There was sobbing throughout the courtroom. But all I could think was,
It’s over
.
Up in the War Room, there were tears of relief. We’d ended strong and we knew it.
I was numb. After 372 grueling days and nearly 48,000 pages of trial transcript entered into the ages, the thought foremost in my mind was
Please, God. No retrial
.
That afternoon the jury picked a forewoman, Number 230, Armanda Cooley. I was encouraged. I wouldn’t say that I’d enjoyed rapport with Cooley, but every so often I had gotten a smile from her. She was the best-educated of the jurors, with two years of college to her credit. I harbored private hopes that she was both intelligent enough and neutral enough to keep an open mind to the evidence. That she’d been picked leader of the pack was good news.
The Goldmans took Chris and me, in fact, the whole team, out to the L.A. Athletic Club. Everybody was feeling upbeat. Our reviews were already coming in, and the pundits were saying terrific things about us. The montage was being hailed as a stroke of brilliance. Kim and I held each other and cried over Ron. The D.A. investigators followed me home that night to make sure I wasn’t followed by reporters.
That weekend we went to Santa Barbara to take refuge with Lynn Reed. I felt like a convict savoring her first delirious moments of freedom. I took naps. I did a crossword puzzle for the first time in a year.
At that moment, I thought there was some fighting chance that my life had returned to normal. I realize now that I was in denial. I guess in my heart of hearts I realized that the worst still lay ahead.
On Sunday night we got back to L.A., and on Monday I went out shopping with my friend Kathy. Earlier in the morning I had gotten word that the jury had asked for a read-back of Allan Park’s testimony. Everyone at the D.A.‘s office was interpreting that as good news for us. If, in fact, Park’s testimony was all the jury wanted to hear, they were focusing on key prosecution evidence. If you believed Park’s account of that night, you had to believe Simpson was lying. They had been presented with a hundred file drawers of damning evidence against O. J. Simpson. If Allen Park’s words were
all
they needed to hear, how could they fail to convict?
But I wasn’t sure what to think. One thing I know is that when juries ask for a read-back, it is seldom for the reason you think it is. So I refused to give in to euphoria. As I was sitting in the parking lot with Kathy, my car phone rang. It was Chris. He sounded both anxious and excited.
“The jury has a decision,” he said.
“How can that be?” I asked, incredulous. I’d been looking forward to a week off while they deliberated. We’d presented evidence for the better part of a year. What jury could come to an agreement on a case this complicated in
two fucking hours?
“Stay put,” he told me. “Ito won’t accept a verdict from them until tomorrow morning at ten.”
I didn’t have to be told why. No one had anticipated this quick turnaround. Not the LAPD. Not the Sheriff’s Department. They had to ramp up security in case the verdict lit a torch to the city.
That evening Chris, Cheri, and I went out to shoot some pool at a little out-of-the-way hall in Glendale. No frills. I loved the place. The first couple of times we’d gone I’d been mobbed. After that the management put me up in their VIP room, where no one would bug me. Chris was in buoyant spirits. Ito had made some comment to him at sidebar. Something to the effect, “Allan Park? You’re a lawyer. You read tea leaves.”
I said nothing. I can read tea leaves as well as the next guy, and to me the short deliberation meant trouble. All it said to me was that the jury had made up its mind weeks, probably months, before.
The next morning, October 3, I walked out the door intending to take Matt to school and ran smack into a guy with a TV cam on his shoulder. He was filming us! I was already way tweaked about the media, because I’d spoken to Gil the evening before and he’d told me that he’d allowed the placement of cameras all over the eighteenth floor.
“I don’t think that’s appropriate,” I told him. “What if we get a ‘not guilty’?”
No one else seemed to be seriously considering that prospect. The pundits were almost unanimously predicting conviction. But I felt uneasy.
“I think one short, dignified press conference where we stand up and talk to everyone jointly is plenty,” I reiterated.
But Gil was jazzed. Finally I said, “You guys want to do it, that’s fine. But I’m not gonna take part in it.”
And now there’s a TV camera blocking my driveway.
“How dare you invade my privacy this way?” I yelled at the cameraman. “Can’t you see I just want to take my child to school? Here, film
this
.” I flipped him off.
By the time I got into the office, the halls were bristling with cameras. I ran the gauntlet to Gil’s office. He’d gathered everyone in the conference room. The main topic of discussion seemed to be what to say about the fact that O. J. Simpson had been convicted. If that isn’t just asking God to smack you silly, I don’t know what is.
I was frankly worried about security. I didn’t know what might happen in court today, but I didn’t want to be caught in the crossfire. Four D.A. investigators were assigned to take me down the back way to the ninth floor. We arrived only minutes before Johnnie, accompanied by his four bodyguards from the Nation of Islam, filed in. It felt like springtime in Beirut.
The deputies brought Simpson in from lockup. He was wearing a gray suit and a bold yellow tie. His eyes appeared more sunken than usual. No doubt he had spent a long night.
“Counsel,” Ito asked us, “is there anything else we need to take up before we invite the jurors to join us?”
No one said a thing.
From the corner of my eye, I watched the jurors file in. I thought I saw a couple of them smile at the defendant.
Lance asked Deirdre to hand the envelope with the verdict forms to a deputy. He walked it over to Armanda Cooley.
“Madam Foreperson,” Ito said. His voice sounded strangely small. “Would you please open the envelope and check the condition of the verdict forms?”
Cooley did as instructed. She assured the court that they were signed and in order.
Deirdre faltered a little as she read the defendant’s name. Then she regained her composure.
“We the jury… find the defendant, Orenthal James Simpson, not guilty of the crime of murder… upon Nicole Brown Simpson, a human being…”
I’d prepared myself for the worst, but now that the moment had come, I felt pain spreading through my body like I’d been pierced by a thousand tiny needles.
We’d lost
.
Deirdre’s sweet, sorrowful voice droned on, reading the verdict of “not guilty” in the death of Ronald Goldman.
“My God,” I whispered.
Behind us Kim Goldman let out an unearthly howl. I couldn’t turn to face the families.
“The defendant,” said Judge Lance Ito, “having been acquitted of both charges… is ordered… released forthwith.”
As the jurors filed out of the courtroom, Lon Cryer turned toward the defense table and raised his fist in a power salute.
You sonofabitch
.
I don’t remember exactly what happened after that. I know that Bob Shapiro walked over to me, looking stunned and disappointed.
“It’s not the verdict I would’ve thought,” he admitted. I’m sure he shook my hand. But I have no recollection of the touch. Once again, I seemed surrounded by a vacuum that no one could penetrate.
How can I explain it? The sense of violation, the confusion, the dislocation. I could remember myself having once waded dreamlike into the surf. This time, as I made my way through a sea of photographers, I found myself walking into waves of grief. The War Room was jammed with warriors in defeat. I remember seeing the young law clerks crying. I wanted to tell them,
This doesn’t mean anything about the real world and the way justice is dispensed. Or the way it should be dispensed. It won’t always be this way. It may never be this way again
.
Ahead lay that excruciating press conference. There, before all the media he’d gathered in anticipation of victory, Gil had to admit that he was “profoundly disappointed” in the verdict. But he implored the nation not to lose faith in its system of criminal justice.
I hadn’t wanted to speak. I didn’t know if I could get the words our of my throat. I managed to say something about my sorrow for the families: “Their strength and dignity have been a source of inspiration.” It was a poor expression of my feelings. I hadn’t prepared more.
Chris was at the mike now. I heard him say, “I’m not bitter… .I’m not angry. I am honored to have—”
Then he choked and slumped forward. Several of us reached for him to keep him from falling. I put my hand on Chris’s back and followed him through the thrashing strobes into the anteroom next to Gil’s office.
“Anything I can do?” I asked him.
“I want to go to my office” was all he said.
As I watched him disappear down the hall, I stood for what seemed like an hour. I’m sure it was only minutes. And gradually, it dawned on me. “
I’m still here
.”
Like someone walking out of the wreckage of a 747, I looked around and saw that I’d fallen 30,000 feet and my legs weren’t broken. I wanted everyone to witness the fact of my survival. I wanted the law clerks, the brass, the TV crews, the black gals out in that Chicago women’s shelter who’d cheered Simpson’s acquittal, the jurors who were planning to attend O. J. Simpson’s victory party in a few hours… I wanted them all to see me now. Bloody, dazed, and reeling. But upright. I wanted them to see that I’d stood for something. I wanted them to see that I’d put myself through hell for the right thing.
I had to believe that suffering was part of something bigger. Justice, like the will of God, doesn’t always manifest itself on the spur of the moment. It doesn’t always come when you think it should. You just gotta wait it out.
And when it comes, I’ll still be standing. Without a doubt.
P
ostscript
After the verdict I slipped into a malaise. I told myself that this was only post-trial letdown, the kind you always feel after a verdict comes in—even when it’s favorable. It takes a while to wean yourself off the adrenaline. But this was different.
For quite a while, five months at least, I couldn’t shake the sense of dislocation. And guilt. I felt such guilt. I felt like I’d let everyone down. The Goldmans. The Browns. My team. The country. The fog didn’t begin to lift until the spring of 1996, when I finally sat down to write.
Let me be perfectly frank with you. I am not a memoirist by nature. Left to my own inclinations, I might never have done this book. In a perfect world I would have slipped quietly out of the spotlight and tried to get some semblance of my old life back. But my old life was gone.
I could have continued being a D.A. But I knew what would happen. I wouldn’t be able to try cases for a long, long time. Either the defense would try to get me removed, for fear the jury would be biased in my favor—or my own office would be afraid to deploy me, because a jury might be biased against me. As I saw it, the Simpson trial had ruined me as a prosecutor.
That caused me more pain than I can tell you. For fourteen years so much of my image of myself had rested upon being a deputy D.A., an advocate of the People, that leaving the office felt like amputating a limb. But I knew there was no place for me there any longer and I had to move on.
Throughout the trial, I would wake up at three in the morning with night sweats, worrying over how I would support two small sons. What kind of work could I get that would allow me to raise and educate them, that would also allow me to spend time with them? I don’t mean “quality time.” I wanted to be—please don’t laugh—a soccer mom. In short, I wanted to do all those things that working mothers manage only with the greatest difficulty.
This book came to my rescue. When I received my contract—bearing a figure I could never have imagined in my wildest dreams—I breathed a sigh of relief, knowing that I could both support my family and do my writing at home.
But this book has done even more than give me financial peace of mind. It’s given me an opportunity to set the record straight.
Since the verdict, I feel that my actual accomplishments—and those of my team—have been obscured by revisionism, some of it simpleminded, much of it downright vicious. I have found myself accused of being too arrogant and too meek; of being too flirtatious and too butch; of cozying up to Mark Fuhrman and of distancing myself from Mark Fuhrman; of protecting the LAPD and not being loyal enough to the LAPD; of being too attentive to detail and too inattentive to detail; of being too passionate and too listless; of being too high-minded and too underhanded. There has been no coherent theme to this criticism, which serves to underscore one point: when a verdict assumes the proportions of a national crisis, someone has to take the fall.
I know that to the vast majority of Americans, that verdict came as a gut shot. I’ve seen photos of the faces of people watching television as it was read back. I’m talking about the look of dumb shock caught on the face of Americans in bars and beauty salons and living rooms all over the country. They
knew
he was guilty. We all did. How could something like this happen in a country where every sixty-minute weekly courtroom drama has conditioned us to expect—in the face of overwhelming evidence of guilt—a triumph of justice?
Was the prosecution perfect? Of course not. No prosecution is perfect. If prosecutions had to be mistake-free, no defendant with a semiconscious lawyer would ever go to jail. But this truth seems to have been lost on the pop chroniclers who, during the months since the criminal verdict, have rewritten history. To a man, they’ve taken the easy road, pinning the blame for the verdict on me and my colleagues rather than explaining to their readers some very complex and brutal realities. The People lost this case not because we introduced too much evidence or too little evidence. We lost because American justice is distorted by race. We lost because American justice is corrupted by celebrity. Any lawyer willing to exploit those weaknesses can convince a jury predisposed to acquittal of just about anything. In the case of
People v. Orenthal James Simpson
, a handful of clever, expensive attorneys were allowed to manipulate the system by invoking the wholly irrelevant, yet provocative issue of racism.