2 different hws. one is 8 sentences the other is 500 words

OJ Simpson Case Professor Lecture

PSC393 spring

Professor James Mulvaney

The bodies of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were discovered late June 12, 1994 outside of her townhouse in the upscale Los Angeles neighborhood of Brentwood.

LA Police detectives went to the home of Ms. Simpson’s ex-husband at 4:30 AM June 13, ostensibly to inform him of the murder and inquire about placement of his children who were inside the townhouse. Simpson’s mansion on Rockingham Drive was about 10 minutes drive from her townhouse.

The bell at Rockingham went unanswered and detectives invoked “exigent circumstances” to climb over the gate without a warrant, claiming they feared that who ever killed Denise Brown Simpson might also go after her ex-husband. Simpson wasn’t home. The detectives testified they spotted what seemed to be blood on Simpson’s vehicle. The defense questioned the claim, specifically asking why police in search for a possible killer would not have donned bulletproof vests or called for back up. Several hours later police obtained a warrant to do a full search of the premises and vehicles.

Simpson was not at home when police arrived, having left several hours earlier in a limo to LAX airport to catch a flight to Chicago for a longstanding business appointment with executives from Hertz where he worked as a celebrity spokesman.

At noon Simpson arrived back in California and, accompanied by a lawyer, was questioned by detectives. He denied being involved in the attack. Police noticed a cut on Simpson’s hand they would later allege came from the knife attack. Simpson said it was from a glass broken after hearing about the killing.

On June 17 prosecutors charged Simpson with two counts of murder. Simpson failed to surrender to police as promised, leading to a 60-mile long slow-speed police pursuit of his white Bronco south on the Five Freeway toward Mexico, reversing after failing to lose the tail of dozens of police cars and news helicopters. It end back in the driveway of his home. He had written a suicide note and was carrying a pistol. His driver was an old friend and former NFL player Al Cowlings.

It was an unprecedented news event with an estimated 95 million people watching at least some of the live chase broadcast carried on cable news and split screened on some network shows including on the broadcast of Game 5 of the NBA finals pitting the NY Knicks against the Houston Rockets.

I was National Correspondent for Newsday and had flown from New York to Los Angeles the morning of June 13 after hearing of Ms. Simpson’s murder. I went straight from the airport to the crime scene, then on to Simpson’s mansion and a press conference at the Parker Center (the name of the old LA Police Headquarters). I watched the start of the chase in a television van in front of police headquarters and walked back to my hotel to start writing a story. Newsday’s presses were scheduled to run at 11PM EDT, meaning my story had to be sent to New York before 10:30, 7:30 PDT. I had purchased a police “scanner” radio from a Radio Shack and procured a list of the LAPD 10-codes from a colleague at the LA Times. Luck was on my side. Because the Knicks game had gone into overtime, the publisher decided to hold the presses until the end of the game, an expensive decision rarely made for a mere news story. Back then, the Knicks were big.

I watched the chase on television and prepared four versions: Story one: OJ still at large; story two, OJ shot and killed by LAPD; story three: OJ Simpson injured as police took him into custody; version four, OJ Simpson surrenders to LAPD and is charged with two counts of murder.

The chase ended moments before 8PM local time when Cowlings drove Simpson into the Rockingham compound. Less than two minutes later I hit the “send” button on my computer shipping “version four” to Newsday’s New York office (n.b. I didn’t dare send all four versions earlier for fear that a gremlin would send the wrong version to the pressroom and I would be a nationally known dope.)

Here is the start of the story that appeared in Newsday the next morning (see pdf):

Los Angeles - O.J. Simpson surrendered to police last night, ending a dash for freedom and an apparent flirtation with suicide. Seven and a half hours earlier, leaving a letter saying "I can't go on," Simpson fled police who were on their way to arrest him on charges of murdering his ex-wife and a friend. He led them on a surreal freeway motorcade that ended back at his Brentwood home, alone in a car in his own driveway, holding a gun, while police negotiators shouted from his doorway.

It wasn't clear why he gave up when he did, but police said he dropped his handgun, picked up two picture frames and walked out of a friend's Bronco. "Code four, code four," cops screamed, indicating the siege was over.

The story did not appear in the bulk of Saturday’s editions of New York Times or Daily News because they hadn’t held the presses for basketball. It was a big story. I didn’t realize how big at the time. I had covered big stories before: Five years earlier I had been in Tiananmen Square watching authorities slaughter some 10,000 students; in 1984 I flew to Gander, Newfoundland to report on the death of 246 U.S. soldiers in an airplane crash; in 1986 I covered the fall of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, in 1989 I flew on Air Force One to Japan to cover the funeral of Emperor Hirohito. While those stories may have been more important, Simpson marked a monumental change in society, the media and law enforcement.

Thousands of people had lined the streets and freeway overpasses to get a first hand view of the Bronco chase. An estimated 95 million people watched some or the entire chase on television, making it the second biggest audience for a breaking news story (surpassed only by the start of the First Gulf War). The story was so big that on that Friday evening, Domino’s Pizza recorded its biggest-ever sales across the country as viewers called takeout glued to their screens.

That was just the beginning.

The arrest and booking dragged on behind closed doors into the early morning hours of Saturday. By Monday morning and the scheduled arraignment it became clear that this was an international event of unprecedented scale. A virtual forest of mobile satellite towers sprouted from a gridlock of television news vans jammed along North Spring Street outside the court.

Television cameras in courtrooms were a relatively new phenomenon. It wasn’t until 1981 that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled states could allow cameras in courtrooms. The previous year, Ted Turner launched the first 24-hour news broadcast operation, CNN.

Cable television was born in the 1950s in rural America, filling a void for places too remote for reliable television signals. As a child in Queens we had crisp pictures but limited choices: a mere seven channels. The move to cable eventually spawned one of the largest private construction projects in the nation’s history as the country was wired. The big change wasn’t until the 1970s when Federal Communications Commission deregulation allowed for widespread growth. The next big change was the 1984 Cable Communications Act, passed by Congress that allowed more companies to compete.

Another change in the landscape involved profit. Television news had traditionally been considered a public service, a requirement to get and keep an FCC broadcast license, not something that needed to show a profit. In the 1970s things changed as networks were taken over by investors groups interested in maximizing share price. Along with that was the surprising profitability of at least one experiment in a solid news program, the vaunted CBS news show 60 Minutes. A former sports guru went to ABC and repackaged news programs to make them flashier turning newsreaders into celebrities and reaping unprecedented ad revenue.

The Simpson case had all the components of a Hollywood fictional blockbuster: Nicole Brown Simpson was a ready-made damsel in distress, a California beach/bleach blonde with classic good looks and, as we learned after an autopsy, a statuesque albeit augmented figure. OJ Simpson was a household face and name. He won a Heisman Trophy playing football at University of Southern California. After his football career he had starring roles on television and movies, including the wildly popular Naked Gun films with Leslie Nielsen and as a sportscaster at CBS and the innovation called Monday Night Football.

He was a rare black celebrity who seemed to transcend race. He was so popular that his appearance as the spokesman for Hertz car rental coincided with a 50% increase in company’s profit. The white community embraced him.

It was a business trip to Chicago for Hertz that provided the backbone of Simpson’s alibi, that he couldn’t have committed the bloody murder of his ex-wife and Goldman and still gotten home in time to make the Chicago plane.

The case provide necessary content for the nascent 24-hour news industry. From the outset, CNN promised full-time coverage of every court appearance, every hearing, every “development” no matter how mundane. Over 2,000 reporters covered the case, more than 80 miles of cable was strung in the LA courthouse to allow 19 outlets to broadcast live.

The amount of coverage far surpassed even what had been called “The Crime of the Century,” the trial of Bruno Hauptman on charges of kidnapping and killing the son of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh, the 20th centuries first celebrity. Reporters came from around the globe to the small New Jersey courthouse. Footage of that trial was shown in movie theatres, radio stations had wall-to-wall coverage. (Ironically it was the Hauptman trial that led states to severely limit cameras from courts for decades)

The Simpson trial was bigger. The backdrop was storied Los Angeles, many stories featured visuals including the iconic “Hollywood” sign or the Santa Monica pier and roller coaster (as opposed to fields surrounding Flemington, N.J.) Hauptman was a non-descript iterant ex-con. The Simpson players were stars in their own right. Simpson’s defense team, the so-called “Dream Team,” featured:

· Dr. Michael Baden, the nation’s premier forensic pathologist, a graduate of City College of New York, who testified before Congress on the murders of President John Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., served as an expert on the cases of SNL star John Belushi, Yankee Manager Billy Martin and Long Beach State football star Ron Settles. He had several television series including “Autopsy” and “Dead Men Talking.”

· Dr. Henry Lee, the criminalist named the nation’s first “Pioneer of Forensic Evidence.”

· Robert Kardashian, Simpson’s golfing buddy whose appearance launched the improbable meteoric careers of his daughters.

· F. Lee Bailey, previously one of the countries best-known defense attorneys who successfully defended Doctor Sam Shepard before the US Supreme Court in another so-called crime of the century.

· Barry Sheck and Peter Neufeld, New York lawyers whose groundbreaking work on DNA led them to create the “Innocence Project” that has overturned more than 350 murder convictions, including 21 people who were on death row.

· Alan Dershowitz the Harvard Law professor whose clients include Mike Tyson, Anatoly Sharansky and President Donald Trump.

· Johnnie Cochrane, one of California’s most famous trial lawyers who had a history of winning multi-million judgments in civil trials alleging the LAPD excessive force driven by race. His criminal court clients include rappers Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dog, football’s Jim Brown and former Black Panther leader Geronimo Pratt who Cochrane freed from prison after he had served 27 years for a murder he didn’t commit.

The Prosecution Case

The case presented by the office of the Los Angeles County District Attorney Gil Garcetti, by assistants Marcia Clarke, a seasoned pro with a great track record who was supposed to provide the female touch to remind the jury of the dead Mrs. Simpson, and Christopher Darden, a black former law school professor assigned to speak directly to the majority black jury. There approach was simple, albeit circumstantial. The theory of the case was based on these components:

· Hair and fiber evidence found at the crime scene.

· Blood evidence at the scene matching Simpson, blood at his house matching the victims.

· A pair of bloody gloves, the right found at her house, the left found behind Simpson’s mansion later.

· History of domestic abuse of Nicole by Simpson.

Darden opened for the government calling Simpson: "a batterer, a wife beater, an abuser, a controller." On direct it seemed to be a solid case.

Defense Strategy

The defense focused on discrediting the police at every turn, claiming that Simpson was a victim of racial profiling by a department with a history of such dating back well before Rodney King.

They also highlighted the department’s ineptitude.

Instead of using a forensically clean plastic sheet to cover Nicole’s body, police draped her bloody remains with an afghan from the living room couch which the defense cited as a possible innocent explanation for finding Simpson’s hair on the body. Simpson had visited the house and sat on the couch several days before the murder. The hair evidence was disallowed.

The defense forced criminalists to admit that they had breeched protocol in collecting and storing blood samples, raising doubt about whether blood had been planted.

They accused detectives of racial bias, saying Simpson was targeted because he was black and a celebrity. In one of the most famous byplays of the trial when Detective Mark Fuhrman at first denied ever having used the “n-word” in his life. The lie was caught quickly. The defense portrayed him as a serial perjurer.

A former date testified that Furhman told her that interracial romance was “disgusting” adding he would do whatever necessary to arrest such couples.

The most famous moment came when Johnnie Cochrane asked Simpson to put on the so-called murder glove in front of the jury. It was too small.

The scene led to Cochran’s most famous line: If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.

On Oct. 3, 1995, the jury found Simpson not guilty on all counts.

Much of America was stunned, the evidence of guilt seemed so clear. In polls conducted days after the verdict, nearly two thirds of whites said they believed Simpson was guilty, 60% of blacks believed he was innocent. Many whites were astounded that many blacks applauded the verdict. In retrospect the support wasn’t for so much for Simpson himself but for attorney Johnnie Cochrane and for the jury’s statement that seemed to validate longstanding complaints regarding racial bias by police not just in Los Angeles but across the country.

The surprise verdict (contrary to the conviction in civil court several months later ) brought substantial criticism of the media coverage of the trial. Had the press been too quick to swallow police and prosecution claims, broadcasting with certainty Simpson’s unquestioned guilt? Others claimed that even formerly staid media had gotten down in the dirt and engaged in wholesale sensationalism, more interested in ratings and newspaper sales that comprehensive coverage. The venerable Time magazine was blasted for airbrushing a photo for the cover during the trial that made Simpson appear darker than he is.

Nearly every news outlet, large and small, presented prominent daily stories on the Simpson trial whether anything of interest occurred or not.

Another change was that for the first time, Americans got to watch a trial directly, free from possibly biased reporting. The impact of the OJ Simpson case required media to go into greater detail, to do more independent reporting and rely less on police spokespeople.

The case highlighted the need for the media and police to be better informed about science. Before the Simpson case, DNA testing was something of a mystery. After Sheck’s blistering cross-examinations it became clear that reporters needed to do more homework before approaching police.

Or maybe not.

I did not cover the trial itself. I left Newsday shortly after Simpson’s arrest and went to work running an investigations team for a large newspaper in California.

In the weeks I covered pre-trial news my old contacts were helpful. I had known Johnnie Cochrane for many years. We became close in 1982 when I attended a second autopsy of Ron Settles, a Long Beach State football star who died in a holding cell of a California police station after being arrested on traffic violations. The LA County corner deemed the death a suicide. Cochrane was hired to rebut the finding and on a dreary March Saturday a second autopsy was conducted by Michael Baden, then Deputy Medical Examiner in Suffolk County, NY. Also at the autopsy was then Deputy District Attorney Gil Garcetti. At the time of the Simpson case it was a mini-reunion.

Although I didn’t write about it, I knew beforehand the glove stunt was coming. The defense had secured a similar pair of gloves and stored them in plastic bags similar to the type used by police. As an aside, organic evidence should never be stored in airtight containers as they tend to shrink. For some reason, that fact wasn’t brought up at trial, the jury was left with the image of the Hall of Fame footballer unable to shove his oversized hand into the glove. Reasonable doubt.

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