August 29, 1995, was the worst day I ever spent in a court of law. That was the date the Fuhrman tapes were played. I sat mortified as those ugly words washed through the courtroom like a tide of sewage.
“Nigger.” God, I despise that word. Every time we heard Fuhrman utter it I felt more and more degraded. Seeing those smug, self-congratulatory expressions at the defense table made it all the worse.
I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. I felt as though I’d had weights attached to my hands and feet. I looked over at Chris and realized that he was in even more misery than I. I just closed my eyes and prayed for the strength to get through this.
This trial is over, I thought. We’ll never recover.
But as Fuhrman’s clipped, arrogant cadences faded, I felt my back stiffen almost involuntarily with a surge of resolve. Get off the damned floor, Clark!
Behind me sat the families of two people murdered by the real defendant in this case. His guilt-that’s what we were here to prove.
Yes, Mark Fuhrman had spoken like a racist. But the issue at hand was whether he had planted evidence. He had not.
The defense had proved that Fuhrman was scum-but I could prove that their client was a murderer. Fuhrman could not be allowed to overwhelm Simpson. These two horrible deaths could not go unpunished.
“I am Marcia Clark, the prosecutor,” I reminded the court. “And I stand before you today not in defense of Mark Fuhrman but in defense of a case. A case of such overwhelming magnitude in terms of… the proof of the defendant’s guilt that it would be [a] travesty to allow such a case to be derailed.”
As I spoke, I felt detached from the world around me. It was like I’d entered some outside-the-body zone where the only thing I could do was to repeat a silent prayer: Don’t do it, Lance. Don’t let the jury hear this.
“The point that I make [is] that this is a murder trial,” I continued. “A murder trial where none of this is relevant. This is not the forum. This is not the forum.”
I told the court about a political cartoon I’d seen several days before. It showed a child watching television-the Simpson trial.
“What’s the forbidden N-word, Mommy?” asked the little girl.
The mother answered, “Nicole.”
The following day, Ito handed down his ruling. It was a victory, I guess. Though he would allow the defense to bring out the number of times Fuhrman said the N-word, he allowed only two brief, relatively innocuous excerpts of Mark actually saying it. Using more, he ruled, would be “overwhelmingly outweighed by the danger of undue prejudice.”
This news seemed to leave the defense team in shock. Johnnie hastily called a press conference. With his colleagues on the defense team, he marched outside to the massed media, faced the cameras, and gave his personal verdict on Lance Ito and the system in general. “This inexplicable, indefensible ruling lends credence to all those who say the criminal-justice system is corrupt,” he charged. “The cover-up continues.”
For weeks now, my own relationship with Johnnie had been icy. His disregard for fairness-his flouting of the law itself-had disgusted me. I guess he knew that, but his mind was focused elsewhere. He still approached the trial with his typical intense energy, but there was no more banter, no willingness to step back and acknowledge the humanity of all those in the courtroom. Now he was carried away with righteous fury. I could almost see the smoke coming out of his ears.
Now, after his shocking press conference, I was less angry than disappointed. Johnnie was once a respected lawyer. Now he was a wild man. Going on national television to call a judge corrupt? That should be grounds for a report to the state bar and a contempt citation. What appalled me even more was how irresponsible and self-centered his actions were. Johnnie’s comments seemed deliberately aimed at inciting a goddamned riot. You don’t need to do that, Johnnie, I told myself. You’re already winning.
Three whole days passed before Ito responded to the press conference. And even then, he might have ignored it, had Johnnie not forced the issue by resisting an innocuous request from the bench.
“I resent that tone,” Johnnie replied petulantly. “I am a man just like you are, Your Honor. I resent that tone…”
The last vestiges of decorum in this courtroom had vanished. I’d hoped that this direct challenge, along with Johnnie’s disrespectful public remarks, would force Ito into taking action. No judge worthy of his robes would allow Johnnie’s behavior to go unpunished.
Ito ordered us into chambers.
“I have chosen up to this point to ignore your press conference last Thursday and what I consider to be in direct contempt of this court…” he said. “And I want you to know that I have chosen to ignore it thus far and this is because of our long relationship and what I hope will be our continuing friendship.”
The penalty? A few of Ito’s “deep breaths.”
I stared in disbelief. What could he be thinking? Johnnie was not his friend. Never was and never would be. You’ve been his patsy through this whole case, Lance-and he’s made a fool of you.
Now that the defense had Fuhrman on the ropes, they went for the final knockout, demanding his reappearance in court. But not before calling Kathleen Bell and a string of other witnesses to attest that Fuhrman had spouted racist remarks in their presence.
Our plan? Dispatch these witnesses with the briefest of questioning. Why bother to impeach these people, with their vague stories of Fuhrman in a marine recruiting office years ago? After the tapes, it was all spilt milk. The one exception to our hurry-up-and-get-‘em-out strategy came the day Laura Hart McKinny testified. Chris could not contain himself and went after her with a misplaced vengeance.
Fuhrman’s appearance, however, could not be glossed over. Ito had ruled, as we had asked, that he would be called to testify out of the jury’s presence. The prospect of Mark’s reemergence was generating even more hype than his celebrated cross by Bailey.
By now, we were no longer speaking to him. We remained in suspense until nearly the last minute-would he invoke the Fifth Amendment? I had mixed feelings about this. Part of me wanted him to speak out to admit he’d lied about the racial slurs, and to reassert the truth that he’d never planted evidence.
The other part of me just wanted him out of my life.
Legally speaking, I didn’t think he had to invoke the right against self-incrimination. For Fuhrman to be convicted of perjury, the lie had to be material to the case-and, as I had argued until my voice ran out, all this garbage was utterly immaterial to the matter involving two people murdered in cold blood on Bundy Drive. Still, any lawyer worth his retainer would have advised Fuhrman not to talk, because anything he did say could be used against him if charges were brought. (Eventually, of course, the state attorney general would bring perjury charges, and Mark would plead “No contest.”)
For us, however, his taking the Fifth would be a disaster. When you take the Fifth, you can’t answer any questions. If you do, you’ve waived your right against self-incrimination. So if you invoke it once, you have to keep invoking it. If he didn’t answer questions about his testimony concerning racial epithets, Fuhrman could no longer affirm that the rest of what he’d said under oath was still accurate.
As much as I dreaded Fuhrman’s appearance, I knew that Chris dreaded it more. He’d despised Mark from the start, and their hatred for each other had only gotten more personal.
“I don’t want to be in the same room with the motherfucker,” he told me when I asked if he was coming to the hearing.