The Simpson case was no exception. My county-issue accordion file had overflowed to a second, then a third.
Everyone was working hard. For several weeks before closing arguments were set to begin, the entire staff had been holding brainstorming sessions in the conference room next to Gil’s office. Hank would unroll a scroll of butcher paper on the long granite table and print on it our topics: “Contamination,” “Planting,” “DNA,” and so on. Over the course of a workday, deputies would drift in, add their two cents, then drift out again. By the end, we had over 150 entries pointing to guilt. It was too much for a summation, so we boiled it down to eight key pieces of evidence-each of which had an irrefutable connection to O. J. Simpson:
The knit cap.
Ron Goldman’s shirt.
The shoe prints up the Bundy walk.
The droplets of blood leading from Bundy.
The blood in the Bronco.
The Rockingham blood trail.
The Rockingham glove.
The socks found at the foot of Simpson’s bed.
We’d originally included the Bundy glove as well, but it had less significant blood, hair, and fibers. Ultimately, we left it out. It didn’t add to proof of guilt.
(One episode of the civil trial that gave me a chuckle was when the defense tried to suggest that the Bundy glove had been switched for a ringer. This, like so many other “stunning developments,” led to nothing, of course. But I thought to myself, “If you were going to switch a piece of evidence, why not pick one that was incriminating?”)
CAR TAPE. Our genius Judge Ito… has preplanned a trip up north for Friday and Monday the twenty-ninth and October second. And he will not cancel for anything or anyone. Instead, he prefers to be going to night sessions after dinner, arguing 7 to 9… That’s ridiculous-we argue to a jury that’s half asleep? God, you know, Ito would rather inconvenience the whole fucking world than himself for one day.
I stumbled awake on September 26, the morning of closing arguments. After splashing water in my face, I caught sight of myself in the mirror. I looked skeletal; the circles under my eyes were the color of eggplants. What’s more, I had a flaming pain in my lower right jaw. I’ve had dental problems all my life and this particular discomfort left no doubt as to its cause: an abscessed tooth. A trip to the dentist was out of the question. You do not call in sick when you are scheduled to give the closing argument in the Trial of the Century.
I almost never rehearse my arguments. Sometimes I’ll read them aloud to a friend. But I don’t memorize them. I don’t want them to sound rehearsed, or insincere. Instead, I’ll commit the main points to memory and speak from the heart. And that is what I did the morning of my summation in the trial of People v. Orenthal James Simpson.
“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,” I greeted them.
“Good morning,” they replied in unison. They were looking more cheerful than usual. I’m sure it was because they knew their ordeal was nearing an end.
Straight out of the gate I wanted to make good on my obligation to tell the jury what I thought of Mark Fuhrman. It was part of the pact I’d made with myself the day before I’d interviewed him back in March. If I didn’t believe his testimony, I would tell the jury that. And so I did.
“It would be completely understandable,” I told them, “if you were to feel angry and disgusted with Mark Fuhrman. As we all are… Did he lie when he testified here in this courtroom saying that he did not use racial epithets in the last ten years? Yes. Is he a racist? Yes. Is he the worst [the] LAPD has to offer? Yes…
“But the fact that Mark Fuhrman is a racist and lied about it on the witness stand does not mean that we haven’t proven the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Then I fulfilled the second part of the pact. I told the jury what Mark Fuhrman had done right. I showed them how impossible it would have been for him to plant evidence-which was, after all, the only thing about Mark Fuhrman that mattered to the case.
Then, for the last time, I walked that jury right through what had happened the night of June 12, 1994.
“The defendant came back from Bundy in a hurry. Ron Goldman upset his plans and things took a little longer than anticipated. He ran back behind the house, that dark, narrow south pathway-you all saw it. You were there in daytime. But imagine how dark it is at night-that dark, narrow south pathway, thinking he could get rid of the glove, the knife, in that dirt area in the back…
“But he was in a hurry. He was moving quickly down a dark narrow pathway overhung with trees, strewn with leaves, and in his haste he ran right into that air conditioner… And [that] caused him to fall against the wall, making the wall of Kato’s room shake… And it was just as simple as that. Simple common sense tells you that the thumping, the glove and the defendant’s appearance on the driveway almost immediately thereafter are all part of one set of events, all connected in time and space. You don’t need science to tell you that; you just need reason and logic.”
I produced the time line showing the clear connection between the thumps and Simpson’s appearance. Johnnie objected, claiming that there had been no testimony to establish that Park had seen Simpson just two minutes after the thumps, but he was promptly and properly overruled. The evidence had shown just that.
“Now, let me ask you this,” I continued. “Why didn’t the defendant let Allan Park drive into the driveway? Why leave him sitting out there at the gate? Why make him wait outside? Because the defendant was frazzled, ladies and gentlemen, he was hurried, and he needed to buy some time. Time to wash himself up, wash off the blood, change the clothes, and to compose himself to appear normal, to appear business as usual… But there are certain things… that tell you that it most certainly was not business as usual on the night of June twelfth after he murdered Ron and Nicole…”
There was Simpson’s forgetting to set the house alarm after Kato told him about the thumping. Simpson’s lying to Allan Park about having overslept. Simpson’s leaving blood in the bathroom and in the foyer, leaving his socks on the floor. (We had heard testimony that Simpson was a compulsively tidy man.)
It was definitely not business as usual, I told the jury, when Simpson had complained of being hot and sweaty on a cool night. Unlike the other passengers on the red-eye, he didn’t sleep, even though he’d been up at six A.M. for an early golf game. One passenger noticed he wore no socks.
I spent quite a bit of time talking about the cuts on the defendant’s left hand. Here, I told the jury, we have the defendant cutting his left hand on the very night of his wife’s stabbing. A cut on the left hand-which happened to be the hand that the killer cut. “That,” I pointed out, was “an alarming coincidence.”
If it was true that O. J. Simpson cut his hand on a broken glass in Chicago, why was there no blood on the glass? Why was there no blood in the sink?
“It shows an effort to conceal a wound that he knows will be highly incriminating. This act shows consciousness of guilt…”
I ridiculed the defense’s theory that evidence had been contaminated. Remember the compelling testimony of Dr. Robin Cotton, I urged. “When DNA degrades… it doesn’t turn into someone else’s type. You get no result.” You don’t get a set of results that all point to one suspect. Only one person in 57 billion could have left that blood at Bundy. That’s about as absolute as you can get.
“The wealth of evidence in this case is simply overwhelming,” I said, winding to a close. “If we only had the Bundy blood trail that matched the defendant, it would be enough proof to find him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. If we only had Nicole Brown’s blood on his socks, that would be enough to prove him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. If we only had Ron Goldman’s blood in his Bronco, that would be enough to prove him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt… But we have all that and much more.”