“Who do you think you are?” she screeched. “Gordon-fucking-Liddy?”
Cheri quickly found a dentist who’d see me right away. Then she and Scott bundled me into her car and drove me to West Hollywood. The dentist and an anesthesiologist were waiting for us. The dentist, a very sweet young guy in his thirties, looked at me and deadpanned, “Don’t you know you can’t perform surgery without a license, Ms. Clark?”
“I can’t be knocked out,” I told him. “I’ve got to go back to work.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he reassured me. “You’ll just feel good.”
Last thing I remember as I slipped under the anesthetic was the ridiculous image of Johnnie pulling O. J. Simpson’s knit cap down over his ears. I heard myself chuckle. But the laughter got fainter and fainter as I tumbled down a tunnel of darkness.
I was under for less than an hour. When I awoke, the pain was gone. Draining the abscess, the dentist explained, had relieved the pressure on the nerves. All I felt was a little tenderness. He gave me a painkiller. But I didn’t even need it.
It was close to ten P.M. when we got back to the CCB. Given what I’d just gone through, I felt amazingly clearheaded. Forty-five minutes under anesthesia, as it turned out, had given me a much-needed rest. Dr. Magic was right. I did feel good. I had shut myself in my office, hoping to work quietly for a few hours, when Chris blew in.
“They’re getting nothing done in there,” he said, motioning to the conference room. “They need Mama.”
I found the troops in disarray. Marching to the front of the room, I began to hand out assignments to deputies, to law clerks, to everyone. My minions scurried off to the transcripts, looking for ammo to return fire.
Until then, I’d intended to do the rebuttal by myself. But Johnnie had changed that. “If you can’t trust the messengers, watch out for their message,” he’d said. He’d insinuated that Chris and I were both, at best, overzealous; at worst, dishonest. We were both part of a nefarious conspiracy that now seemed to involve all county employees right down to the steno pool. Chris and I both had to put in an appearance to defend our honor.
This caught Chris unawares. Not only did he have to compile the legal materials, but he had to prepare himself psychologically. He had done a first-rate job on his summation, but asking him to go another round on a moment’s notice was expecting an awful lot. I called him into my office.
“If you don’t think you can do this,” I told him, “I’ll understand. I’ll never hold it against you.”
He smiled, as he did so rarely.
“I’m in.”
Chris pulled together an ad hoc team consisting of his law clerk, Melissa Decker; Scott; Cheri; David Wooden; and Gavin de Becker. The five of them holed up in a hotel room to work on his rebuttal.
Hank, Woody, Rock, and I convened in my office. My vigilant team kept refilling my coffee mug to keep me awake until we had a draft we could live with. Hank left at two A.M. Woody left at 2:30. Rock left at three. I left at 3:30.
As I went to shut down my computer for the night, something flashed on the main menu. My law clerks had posted a message on the screen. It read, “We Love You, Boss.”
You save your good stuff for last. And on the morning of Friday, September 29, Christopher Darden gave them the best he had. Chris and I had decided that we might actually use Johnnie’s plea for nullification to our advantage; spin it around to remind the jury what this trial was not about. So he hit the issue head-on.
“You can’t send a message to Fuhrman,” he told the jury. “You can’t send a message to the LAPD. You can’t eradicate racism within the LAPD or the L.A. community or within the nation as a whole by delivering a verdict of ‘not guilty.’ In a case like this, the evidence is there. You just have to find your way through the smoke.”
His message was so eloquent, he should have reached them.
But my heart sank when I saw what was happening-or not happening-in that jury box. The jurors were shifting in their seats, turning their heads, tapping their feet. And this was really scary: Juror Number 98, a fifty-three-year-old postal clerk, one of the three black women who later went on to write a book about the case, was giving Chris a hateful stare. She was sighing and tapping her feet-as if to say, “Shut up and siddown.”
And then it was my turn. I would like to say that my mind was clear and my attention sharp. But the truth, tens of millions of Americans might have noticed, was otherwise. I was struggling to maintain my focus. One commentator later described my demeanor as “subdued.” I would have described it as simply worn out.
But as I rose to address the twelve, I drew on the last of my depleted reserves to bring this thing to an honorable finish. I had to make each word count. I had a feeling, even then, that this would be the last argument I would ever make in a court of law.
I spoke from my heart.
“I’ve been doing this a lot of years,” I told the jurors quietly. “I started on that side of counsel table,” I said, gesturing to the defense. “I know what the ethical obligations are of a prosecutor… I took a cut in pay to join this office because I believe in this job. I believe in doing it fairly and doing it right. And I like the luxury of being a prosecutor because I have the luxury on any case of going to the judge and saying… ‘Your Honor, dismiss it’… I will never ask for a conviction unless… the law says I must, unless [the defendant] is proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt on credible evidence that you can trust… I can never do it otherwise. That is my obligation.”
“Improper!” Barry Scheck barked.
Now, a prosecutor is not normally allowed to tell a jury about the ethical obligations of his office and how superior he is to those scoundrels on the defense side. That’s called “personal vouching,” and it’s strictly disallowed. The exception is when the defense has called a prosecutor’s integrity into question. Then all bets are off.
Lance knew this. I believe that by this time he was fed up to the gills with the Dream Team. And so he did what he should have done months before. He took control of the courtroom.
“Overruled.” He cut Scheck down with a word. For the next two hours that I would speak, the defense would object over fifty times, trying to break my stride. But Lance Ito ran interference for me, overruling them again and again and again.
Before me I had a green binder, three inches thick with misstatements or inconsistencies in the defense’s closing arguments. Most of them had to do with claims of evidence having been “contaminated” or “planted.” One of the most amazing things to me was that after all the hours spent ragging Dennis Fung and Andrea Mazzola for their sloppiness in the field, Barry Scheck backed off this line during closing argument. He and the defense had now retreated to the position that the so-called contamination had occurred at the hands of Collin Yamauchi in the Evidence Processing Room of the LAPD.
Once again I reminded this jury what a bogus issue this whole business of contamination really was. As Gary Sims had observed, “DNA cannot fly.” Nothing in this case could account for the wholly consistent blood results except Simpson’s guilt.
It has really bugged me since the trial to hear the pundits say that I didn’t spend enough of my closing on debunking the notion of a police conspiracy. This is absolutely untrue. I brought it up over and over and over again. I brought it up, in fact, every time I attacked the premise of “planted” evidence. In fact I brought it up over fifty-three times.
I wanted this jury to see the lengths to which the defense would go to sell their package of contorted and contradictory “planting” theories. There was no more telling example of this, in my estimation, than their attempts to account for the presence of Ronald Goldman’s blood on the console of Simpson’s Bronco. Of all the blood evidence against O. J. Simpson, this was probably the most damning. There was simply no explanation for it, other than the obvious: when Simpson got into the Bronco after the murders, he dropped his right glove on the console beside him.