Lance cut me off. “Miss Clark, earlier today I cautioned you about personal attacks.” I began to apologize but he stepped on me again. “Sanction is two hundred and fifty dollars. Don’t leave court without writing a check.”
Thanks, Lance.
At the end of the day, he ruled that the defense could put Rieders on first, and they could do it on Monday, July 24. This gave me only three or four days to prepare an incredibly complicated cross. With the witness order inverted, the defense would use Rieders to distort the test results before Martz, an honest and knowledgeable witness, could explain what they meant. Instead, I’d be forced to try and extract simple explanations of scientific evidence from a hostile witness bent on confusion and distortion. At the same time, I’d need to use my now bulging dossier on Rieders’s professional history to impeach both his ethics and his expertise.
This task would have been daunting if I’d had three months to prepare, but three days? Even as Ito admitted the situation was unfair, he wouldn’t budge. His rationale: “Professional attorneys are paid to work twenty-four hours day when they’re in trial.”
Which rules out, I guess, single parents, people with sick relatives, or human beings who simply require sleep.
On July 24, Dr. Fredric Rieders took the witness stand. After putting in a very long weekend, I was ready for him.
Rieders was a portly man with wisps of long, wild hair swirling about his head. His thick Austrian accent made him difficult to understand and he had a gruff, abrasive demeanor that turned condescending when he explained technical terms to the jury. With any other jury, I would have leaned back and let him hang himself. But not this one. He was going to give them the excuse they needed to dismiss key blood evidence. I had to hang tough. During his direct testimony, which was every bit as convoluted and misleading as I’d expected, I took careful notes.
When it came time for cross, I promptly introduced a copy of a study conducted by the EPA. It showed that the levels of EDTA found in the environment at large were consistent with those measured on the rear gate and the sock. Further, I noted that these levels were also consistent with the unpreserved blood from Agent Martz’s own body. Didn’t this, I asked the witness, show that the levels in the untreated evidence were meaningless?
Rieders resisted, calling the EPA study “either a typo or a complete absurdity.”
“But isn’t it true, Doctor, that [Martz’s] unpreserved blood came out very similarly in result to bloodstains found on the gate and the sock? Isn’t that true, Doctor?”
“Surprisingly, yes,” was his answer.
“Yes,” I repeated with exaggerated emphasis.
Ito demanded a sidebar. “Miss Clark… I know you’re enjoying yourself,” he began. “But I’m warning you in no uncertain terms, if I see any more of that commentary, there’s going to be severe sanctions. And I underline the word ‘severe.’ “
I couldn’t believe it. Barry Scheck could stand up there and sneer, “Where isss itttttt, Misterrr Fung?” and Ito would shine it on. I emphasize one word for effect and get dragged to sidebar.
I returned to Rieders.
“Doctor,” I asked him, “how do you account for the readings that came up from Agent Martz’s blood?”
“I don’t have to account for it,” he sniffed. “I think he would have to account for it because it’s absurd to find that much EDTA in normal blood.”
Great. You dismiss our tests as “absurd.” Not that you have any evidence to the contrary. In fact, you haven’t done one single test or your own. What a despicable sham. They claimed the blood was planted-that was their whole defense against all our evidence-and yet they don’t even perform one test? How could it be more obvious that their claims were fiction?
All that remained, at this point, was to impeach Rieders’s competence as a toxicologist-and we believed we had the goods to do it.
Brian Kelberg would present to the court certain details about Rieders’s role in a 1985 murder case-a Ventura County man who had allegedly been killed by a fellow named Sconce, one of his competitors in the funeral business. It was suspected that the victim had been poisoned with oleander. Rieders did the original postmortem tests and later appeared in court to say that while he could not be 100 percent certain, he felt that his tests showed, to “a high degree of scientific certainty,” the presence of oleander. That testimony led to Sconce’s indictment.
But Rieders, as Kelberg would argue, had done only rudimentary tests. Really definitive results would have required a pricey instrument he didn’t have. When this weakness was discovered, the district attorney joined the defense and ordered the more sophisticated testing. The results? No oleander. (Rieders argued that the differences between his results and those of the toxicologist who double-checked him is that the latter used a different set of tissue samples, which could have deteriorated with the passage of time.)
That explanation notwithstanding, charges against Sconce were dropped.
The Simpson jury had to hear this.
At the mention of Sconce, Rieders began to fidget and waved his hands at me dismissively. When a witness behaves this way, it is the judge’s role to force him to respond to the question. Not only did Ito refuse to do this, but he began to interrupt my questions, urging me to move to another topic.
“This is the Simpson case, Ms. Clark. How about getting back to it?”
I couldn’t believe it. We’d had to argue the admissibility of the Sconce case at some length before Rieders took the stand. Ito knew perfectly well that this was important impeachment testimony. What was he doing?
I pressed on, determined to show the jury that the witness’s interpretation was unreasonable and far-fetched. But after a few more questions, Ito barked, “This inquiry. It is completely irrelevant at this point. Move on to something else.”
In that instant this judge had told the jury to disregard a significant point of impeachment and rebuked me as if I were some wayward schoolgirl. I was ready to lock horns with Lance, to keep pursuing Rieders, but Ito’s inevitable response would damage my cross even further. I had no choice but to accede.
I could only hope that the jury had troubled to get clear of all the scientific mumbo jumbo to see the truth-which is what Martz himself presented when he took the stand next. The blood on the defendant’s sock, Nicole’s blood, did not come from a test tube containing EDTA. The blood on the rear gate, Simpson’s blood, did not come from a test tube containing EDTA. Which is to say, in each case the blood came straight from the source.
It should have been a clean win for us-a definitive rebuttal to the defense’s lunatic speculations. But I knew that the impact of Martz’s testimony was diluted by the circus put on by Rieders and the defense. Any other jury would have seen through it. But by now we had a pretty good idea that this jury liked a circus.
The defense’s next witness was Dr. Herbert MacDonell, an expert witness in blood-spatter interpretation. He was the man who would supposedly buttress Johnnie’s claims that if Simpson had committed these murders, he would certainly have been drenched in blood. Ironically, MacDonell himself had offered an answer to that question. In a paper entitled “Absence of Evidence Is Not Evidence of Absence,” he’d demonstrated how a perpetrator could leave a bloody crime scene without very much blood on him. I couldn’t wait to have him discuss it.
We had collected a whole binder of materials to impeach MacDonell’s testimony with his own writings. But the defense must have seen this coming. To keep us from getting that paper into evidence, they narrowed MacDonell’s testimony to a single piece of evidence: the socks found at the foot of Simpson’s bed.