Last thing I remember as I slipped under the anesthetic was the ridiculous image of Johnnie pulling O. J. Simpson’s knit cap down over his ears. I heard myself chuckle. But the laughter got fainter and fainter as I tumbled down a tunnel of darkness.
I was under for less than an hour. When I awoke, the pain was gone. Draining the abscess, the dentist explained, had relieved the pressure on the nerves. All I felt was a little tenderness. He gave me a painkiller. But I didn’t even need it.
It was close to ten P.M. when we got back to the CCB. Given what I’d just gone through, I felt amazingly clearheaded. Forty-five minutes under anesthesia, as it turned out, had given me a much-needed rest. Dr. Magic was right. I did feel good. I had shut myself in my office, hoping to work quietly for a few hours, when Chris blew in.
“They’re getting nothing done in there,” he said, motioning to the conference room. “They need Mama.”
I found the troops in disarray. Marching to the front of the room, I began to hand out assignments to deputies, to law clerks, to everyone. My minions scurried off to the transcripts, looking for ammo to return fire.
Until then, I’d intended to do the rebuttal by myself. But Johnnie had changed that. “If you can’t trust the messengers, watch out for their message,” he’d said. He’d insinuated that Chris and I were both, at best, overzealous; at worst, dishonest. We were both part of a nefarious conspiracy that now seemed to involve all county employees right down to the steno pool. Chris and I
both
had to put in an appearance to defend our honor.
This caught Chris unawares. Not only did he have to compile the legal materials, but he had to prepare himself psychologically. He had done a first-rate job on his summation, but asking him to go another round on a moment’s notice was expecting an awful lot. I called him into my office.
“If you don’t think you can do this,” I told him, “I’ll understand. I’ll never hold it against you.”
He smiled, as he did so rarely.
“I’m in.”
Chris pulled together an ad hoc team consisting of his law clerk, Melissa Decker; Scott; Cheri; David Wooden; and Gavin de Becker. The five of them holed up in a hotel room to work on his rebuttal.
Hank, Woody, Rock, and I convened in my office. My vigilant team kept refilling my coffee mug to keep me awake until we had a draft we could live with. Hank left at two A.M. Woody left at 2:30. Rock left at three. I left at 3:30.
As I went to shut down my computer for the night, something flashed on the main menu. My law clerks had posted a message on the screen. It read, “We Love You, Boss.”
You save your good stuff for last. And on the morning of Friday, September 29, Christopher Darden gave them the best he had. Chris and I had decided that we might actually use Johnnie’s plea for nullification to our advantage; spin it around to remind the jury what this trial was
not
about. So he hit the issue head-on.
“You can’t send a message to Fuhrman,” he told the jury. “You can’t send a message to the LAPD. You can’t eradicate racism within the LAPD or the L.A. community or within the nation as a whole by delivering a verdict of ‘not guilty.’ In a case like this, the evidence is there. You just have to find your way through the smoke.”
His message was so eloquent, he should have reached them.
But my heart sank when I saw what was happening—or not happening—in that jury box. The jurors were shifting in their seats, turning their heads, tapping their feet. And this was really scary: Juror Number 98, a fifty-three-year-old postal clerk, one of the three black women who later went on to write a book about the case, was giving Chris a hateful stare. She was sighing and tapping her feet—as if to say, “Shut up and siddown.”
And then it was my turn. I would like to say that my mind was clear and my attention sharp. But the truth, tens of millions of Americans might have noticed, was otherwise. I was struggling to maintain my focus. One commentator later described my demeanor as “subdued.” I would have described it as simply worn out.
But as I rose to address the twelve, I drew on the last of my depleted reserves to bring this thing to an honorable finish. I had to make each word count. I had a feeling, even then, that this would be the last argument I would ever make in a court of law.
I spoke from my heart.
“I’ve been doing this a lot of years,” I told the jurors quietly. “I started on that side of counsel table,” I said, gesturing to the defense. “I know what the ethical obligations are of a prosecutor… . I took a cut in pay to join this office because I believe in this job. I believe in doing it fairly and doing it right. And I like the luxury of being a prosecutor because I have the luxury on any case of going to the judge and saying… ‘Your Honor, dismiss it’ . . . I will never ask for a conviction unless… the law says I must, unless [the defendant] is proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt on credible evidence that you can trust… . I can never do it otherwise. That is my obligation.”
“Improper!” Barry Scheck barked.
Now, a prosecutor is not normally allowed to tell a jury about the ethical obligations of his office and how superior he is to those scoundrels on the defense side. That’s called “personal vouching,” and it’s strictly disallowed. The exception is when the defense has called a prosecutor’s integrity into question. Then all bets are off.
Lance knew this. I believe that by this time he was fed up to the gills with the Dream Team. And so he did what he should have done months before. He took control of the courtroom.
“Overruled.” He cut Scheck down with a word. For the next two hours that I would speak, the defense would object over fifty times, trying to break my stride. But Lance Ito ran interference for me, overruling them again and again and again.
Before me I had a green binder, three inches thick with misstatements or inconsistencies in the defense’s closing arguments. Most of them had to do with claims of evidence having been “contaminated” or “planted.” One of the most amazing things to me was that after all the hours spent ragging Dennis Fung and Andrea Mazzola for their sloppiness in the field, Barry Scheck backed off this line during closing argument. He and the defense had now retreated to the position that the so-called contamination had occurred at the hands of Collin Yamauchi in the Evidence Processing Room of the LAPD.
Once again I reminded this jury what a bogus issue this whole business of contamination really was. As Gary Sims had observed, “DNA cannot fly.” Nothing in this case could account for the wholly consistent blood results except Simpson’s guilt.
It has really bugged me since the trial to hear the pundits say that I didn’t spend enough of my closing on debunking the notion of a police conspiracy. This is absolutely untrue. I brought it up over and over and over again. I brought it up, in fact, every time I attacked the premise of “planted” evidence. In fact I brought it up over fifty-three times.
I wanted this jury to see the lengths to which the defense would go to sell their package of contorted and contradictory “planting” theories. There was no more telling example of this, in my estimation, than their attempts to account for the presence of Ronald Goldman’s blood on the console of Simpson’s Bronco. Of all the blood evidence against O. J. Simpson, this was probably the most damning. There was simply no explanation for it, other than the obvious: when Simpson got into the Bronco after the murders, he dropped his right glove on the console beside him.
As I’ve said, Dennis Fung had failed to collect all of those samples when he did his first sweep of the vehicle on July 14; we didn’t get the rest until September 1. This now left Scheck an opening to contend that they had been planted on the later date. Problem was, photos taken on both dates showed blood spots in absolutely identical configuration. You would have needed a skilled counterfeiter to pull that one off.
So, I pointed out to the jury, the defense had neatly jettisoned that theory and tried another. In this version of reality, O. J. Simpson had reached over the console and bled on it with his left hand—and
then
, on the same spot, Mark Fuhrman wiped the glove bearing the blood of the two victims. That’s why all the blood was mixed.
In order to wrap your mind around this theory, you’d have to believe that Fuhrman had filched a glove from Bundy, hidden it in his pocket until he got to Rockingham, slim-jimmed the door of the Bronco, slipped into it unnoticed, and rubbed the bloody glove on the console.
“If you wanted to sell this story in Hollywood,” I told that jury, “they wouldn’t buy it because it’s so incredible.”
I continued ticking off absurdities until I got to the bottom line: You could forget the DNA. Even if you put it aside, the People had amassed such an archive of circumstantial evidence that a reasonable juror could vote to convict even if he or she had slept right through the scientific testimony.
“I have one more exhibit I would like to show you,” I told the jury. “This is entitled ‘Unrefuted Evidence.’ And I think that this will bring home to you the power of the evidence in this case.”
The Unrefuted Evidence idea was the brainchild of Bill Hodgman. And it was brilliant. Show the jury, in the aggregate, all the strange occurrences, the bizarre coincidences, for which the defense had no explanation whatsoever. The evidence had been arranged in the shape of a pyramid and mounted on a magnetic board. It was so heavy two men had to carry it to the easel.
“This is evidence,” I continued, “which has not been contested by any contradictory evidence.”
•First of all, opportunity… between 9:36
*
and 10:53, the defendant’s whereabouts are unaccounted for. No dispute about that. Nobody’s contradicting that.
•Kato Kaelin saw the defendant wearing a dark sweat suit at 9:36. No contradictory testimony about that.
•The defendant tried to call Paula Barbieri on his cell phone from the Bronco at… 10:03. There’s no contradictory testimony as to that fact.
•Allan Park buzzed the intercom at Rockingham at 10:40, at 10:43, and at 10:49. There was no answer. No testimony contradicts that.
•Kato Kaelin heard the three thumps on his wall at 10:51 or 10:52. That testimony isn’t contradicted.
•Allan Park saw the person in dark clothes, six feet, 200 pounds, walk across the driveway at 10:54, walking into the house, testimony that is uncontradicted. Two minutes after the thumps heard by Kato, uncontradicted testimony.
•And at 10:55, when Allan Park got out of his limo to go and buzz the defendant, the defendant finally answered. That testimony, ladies and gentlemen, is uncontradicted.
“What this testimony proves,” I argued, “is not only that the defendant was not home, but it proves he was not sleeping. And it proves that he lied about it… to create an alibi for himself. You don’t need to do that unless you’ve been doing something… that you need to hide.”
The coincidences were too blatant to ignore. Defendant wears same shoe size as killer. Defendant wears same brand of glove as killer. Killer drops blood to the left of his shoe prints. Defendant has a fresh cut on his left hand immediately after the murders.
Evidence that
all
remained uncontradicted.
Fibers consistent with the Bronco carpet found on the knit cap and the Rockingham glove. Blue-black cotton fiber (presumably from a sweatsuit worn by Simpson) found on Ron Goldman’s shirt, Simpson’s socks, and the Rockingham glove. Hair consistent with the defendant’s found on the knit cap and Ron Goldman’s shirt.
All uncontradicted!
Even now, as I think back on that pyramid—that
mountain
—of evidence, it blows my mind. How could anyone fail to see?
The objections from the defense were flying fast and furious. Ito was slapping them down at every turn. I got to the point where I wouldn’t even stop and wait for a ruling. I just talked over them. The jurors seemed absolutely riveted. They didn’t budge. They never blinked, sighed, or moved a muscle. For once, I felt that they were actually listening.
By now, I was running on fumes. But the end was in sight. And now, at last, I was about to speak to what this case was really about: the two dead human beings for whom we sought justice. I let them guide me through the rest of my rebuttal.
“Usually,” I told the jury, “I feel like I’m the only one left to speak for the victims. But in this case, Ron and Nicole are speaking to you. They’re speaking to you and they’re telling you who murdered them.
“Nicole started to speak before she even died. Remember, back in 1989, she cried to Detective Edwards, ‘He’s going to kill me… .’ The children were there.
“In 1990, she made a safe deposit box, put photographs of her beaten face and her haunted look in a safe deposit box along with a will. She was only thirty years old! How many thirty-year-olds [do] you know who do that? A will? A safe deposit box? It’s like writing ‘In the event of my death.’ She knew… .
“Nineteen ninety-three, the 911 tape; the children were there. He was screaming… she was frightened.
“I think the thing that perhaps was so chilling about her voice is that sound of resignation… inevitability. She knew she was going to die.
“And Ron—he speaks to you. [By] struggling so valiantly, he forced his murderer to leave the evidence behind that you might not ordinarily have found. And they both are telling you who did it—with their hair, their clothes, their bodies, their blood. They tell you he did it. He did it. Mr. Simpson. Orenthal Simpson. He did it.
“They told you the only way they can. Will you hear them or will you ignore their plea for justice? Or, as Nicole said to Detective Edwards, ‘You never do anything about him.’ “
I looked at the faces of my jury.
“Will you?”
I gestured to Jonathan.
For several weeks now, the team had been pulling together a montage, a sort of visual history of this crime. Over the images, we’d decided that we would play the 911 tapes. Although I’d seen bits and pieces of this opus as it was coming together, I didn’t feel the full power of it until this morning, when Jonathan hit the “play” button.
You heard “Emergency 911,” then the static confusion on the caller’s end. The thumps of blows landing on flesh. Then, the more frantic pleas of the 1993 call. “He’s O. J. Simpson. I think you know his record. He’s fucking going nuts.” All the while, on the large screen, we showed the photo of Nicole taken after the beating of 1989. She was lifting her hair to reveal the full extent of the damage to her face. Her eyes were downcast, as if in shame. Then, the photo of her smeared with mud. Cut to the Bundy trail, the knit cap, a close-up of Ron’s shirt. Behind those images, O. J. Simpson’s voice rose to a peak of rage. Suddenly, the audio stopped, and all that was left was a picture of Nicole’s body curled in a pool of blood. We held on that image for thirty seconds in complete silence.