reality of losing Cravin finally dawned on them, they ran back into court, saying, “We want to take a writ. Have him reinstated.” There was no provision in the law for that. But they tried anyway and were summarily shot down.
Defense:
5.
The People: 5
.
That was a fine day. I was so happy I actually skipped out of court. A lapse in decorum to be sure, but understandable given the circumstances. We’d broken the back of the Clique of Four. The composition of the jury had changed radically. Depending on who filled the spot left by Willie Cravin, we might actually hope for a level playing field. I was hoping like hell we wouldn’t draw Alternate Number 165, an elderly black man who’d regaled fellow jurors with tales of racism from his Southern youth.
Of course, a hard look at the jury that day would have revealed only two votes we really felt we could count on. That of Anise Aschenbach, a sixty-one-year-old white woman who’d gone to college for a year. And Annie Backman, a twenty-three-year-old white insurance claims adjuster, who I felt might—just might—have the mathematical acumen to grasp the scientific testimony. The rest were ciphers or hard sells, including forty-four-year-old Lon Cryer, a black man whom we’d begun to suspect was a militant, and who had confided to Ito during the latest round of juror interviews that he didn’t trust cops. There was also a young Hispanic deliveryman who’d been on the case since the beginning. We still had no idea where he stood. And then there were those (seven) black women. Two of them seemed fairly bright. They’d also happened to have some college education. Perhaps they could be reached. Perhaps they could persuade the rest.
That’s what I was thinking on the day Willie Cravin got his walking papers. I was so high on hope, not even common sense could bring me down.
After Fung, we really picked up speed. Andrea Mazzola, Dennis’s assistant, might have been a rookie in the field but on the stand she came on like a real pro. She didn’t take guff from Peter Neufeld, and her clear, confident answers went a long way toward bolstering Dennis Fung’s credibility.
Then on May 1, Greg Matheson, the foursquare forensic chemist I’d brought in from SID to sub for Fung at the preliminary hearings, took the stand.
In Hank’s skillful hands, Greg helped us to do some serious debunking.
Defense contention: Nicole’s blood had been planted on the socks found at the foot of Simpson’s bed.
Debunked: Greg explained that his notation concerning the blood, “none obvious,” meant just that—no blood observable
under ordinary light
on June 29. It didn’t, as Johnnie had tried to suggest in his opening statement, mean that Nicole’s blood wasn’t on the socks as of that date, leaving open the possibility that it had been planted later. The blood just wasn’t detected until Collin did his presumptive test a few weeks later.
(There’s an interesting aside to this story: The cops just assumed the blood belonged to O. J. Simpson. I was the one who pushed the crime lab to take it one test further and do conventional testing, which, to everyone’s utter amazement, showed that the blood on O. J. Simpson’s sock belonged to Nicole.)
Defense contention: “Missing blood.” Thano Peratis, the LAPD nurse who’d drawn Simpson’s reference sample of blood, had testified at the preliminary hearings that he’d drawn 8 milliliters. In poring over records, Barry Scheck noticed the actual amount was 6.5 milliliters. A discrepancy of about 1.5 milliliters. Do you have any idea how little that is? About a quarter of a tablespoon. As near as I could figure it, the defense was contending that this minuscule volume of “missing” reference blood had multiplied miraculously—to be slathered generously by “conspirators” over gateposts, socks, and other incriminating pieces of evidence.
Debunked: When Thano heard that the defense was making hay with his measurements, he called us to correct the record. He really didn’t know how much he’d drawn. He was just estimating. It could have been as much as 7 milliliters or as little as 6. Since the vials themselves have no hatch marks, it’s impossible to know exactly how much blood was in them to begin with. Even if you assumed the scenario most favorable to the defense—that he’d drawn 7 milliliters—that left only 0.5 milliliter unaccounted for.
In his sensible, careful testimony, Greg went on to account for it. Small amounts of blood, he explained, are routinely lost in testing as a natural consequence of the opening and closing of the vial.
So much for missing blood.
Defense Contention: Contamination.
Debunked: Greg’s most powerful testimony went to a single blood spot, Sample Number 49, found on the walkway at Bundy. Forget DNA testing for a moment. The very basic conventional serology tests Greg did on that single stain showed that it matched Simpson’s blood. And that only 0.5 percent of the population had that blood type. This was a bigger deal than we knew at the time: the basic tests, it turns out, aren’t sensitive enough to be affected by contamination even if there
was
any. We extracted that concession from one of the defense’s own witnesses, Dr. John Gerdes. Throughout the trial, the results on that drop linking O. J. Simpson to the crime scene remained unrefuted.
The star of our DNA case was Dr. Robin Cotton, a petite woman with short blond hair and wire-rimmed glasses. She was the director of Cellmark Diagnostics, the largest private DNA lab in the country. I’d presented her as a witness in the first DNA case I ever tried, and I’d been mightily impressed. She was indubitably honest, and her explanations of the very complicated procedures of DNA testing were as simple as one could humanly make them.
Woody Clarke, a slender, sweet-faced man who was one of California’s leading attorney-experts in DNA evidence, had the difficult job of leading Cotton through this potential quagmire. He elevated the discussion above the technicalities to drive home three essential points.
Would the method of collection and packaging cause the evidence to change from one person’s type to another? he asked her.
It would not.
What if it degraded totally?
Then it would produce no result, she explained; not a change in type. What will happen is that a dirty surface will eat up DNA faster than a clean nonporous surface, which was why the blood on the rear gate was in better shape than the droplets on the cement walkway.
“So this process of degradation,” Woody continued, “can it change my DNA into looking like your DNA?”
“No.”
“Or [the DNA of] any members of the jury or the audience?”
“No.”
Bottom line:
Neither sloppy collection nor degradation can change one person’s blood into another’s!
It was a point we would hammer home again, and again, and again.
Dr. Cotton gave us something else. An incredible set of statistics. One blood drop on the driveway behind Nicole’s condo was good enough for RFLP, the most sensitive DNA test that can be performed. Only one in 170 million people had blood that would match that drop—and it matched Simpson’s. Even more compelling, the blood on the rear gate also matched the defendant’s. And it was in better shape, so we’d been able to do more extensive tests that narrowed the field even further. Only one in 57 billion people had that DNA type. There are only 5 billion people on the planet. Odds like this are called “identification.” It’s probably the closest thing you can get to a perfect match.
Robin’s results were verified by Gary Sims, of the California Department of Justice, who testified after her. Gary had done the RFLP testing on some of the same stains, but using different probes. The results of both labs combined to produce the most powerful matches and most reliable conclusions that anyone had been able to introduce into a court of law.
As Gary was testifying, I glanced over at the jury. They appeared despondent. I had a painful, dawning insight. The stronger, the more compelling our evidence became, the more they hated us.
We were all a little nervous on the morning of May 24, when Collin Yamauchi took the witness stand. Collin had done the first PCR testing at the LAPD lab—the lab the defense had taken to calling the “cesspool of contamination.” The defense would try to claim that he’d contaminated the samples
before
they got to Cellmark and the Department of Justice, so it wouldn’t matter what Robin or Gary had found. Garbage in; garbage out.
During his first appearance before the grand jury, Collin had been solid, but unpolished. This time he’d really gotten his act together. Under Rock’s direct, Collin calmly explained how he’d begun his testing by opening the vial of Simpson’s blood and placing a small drop of the blood on what is called a Fitzco card. This is a small package containing filter paper. In the process of opening it, he’d gotten a bit of blood on his gloves, but he’d promptly stripped them, discarded them, and put on new ones before moving over to the evidence swatches. Collin went carefully over the procedure he’d followed in dealing with those samples. He’d even used a fresh knife after cutting each swatch. Pretty damned careful.
Barry Scheck, of course, seized upon the “spilled” blood, arguing that it had somehow contaminated the evidence samples. But as usual, he was blowing smoke. Collin had been standing over fifteen feet away from the evidence swatches, which were sealed inside little paper envelopes, which had been placed inside coin envelopes, which were taped shut. How could the blood have reached them?
Gary Sims of the California Department of Justice had already testified that DNA does not “jump,” nor does it “fly.” It does not waft across the room as an aerosol and penetrate two layers of packaging. And even if you assumed for one mad moment that this was possible, how did this itinerant DNA manage to come to rest
only
on the evidence swatches, and not on the control swatches?
(Later on, one defense expert theorized gamely that the control swatches
were
contaminated, but in amounts so small you couldn’t measure them. Now think about this for a minute. A scientist knows, if anyone does, that if you can’t measure something, you can’t really say it’s there, now, can you? We’re not talking about quarks here. This is blood, a substance which is quantifiable even in trace amounts. But by then, we’d tripped so far through the looking glass that an inane observation like this one could actually pass for rebuttal.)
Collin’s testimony was going great. He was firm and lucid, no mean feat considering the technical detail he had to recount. The apprehension I’d felt when he took the stand was giving way to pride. Then, suddenly, things went radically wrong.
Rock asked Collin the following: “Based on what you heard in the media at the time or… before you did the tests in this case, did you have an expectation of what the outcome of these tests would be?”
This might seem like an odd question. But in fact, during our private conversations with Collin, he’d confided in us that he was a big fan of O. J. Simpson. We wanted to let the jury in on the fact that this man was not conspirator material. Naturally, we thought Collin would say something along the lines of how he’d admired Simpson as an athlete and how improbable he thought it was that Simpson could do something like this. The point was to demonstrate that if there was any “examiner bias,” it was in the defendant’s favor.
Instead, Collin blurted out, “I heard on the news that, well, yeah. He’s got an airtight alibi. He’s—he’s in Chicago… . And I go, ‘Oh, well, he’s probably not related to the scene.’ “
Ito promptly cut off the witness and ordered counsel to sidebar.
“We have a huge problem.” He glowered. “We just brought in a statement by the defendant…”
What the hell could he be referring to? The statement Simpson gave to Lange and Vannatter in their interview on June 13? Section 356 of the California evidence code says that if one side introduces part of a writing or statement, the other side has the right to bring in the rest. But it was absurd to apply that rule here. Collin’s “alibi” remark had nothing at all to do with Simpson’s statement. It was simply Collin’s own conjecture, based on news reports—and false ones at that.
Johnnie whispered urgently to Scheck, and Scheck nodded. I knew exactly what he was saying: “Go for it. Get that statement in!”
And Ito was going to allow it!
Here’s the situation. Simpson’s attorneys had been dying to get that statement into evidence so that the jury would get to hear Simpson’s tape-recorded expressions of innocence
without his ever being exposed to cross-examination
. Problem was, they couldn’t introduce it on their own. They had to wait for us to bring it up. Collin, supposedly, had given them an opening.
We had to close it fast.
I knew that unless I played along like this was a serious legal question, Ito’s ego would be bruised and we’d pay dearly. We’d have to submit a motion to stop this thing.
I went looking for Hank and found him in the War Room.
“I’m going to need some paper quick, so I can get him to turn around without his losing face,” I told him.
That fucking statement!
How many hours had Hank and Chris and I—in fact, the entire team—spent agonizing over what to do about it? We’d looked at it from every side. There were a couple of good arguments for allowing it in. Phil had gotten Simpson to admit that the last time he’d visited Bundy was five days earlier and he told detectives he had not been bleeding at that time. That made it patently absurd for the defense to argue that the blood drops had been left by Simpson on a social visit to Bundy before June 12. But on the other hand, the defense wasn’t even thinking about arguing that Simpson had bled there on some other occasion, so we’d gain nothing.
At one point, Simpson had said that the last thing he did before leaving for the airport was to get his cell phone out of the Bronco. That part I liked. When you combined it with the cell phone records showing the call to Paula Barbieri at 10:03, it placed him in the Bronco just before the murders.