LOS ANGELES, SEPT. 27 -- O.J. Simpson's lawyer said in his closing argument today that Los
Angeles police engaged in a "rush to judgment" to implicate the former
football star and the District Attorney's Office then adopted a
"win-at-all-costs" strategy to convict a wrongfully accused man.
If "bungling, incompetent" police investigators had done their job
properly, Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. said, Simpson would have been
eliminated early on as a suspect in the slayings of his former wife and
her friend.
Cochran began his summation to the jury this afternoon, after
Deputy District Attorney Christopher Darden had completed the
prosecution's closing argument with an intimate, and at times moving,
portrayal of Simpson's stormy 17-year relationship with Nicole Brown
Simpson.
Cochran contended that from the time detectives first arrived on the
crime scene through the preparation of the state's case against O.J.
Simpson, the authorities were more concerned with their own images and
the publicity surrounding the case than they were discovering the truth.
"A search for the truth is their job. It's not just to convict,"
Cochran said. But, he said, police detectives and a prosecution team
driven by an "obsession to win" committed "sloppy errors and a coverup
trying to achieve {O.J. Simpson's} conviction.
Cochran also wove an intricate tapestry of allegations -- as yet
unsupported by evidence -- of a massive police conspiracy and coverup in
which detectives took a sample of blood obtained from Simpson after the
murders and used it to plant incriminating stains on socks in his
bedroom, drops in the driveway and foyer of his house and smears on the
console of his white Ford Bronco.
At the center of the conspiracy, the lawyer said, was
then-Detective Mark Fuhrman, "a lying, perjuring, genocidal" officer who
went to Simpson's home in 1985 on a domestic abuse complaint and was
indelibly repelled then by Simpson's interracial marriage.
Referring to Fuhrman's involvement in the murder investigation
hours after the killings, Cochran said, "He knew what he was going to do
that night. . . . You can't trust this evidence. You can't trust the
messenger. You can't trust the message." Cochran accused Fuhrman of
planting a bloody glove at Simpson's mansion.
Cochran said defense witnesses had punctured the "tortured window
of opportunity" of about an hour and 20 minutes that the prosecution
claimed Simpson had to drive the nearly two miles from his house to
Nicole Brown Simpson's town house condominium, kill his ex-wife and
Ronald L. Goldman, return home, change out of his bloody clothes and
appear in his driveway to get a limousine to the airport.
A parade of "responsible citizen witnesses," Cochran said,
testified that there were no signs of a double murder at Nicole
Simpson's South Bundy Drive town house until at least 10:35 p.m. on June
12, 1994, despite the prosecution's claim that the murders probably
occurred about 10:15 p.m.
If a struggle between the "killer or killers" and the victims took
15 minutes, Cochran said, then Simpson could not possibly have committed
the murders and returned home in time to have caused the loud thumping
noise his house guest Brian "Kato" Kaelin testified he heard about 10:45
p.m.
"You're never, ever going to be able to reconcile this time line,"
Cochran said. Echoing Simpson's speech in court last week, he said
Simpson "could not, would not and did not commit these crimes."
Cochran recalled the prosecution's ill-fated attempt to have
Simpson slip on leather gloves allegedly used in the killings as the
"defining moment" of the nearly nine-month trial. Borrowing a phrase
used by prominent Wyoming defense lawyer and legal commentator Gerry
Spence, Cochran said, "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit."
Later, Cochran repeated the same phrase when he pulled out a blue
knit ski cap similar to one that prosecutors say was used by Simpson as
a disguise the night of the killings and was found at the crime scene.
Calling the prosecution's claim "ridiculous," Cochran put the cap on his
head and asked the jurors, "Who am I? I'm still Johnnie Cochran with a
knit cap. O.J. Simpson in a knit cap is still O.J. Simpson. It makes no
sense. . . . If it doesn't fit, you must acquit."
In the prosecution's opening day of summation Tuesday, lead
prosecutor Marcia Clark outlined the evidence against Simpson as well as
a scenario of how the murders occurred. Today Darden traced a history of
domestic violence in the Simpson household that spanned more than a
dozen years and which brought police to the couple's homes at least
eight times before a highly publicized incident in 1989 in which Nicole
Simpson was beaten so severely that her then-husband pleaded no contest
to a charge of spousal abuse. He described Simpson's part in that
relationship to a "time bomb ticking away."
"It is an unusual relationship. There's something wrong here. The
fuse is burning, folks, and it's getting shorter and shorter and
shorter," Darden said.
Darden asked the jurors to imagine Simpson, "full of anger, full of
rage, full of jealousy," driving in his white Ford Bronco to his
ex-wife's home, parking the car, getting out and approaching the house
while his children slept in their bedrooms.
"We are not talking about June 12, 1994. We're talking about Oct.
25, 1993," Darden said, as he signaled an aide to begin playing a
tape-recorded emergency call Nicole Simpson made to a 911 operator on
that date. In the tape, a terrified Nicole Simpson pleads for help while
in the background Simpson's baritone voice booms out threats and verbal
abuse.
Darden then described the couple's failed attempts at
reconciliation, Simpson's reported outbursts of jealous rage and the
obsessive stalking that Nicole Simpson recounted to her friends. "The
fuse is burning, and it's getting shorter. He's angry and he's upset and
he's been rejected, and he doesn't like that rejection," the prosecutor
said. "He's trying to get over her, but he can't."
Darden then recalled how Simpson turned to a new girlfriend, Paula
Barbieri, who also rejected him when he refused to allow her to attend a
dance recital at his daughter's school the night of the murders,
according to testimony.
"The fuse is getting shorter. There's going to be an explosion,"
the prosecutor said as he described how Simpson must have raged with
anger as he drove around fashionable Brentwood unsuccessfully trying to
call Barbieri, who had gone to Las Vegas, on his cellular telephone
shortly before the slayings.
"Paula Barbieri probably could have stopped this whole thing that
night . . . but she wasn't there," Darden said.
Then, he said, "the rage, the anger, the hate he has blows out
through the knife. . . . With each thrust of that knife there's a
release, a small release, until the rage is gone."
With enlarged color portraits of the two victims, both smiling,
resting on an easel in front of the jury, Darden glanced at Simpson
sitting at the defense table and said: "He's a murderer. He's also a
hell of a football player, but he's still a murderer." Simpson, his face
grimacing, turned away from the prosecutor and the jury and stared at
the wall behind him.
Later in his summation Cochran rejected as "preposterous" Darden's
description's of Simpson's alleged jealous rage on June 12, presenting a
videotape and a still photograph of a smiling Simpson's at his daughter
Sydney's recital. "Where's the murderous rage? Where's the fuse now, Mr.
Darden? Where's the fuse?"
"Thank God for videotapes. . . . We know in this city how important
videotapes can be," Cochran said in calling the predominantly black
jury's attention to videotapes of black motorist Rodney G. King's
beating at the hands of white Los Angeles police in 1992.
In one of the prosecution's most effective presentations, Darden
recalled Cochran's opening statement promises nearly nine months ago to
present a parade of witnesses who claimed to have walked by Nicole
Simpson's house the night of the slayings and seen suspicious-looking
Hispanic men wearing knit ski caps or Nicole Simpson embracing an
unidentified man as a shadowy figure watched in anger from nearby.
Darden invited the jury to wonder why they had never appeared on
the witness stand. He also asked the jurors to wonder why, if they all
were walking by Nicole Simpson's town house about the same time, they
did not notice one another, according to their statements to the police.
Assailing Simpson's case as a "shotgun defense," Darden said, "Smoke
and mirrors, that's it. That's what you got."
