1995

by Campbell, W. Joseph

  Arenella said the elation among African Americans did not necessarily mean they believed Simpson innocent. Nor were all blacks cheering acquittal, Arenella said, adding that some of them believed Simpson guilty but were pleased that a racially mixed jury had expressed its distrust of police authority and did not embrace police misconduct.92 At least some of the cheering on October 3, 1995, was for the reprimand the jury had so sharply delivered to the Los Angeles police.

  Arenella’s nuanced interpretation finds some support in a close reading of news accounts about the verdicts. The New York Times, for example, noted in a report published the day after the verdicts that “there were more than a few black people who said yesterday that they thought Mr. Simpson was guilty, and a larger number of whites said they believed there was a reasonable doubt” in the case.93 “I think he’s guilty. I suspect a lot of black folks think that he’s guilty—know he’s guilty,” Syrie Fried told a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Fried, a former public defender who is African American, was further quoted as saying: “I always thought there would be a conviction in this case. But I could understand why a jury would acquit” Simpson.94

  The jurors, notably, were adamant that race and racial issues were not decisive to their thinking or to the verdicts they reached. Doubt shaped their verdicts, they said, not race. Indeed, some jurors bristled at suggestions that race had to have been the defining factor. “We didn’t even get to that issue,” said one of the jurors, Brenda Moran.95 Simpson, she said, “was not guilty. It was not proven. I didn’t have enough evidence to convince me he was guilty.”96 Moran also invoked the prosecution’s ill-advised request to Simpson during the trial to try on the leather gloves. “In plain English, the gloves didn’t fit,” she said.97

  Interestingly, reactions were quite subdued—and without prominent black-white division—when verdicts were announced at Simpson’s civil trial in Los Angeles in 1997. He was found responsible for the deaths of his former wife and Goldman, and ordered to pay their estates a total of $33.5 million. The civil verdicts were announced February 4, 1997, a few hours after they were reached. News of the verdicts that evening overshadowed Clinton’s State of the Union address, but they produced nothing akin to the vivid and disparate reactions to Simpson’s acquittal in 1995.98 “This time,” said a New York Times article, “almost no one erupted in ecstatic cheers or gasped in stunned dismay. This time, almost no one seemed surprised.”99

  Nor was there an outcry—or even much public interest at all—when Simpson was convicted at a criminal trial in Las Vegas in 2008 on twelve charges of armed robbery and kidnapping—a verdict returned, coincidentally, thirteen years to the day of his acquittal in Ito’s courtroom. Simpson was sentenced to prison for a maximum of thirty-three years and incarcerated at Lovelock Correctional Center near Reno. The absence of protests and the few demonstrations of support in Simpson’s favor were striking. “In 1995,” a writer for the New York Times observed, “Simpson was a cause célèbre for many blacks who viewed him as suffering a raw deal from a racist judicial system. This time, not a single black activist in Las Vegas picketed, protested or even commented on the case.”100 Few people cared much about Simpson’s fate.

  To evaluate the Simpson verdicts of 1995 principally through a lens of race relations is to discount what perhaps was the most decisive factor in the case: Simpson’s multimillion dollar wealth, which allowed his cadre of lawyers to even out the adversarial relationship with the state. Simpson’s wealth allowed him to put on a defense the likes of which few murder defendants could ever hope to mount. The aggressive, confrontational strategy his lawyers developed may not have been lofty or inspired. But it was devastatingly effective. Without Simpson’s wealth, that strategy would have remained theoretical.101 “What this verdict tells you,” Arenella said after the verdicts were returned, “is that the quality of justice depends on how much money you spend to hire the best lawyers, and how much you can match the power of the state by sewing up the best experts to fight.”102

  Simpson, too, was aware that his wealth was a decisive factor. “If I didn’t have some money, I would have no chance at all,” he stated in his 1995 book, I Want to Tell You. “I wouldn’t be able to afford all these people” on his legal team.103 The American public also recognized the decisiveness of wealth. A Gallup poll reported that 73 percent of Americans thought Simpson would have been found guilty had he not been rich; only 19 percent thought he would have been acquitted.104 “Poor people’s justice is different from what O. J. Simpson” experienced in 1995, Abbe Smith, then deputy director of Harvard University’s Criminal Justice Institute, said as the trial closed. “I think people in this country have always thought that rich people get a different quality of justice in this country than poor people.”105

  Poor people’s justice would never have mustered the challenge to forensic DNA evidence that Simpson’s lawyers mounted so successfully. The DNA evidence pointed overwhelmingly to his guilt, but what Simpson’s legal team presented in court was a kind of road map for challenging such evidence. To be sure, the presentation of DNA evidence at the trial was grueling, tedious, and often snooze-inducing. Dramatic it usually was not. The intricacies and arcana of DNA typing were not readily grasped by the jury or the public.

  But in what was another anomaly of an anomalous case, those tedious hours were to bear the most lasting significance. The trial’s lasting importance was not in what it may have suggested about race relations in late-twentieth-century America, nor in the insights it may have offered about the effects of wealth in criminal justice. The “Trial of the Century” exerted little lasting impact on American jurisprudence and legal doctrine.106 Instead, the trial’s most significant contributions were to forensic DNA analysis, to introduce the promise and benefits of genetic evidence to mainstream American culture. Through the Simpson case, the American public gained a measure of familiarity with forensic DNA testing that was to deepen in the years after 1995.

  The trial marked a delineation in the recognition of forensic DNA testing as decisive in criminal trials, and Simpson’s acquittal encouraged a push for improved procedures in collecting, storing, processing, and analyzing DNA evidence. “We’ve come a long way since O.J.,” Laurie Levenson, a Loyola Law School professor who helped analyze the trial for ABC News, said in 2002. “We’ve become accustomed to DNA evidence and it’s not as controversial anymore. It’s become one of the most valuable pieces of evidence you can have.”107

  It came as little surprise that the trial would bring unprecedented scrutiny to forensic DNA evidence. The scrutiny had been widely anticipated. “In the Simpson trial,” a Wall Street Journal report stated in early January 1995, “DNA testing will be subjected to the most intense public scrutiny ever focused on a forensic procedure.”108 Similarly, an article in the New York Times speculated that the trial would become “something of a landmark for forensic science.”109

  Odd as it may seem these days, DNA evidence in the years before the Simpson trial was intensely debated and the subject of no small controversy. Disputes flared in the late 1980s and continued into the 1990s in what were called the “DNA Wars.” At issue principally was whether DNA tests were sufficiently sensitive to distinguish among people sharing similar DNA patterns; also at issue was which scientific communities had the appropriate expertise to assess the validity of DNA testing.110

  In late October 1994, as the start of the Simpson trial drew nearer, two leading protagonists in the “DNA Wars” jointly called a truce, declaring in an article in the journal Nature that there is “no remaining problem that should prevent the full use of DNA evidence in any court.” The protagonists, Eric S. Lander, a molecular biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,111 and Bruce Budowle, a forensic scientist at the FBI, declared that DNA typing “is soundly rooted in molecular biology” and that the DNA Wars should be declared over.112 Their article opened with a reference to the coming Simpson trial, saying the proceedings would likely offer “the most
detailed course in molecular genetics ever taught to the U.S. people.”113

  Significantly, Simpson’s lawyers neither challenged nor attacked the science of forensic DNA analysis. They accepted it. Instead, they went after the sloppy and imprecise ways in which the Los Angeles police had gathered, stored, and processed the DNA evidence in the Simpson case. That they did not challenge the science lent tacit confirmation to the Lander–Budowle thesis that the DNA Wars had ended, that the time had come “to recognize that forensic DNA typing has become a mature field.”114

  The defense strategy thus signaled a high-profile affirmation of the relevance of DNA evidence in criminal trials. As Barry Scheck later observed, Simpson’s lawyers “never attacked the validity of DNA technology, because it’s a valid technology, it’s a revolutionary technology.”115 But in pointing to the lapses in gathering DNA evidence, the Simpson defense team demonstrated that evidence collection had not caught up to the science. As Scheck noted in an interview several years after the trial, “They were using nineteenth-century evidence collection techniques for twenty-first century technology, which had more than the potential, but the reality, of producing contaminated results.”116

  During cross-examination at the trial, Scheck extracted acknowledgments by Los Angeles police criminalists that they had mishandled or overlooked DNA evidence at the crime scene. They had placed DNA evidence inside plastic bags, where it was prone to degradation. DNA samples were placed in a police evidence van that lacked air-conditioning. Crucial blood evidence was collected at the gate near Nicole Simpson’s townhouse three weeks after the killings. A portion of a reference sample of O. J. Simpson’s blood was spilled at the police laboratory where DNA evidence samples were tested.117 The prosecution’s most damning evidence against Simspon became its bane.

  The missteps and the evidence-gathering irregularities allowed Simpson’s lawyers not only to impugn and neutralize the prosecution’s best evidence; it allowed them to claim that the evidence had been tampered with in a brazen attempt to frame the defendant. Such claims seemed far-fetched and were unsubstantiated by direct evidence, but they were not altogether implausible, given the extent of police bungling. In any case, the DNA evidence collected in the Simpson case was too suspect and unreliable to support a conviction; guilty verdicts became all the more improbable.

  The work of Simpson’s defense team offered lessons for forensic laboratories around the world about the sorts of practices to avoid.118 An upshot, then, of the Simpson trial was to encourage improvements in the methodology of collecting DNA evidence. A brochure was produced for law enforcement officers describing the techniques for proper collection and handling of DNA evidence.119 Scheck has claimed that the defense strategy to attack the collection, processing, and testing of the DNA samples in the Simpson case “actually changed forensic science in a very profound way,” as it underscored “that if you’re going to get anything out of DNA testing you have to collect the evidence correctly, you have to make sure that the labs are handling it correctly, so that you don’t screw up these results.” The trial made clear, Scheck said, that proper techniques of “collection and handling of this evidence [are] essential to getting reliable results.”120

  The trial’s focus on DNA anticipated and perhaps stimulated broad popular interest in DNA and its seemingly wondrous capabilities. Prime-time television series such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and its spinoffs draw on techniques of DNA collection and testing and have elevated the work to a dramatic and decisive level. Such portrayals of criminalists and detectives have been criticized for simplifying and minimizing the intricacies of forensic analysis,121 but the shows are undeniably popular.122 The CSI team invariably solves the baffling and horrific crime within the program’s hour-long time slot. “People had an idea about what forensic science was, although they were a little confused at the O.J. trial,” Anthony Zuicker, the creative and executive producer of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, has said. “We found a way to make it sexy and educational and fun. And people now know what DNA and blood splatter are.”123

  The challenges Simpson’s lawyers posed to forensic evidence collection in the 1995 case clearly inspired a CSI episode that aired in October 2002, on the seventh anniversary of Simpson’s acquittal. The show, titled “The Accused Is Entitled,” was about a shaggy-haired young movie star named Tom Haviland, played by actor Chad Michael Murray, who was accused of fatally stabbing two fans in a sexual encounter in his hotel suite. Haviland hired a high-profile lawyer and a veteran criminalist who turned up flaws and deficiencies in the CSI team’s evidence-gathering procedures and in effect put the team on trial. “They’re beating our heads in,” one team member complained after enduring a grilling in court. “Judge is going to dismiss; you can feel it.” The drama was quite over the top, but the parallels to the Simpson case were frequent, amusing, and impossible to miss.

  Unlike the outcomes that typify CSI programs, forensic DNA evidence implicated Simpson but failed to convict him. By the end of the trial, Simpson’s acquittal was predictable—or should have been—given how effectively his lawyers had shredded the prosecution’s case and had injected serious doubts about the integrity of the DNA evidence. Considering the impugned quality of the evidence, the jury reached verdicts that were supportable, certainly, and probably inevitable.

  Simpson’s acquittal brought no exoneration, however. His conviction, such as it was, was left to the court of public opinion and to a controversial effect, abetted by television coverage, known as the “13th juror.”124 The television camera in Ito’s courtroom allowed millions of Americans to follow the Simpson proceedings and enabled them to form judgments that were sharper and more insightful than if they had been restricted only to news reports about the trial.

  Television was assailed in the Simpson case for many sins—prolonging the trial and encouraging lawyers and witnesses to grandstand and play to the camera, among them.125 Critics also say that televised trials offer a mistaken sense of presence, that the camera is a very poor substitute for being in the courtroom.126 However imperfectly, the camera’s unblinking eye helped to establish the public as a 13th juror, decisive in the court of public opinion. The popular verdict, which has proven unshakeable over the years, was that Simpson killed his former wife and Goldman. No plausible suspect other than O. J. Simpson has emerged, and the not-guilty verdicts of October 1995 could not contradict that conclusion. Simpson became a pariah despite his acquittal. He would never recover the popular esteem he enjoyed before the trial.127

  Within an hour of the reading of the verdicts, Simpson was on his way home, riding in a white van and pursued by news helicopters in a vague replay of the low-speed highway pursuit that preceded his arrest in June 1994, 473 days earlier. Simpson spent the evening at his mansion, where friends and family gathered to drink champagne and celebrate the verdicts. “It was all on television,” Vanity Fair writer Dominick Dunne noted. “Women in pink pantsuits waved champagne toasts to the media. Everyone hugged. . . . Jubilation reigned.”128 Earlier, at an impromptu news conference in Ito’s courtroom, Simpson’s son by his first marriage had taken the floor to read a statement for his father. In it, O. J. Simpson pledged to “pursue as my primary goal in life the killer or killers who slaughtered Nicole and Mr. Goldman. They are out there somewhere.”129 It was a gratuitous and narcissistic vow that insulted the angry and grieving families of the victims. It was a vow that Simpson has never kept.

  Interestingly, the landmarks closely associated with the Simpson case—the places in Brentwood mentioned so often during the trial—were scrubbed of their former identities, as if to purge their associations with the “Trial of the Century.” People in Brentwood do not much like talking about the case, said Jeff Hall, editor of the local Brentwood News. Simpson, he said, used to be well liked in Brentwood. He was approachable and friendly, and relished the attention he received. Nowadays, Hall said, Simpson’s name and memory are reviled in Brentwood, where his guilt in the murders is wid
ely assumed.130

  After the civil trial verdicts in 1997, Simpson left Brentwood for southern Florida, where he could better protect his assets and remaining wealth. His Tudor-style mansion on North Rockingham Avenue in Brentwood was sold to a savings bank at auction. It fetched $2.6 million, enough to satisfy the mortgage payments on which Simpson had defaulted,131 and afterward it was sold to an investment banker for nearly $4 million.132 The new owner razed the place in 1998 and put up a Mediterranean-style mansion, only glimpses of which can be seen behind hedges and high walls.

  Nicole Simpson’s townhouse on South Bundy Drive in Brentwood was sold for less than $600,000 in 1996, and the new owner landscaped the front entrance with a riot of Southern California vegetation to shield from passersby what once had been a bloody crime scene. Only a small, hand-lettered sign gives away the townhouse street number, which also has been changed since the slayings. The cozy Mezzaluna restaurant on San Vicente Boulevard, where Nicole Simpson ate her last meal and where Goldman waited tables, was closed and its contents auctioned off in 1997. A coffee and tea café has since opened in its place. Downtown, Ito’s courtroom was closed to trials a few years ago in a round of budget cuts. But to step into the courtroom is to be returned to a setting that looks much as it did to television viewers in 1995: dingy, with blue and dark brown competing as the dominant colors. Still in place in 2013 was Ito’s nameplate at the bench. Hanging on the back wall of the courtroom was a framed cover of Newsweek magazine that showed Ito presiding at the Simpson trial and looking glum. His chin rested on the palm of his hand. “What a mess,” the headline said of the trial.