“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.