1995

by Campbell, W. Joseph

  108. Sue Anne Pressly, “Dust and Tears Attend the Fall of a Tragic Symbol,” Washington Post, May 24, 1995.

  3. O.J., DNA, AND THE “TRIAL OF THE CENTURY”

  1. For a discussion of “flashbulb events,” see Jennifer M. Talarico and David C. Rubin, “Confidence, Not Consistency, Characterizes Flashbulb Memories,” Psychological Science 14, no. 5 (September 2003): 455. Research about “flashbulb memories” dates to at least 1977. See Roger Brown and James Kulik, “Flashbulb Memories,” Cognition 51, no. 1 (March 1977): 73–99.

  2. N. R. Kleinfield, “The Moment: A Day (10 Minutes of It) the Country Stood Still,” New York Times, October 4, 1995. Kleinfield’s account likened the vigil to “an eerie moment of national communion” in which millions of people “in millions of places seemed to spend 10 spellbinding minutes doing exactly the same thing.”

  3. Nearly 80 percent of the respondents to a Gallup poll said they learned about the verdicts by watching television or listening on radio. The data were retrieved from the Gallup Organization’s online “Gallup Brain” database. The question’s wording was: “Did you personally watch or listen to the verdict announcement on television or radio today as it was being announced, or did you hear about it later?” The question was asked of 643 American adults on October 3, 1995.

  4. John L. Mitchell and Jeff Leads, “Half of Americans Disagree with Verdict: Reaction: High-Voltage Joy, Angry Denouncements,” Los Angeles Times, October 4, 1995.

  5. Dan Levy, “A Nation Stops to Watch O.J.,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 4, 1995.

  6. Peter Kendall and Pamela Cytrynbaum, “Race Tints Shared Experience,” Chicago Tribune, October 4, 1995.

  7. Kleinfield, “The Moment: A Day (10 Minutes of It) the Country Stood Still.”

  8. “All Boston Stood Still at the Hour of Reckoning,” Boston Herald, October 4, 1995.

  9. Cited in John F. Harris, The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House (New York: Random House, 2005), 206. Harris noted: “As with other Americans, guessing the verdict became a macabre parlor game among the president’s staff.”

  10. Levy, “A Nation Stops to Watch O.J.”

  11. Quoted in Paul Duggan, “Washington Comes to a Stop; Then Pent-Up Emotions Start Spilling Out,” Washington Post, October 4, 1995. Democratic Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia had scheduled a news conference at the hour of the verdicts on October 3 to reveal whether he would seek reelection. Nunn postponed the event to the following week—and announced he would not seek reelection.

  12. The exceptional character of the country’s anticipation of the verdicts also was noted by Alan M. Dershowitz, one of the members of Simpson’s legal team. In his book Reasonable Doubts: The Criminal Justice System and the O. J. Simpson Case (New York: Touchstone, 1996), he wrote that the reading of the Simpson verdicts was “different from the Kennedy assassination, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor or the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Those were unexpected events which came out of the blue like bolts of lightning on a clear summer day” (11). The Simpson verdicts hardly qualified as “bolts of lightning.”

  13. Quoted in Robert Lipsyte, “Sports of the Times: O.J. Didn’t Play,” New York Times, August 2, 1969. It was also said that Simpson was a “wealthy celebrity who lived white, spoke white and married white.” See William Safire, “After the Aftermath,” New York Times, October 12, 1995.

  14. See Joe Urschel, “Case That Captivated U.S.; Simpson Trial ‘Monopolized’ Our Attention,” USA Today, September 29, 1995.

  15. Gerald F. Uelmen, one of Simpson’s lawyers, found at least thirty-two trials since 1901 that the news media had described as a “trial of the century.” Among them were the cases of Leon Czolgosz, who assassinated President William McKinley in 1901; Bruno Hauptmann, who was convicted in 1935 of the kidnap-murder of Charles Lindbergh’s infant son; and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted of espionage in 1951. “We average a new ‘Trial of the Century’ every three years,” Uelmen said. Quoted in Elizabeth Wasserman, “O.J. Case Isn’t the First, Won’t Be the Last: Trials of the Century,” San Jose Mercury News, May 22, 1995.

  16. Peter Grier and Daniel B. Wood, “Why It’s ‘Not Guilty’ in Trial of Century,” Christian Science Monitor, October 4, 1995.

  17. Dominick Dunne, “LA in the Age of O.J.,” Vanity Fair 58 (February 1995): 48.

  18. Shaun D. Mullen, “What Price Freedom?” Philadelphia Daily News, October 4, 1995.

  19. Dave McIntyre, “U.S. in 1995: The Verge of Change, or More of the Same?” Deutsche Presse-Agentur, December 26, 1995, retrieved from Lexis Nexis database.

  20. See Urschel, “Case That Captivated U.S.”

  21. The remark was attributed to author and lawyer Scott Turow. See Urschel, “Case That Captivated U.S.”

  22. Karen Heller, “Not Just a Spectacle, a Circus Outside the Courtroom,” Philadelphia Inquirer, January 24, 1995.

  23. David Shaw, “The Simpson Legacy: Obsession: Did the Media Overfeed a Starving Public?” Los Angeles Times, October 9, 1995, accessed May 29, 2013, http://articles.latimes.com/1995–10–09/news/ss-55103_1_simpson-case/3.

  24. These salient characteristics were drawn from Peter Arenella, “The Perils of TV Legal Punditry,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 25 (1998): 39. Arenella, an emeritus professor at the UCLA School of Law, was a legal analyst for ABC News during the Simpson trial.

  25. See “The Power of DNA Evidence,” New York Times, May 28, 1995.

  26. See “O. J. Simpson Case by the Numbers,” Associated Press, October 3, 1995, retrieved from LexisNexis database.

  27. The jury’s swift decision prompted some analysts to speculate that Simpson had been found guilty. See, for example, Harriet Chiang, “Swift Decision Called Bad Sign for Simpson,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 3, 1995.

  28. According to legal analyst and author Jeffrey Toobin, O.J. in speaking with police did not ask when Nicole Simpson had died, or how. See Toobin, The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 39.

  29. See Seth Mydans, “Simpson Is Charged, Chased, Arrested,” New York Times, June 18, 1994. Before slipping away, Simpson left behind three letters in sealed envelopes, one of which was addressed “to whom it may concern.” That letter was opened by Robert Kardashian, a friend of Simpson, and read to journalists after Simpson had fled. The letter indicated that Simpson had contemplated suicide. “I think of my life, and feel I have done most of the right things,” the letter said. “So why do I end up like this? I can’t go on. No matter what the outcome, people will look and point. I can’t take that. I can’t subject my children to that.” He also wrote: “Don’t feel sorry for me. I have had a great life, great friends. Please think of the real O.J., and not this lost person.” Quoted in Jim Newton and Shawn Hubler, “Simpson Held after Wild Chase; He’s Charged with Murder of Ex-Wife,” Los Angeles Times, June 18, 1994, accessed May 28, 2013, www.latimes.com/news/la-oj-anniv-arrest,0,922015.story.

  30. See Mydans, “Simpson Is Charged, Chased, Arrested.”

  31. Newton and Hubler, “Simpson Held after Wild Chase.”

  32. David Dow, “What I Learned Covering the Trials of the Century,” Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review 33, no. 2 (January 2000): 742.

  33. See Susan Caba, “Trial Judgments: Consensus: Money Counts, Race Matters,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 8, 1995. See also Peter Arenella, “Foreword: O.J. Lessons,” Southern California Law Review 69 (May 1996): 1233. Arenella further wrote that “using the Simpson trial to illustrate the defects of our trial system is somewhat misleading because his trial did not mimic how a typical trial proceeds” (1239).

  34. Vincent Bugliosi, a former Los Angeles district attorney, scoffed at the praise embedded in the term “Dream Team,” noting that Simpson’s lawyers included no one who had “demonstrated any real competence in murder cases.” Only the news media, Bugliosi said, could conjure “nonsense like ‘Dream Team’ to describe these lawyers.” Bugliosi, Outrage: The Five Reasons Why O. J. Simpso
n Got Away with Murder (New York: Norton, 1996), 38, 40.

  35. In questioning by police, Simpson acknowledged that, as the husband of one of the victims, he must be the lead suspect. He also gave vague explanations for the cut on his hand that left blood droplets inside and outside his home. The text of Simpson’s statement appears as an appendix in Bugliosi, Outrage, 291–305.

  36. “Transcript of Prosecution’s Opening Statements,” Associated Press, January 25, 1995, retrieved from LexisNexis database.

  37. In his book about the Simpson case, Jeffrey Toobin noted that, except for Lee Bailey, “no one on the defense team ever took the idea [of Simpson’s testifying] very seriously. . . . Cochran and Shapiro were more worried about losing the case, and their view prevailed.” Simpson was not called to the witness stand. Toobin, The Run of His Life, 415.

  38. Nell Henderson, “O.J. in L.A.: If You Must See the Sites, Here’s How,” Washington Post, September 3, 1995. Henderson also wrote: “The truth is, for all the hype, the so-called ‘Trial of the Century’ does trigger goose bumps in person. . . . Whether the testimony or arguments are moving, frightening, amusing or boring, just sitting in that courtroom produces a shiver that a viewer doesn’t get from the tube.”

  39. See David Margolick, “Simpson Judge Delays Trial Opening and Will Allow Questioning of Detective on Bias,” New York Times, January 24, 1995.

  40. O. J. Simpson, I Want to Tell You: My Response to Your Letters, Your Messages, Your Questions (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995), 99.

  41. Cited in Toobin, The Run of His Life, 254.

  42. Simpson, I Want to Tell You, 129.

  43. Ibid., 68.

  44. Ibid., 98.

  45. Quoted in Kenneth B. Noble, “Simpson Defense Grills ‘Dreams’ Witness,” New York Times, February 3, 1995.

  46. See Toobin, The Run of His Life, 273. Toobin also wrote: “There was a simple barometer of Simpson’s reaction to testimony during his trial: The more it hurt, the more he talked. . . . Though ultimately unpersuasive to the jury, the domestic-violence evidence particularly set Simpson off” (272).

  47. Quoted in Lawrence Schiller and James Willwerth, American Tragedy: The Uncensored Story of the Simpson Defense (New York: Random House, 1996), 373–74. Schiller and Willwerth also described how Simpson’s defense team worked hard to establish “O.J.’s African-American identity” by redecorating his mansion before the jurors visited (371–72). A nude portrait of Paula Barbieri, a girlfriend of Simpson, was removed from Simpson’s bedroom. Placed at the top of the stairs where jurors would not miss it was a framed copy of Norman Rockwell’s 1963 painting of a black schoolchild escorted to school by federal marshals. “This has little to do with a search for the truth,” Schiller and Willwerth wrote. “This is stagecraft” (372).

  48. Darden later said he asked Simpson to put on the gloves as a preemptive move, figuring that the defense team was likely to do so. Darden also said Marcia Clark, the lead prosecutor, reluctantly agreed to the demonstration. See Christopher Darden with Jess Walter, In Contempt (New York: Regan Books, 1996), 323–24. Darden conceded that the demonstration had been a mistake, writing: “People ask me now would I do it again. No. Of course not. I should have taken into account shrinkage” of the gloves. “But, while I wouldn’t do it again,” he wrote, “I know those are his gloves” (326).

  49. Quoted in Toobin, The Run of His Life, 367. Toobin noted that “O.J. slipped the gloves off in a flash, which would not have been possible if they were really too tight” (368).

  50. This point was made by Peter Arenella in an interview with USA Today. “There he was professing his innocence,” Arenella said. “Why in the world would the defense have to put him on as a witness?” Quoted in Gale Holland, “Small Gloves, Big Problem for O.J. Prosecution,” USA Today, June 19, 1995. A few days after the disastrous demonstration, Darden claimed that Simpson had stopped taking anti-inflammatory medication for arthritis, which caused his hand to swell and made the evidence gloves harder to fit his hands. Simpson’s lawyers denied Darden’s accusation. See David Margolick, “Judge Ito to Open Files on 10 Dismissed Jurors,” New York Times, June 24, 1995.

  51. In his closing remarks in late September 1995, defense lawyer Johnnie Cochran described the gloves gambit as “perhaps the single most defining moment in this trial.” See “Excerpts of Closing Arguments on Murder Charges against O. J. Simpson,” New York Times, September 28, 1995. It was astonishing, as many legal observers pointed out, for Darden to have asked Simpson to try on the evidence gloves without knowing for sure whether they would fit. Not even a first-year law student would likely commit such a blunder, Vincent Bugliosi observed. See Bugliosi, Outrage, 114. Gerald F. Uelmen, another lawyer on Simpson’s legal team, later said of the botched demonstration: “From that point on, the prosecution was scrambling to undo the damage” done to its case. Uelmen, Lessons from the Trial: The People v. O. J. Simpson (Kansas City, Mo.: Andrews and McMeel, 1996), 166.

  52. After the demonstration, Darden said, his colleagues in the district attorney’s office “had nothing to say to me,” adding that senior lawyers “convened a meeting to talk about the gloves. I wasn’t invited or even told about the meeting. Marcia [Clark] didn’t talk to me for a few days. For weeks after that, I was left out of major decisions involving the case.” Darden, In Contempt, 326–27.

  53. See “Jurors Hear Dramatic Appeals; Lawyers Present Two Faces of O.J.,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 28, 1995.

  54. David Margolick, “Simpson Tells Why He Declined to Testify as Two Sides Rest Case,” New York Times, September 23, 1995.

  55. Ibid.

  56. “‘Did Not, Could Not, Would Not’: Simpson Stuns Courtroom, Tells Ito He’s Innocent,” Houston Chronicle, September 23, 1995.

  57. See Toobin, The Run of His Life, 429.

  58. Dominick Dunne, a writer who covered the trial for Vanity Fair, noted that the “exhilaration that is part and parcel of an acquittal for a wrongly accused person was eerily missing” in the defense team’s reaction to the verdicts. See Dunne, Justice: Crimes, Trials, and Punishments (New York: Crown, 2001), 229.

  59. See Lorraine Adams, “Simpson Jurors Cite Weak Case, Not ‘Race Card,’” Washington Post, October 5, 1995. The juror was forty-four-year-old Lionel Cryer, a former Black Panther. See also Schiller and Willwerth, American Tragedy, 679.

  60. Quoted in Bugliosi, Outrage, 278.

  61. President Clinton reacted to the verdicts with a single word: “Shit.” See Harris, The Survivor, 206. Clinton, Harris wrote, “believed the evidence overwhelmingly proved Simpson guilty of the murders.”

  62. See, among others, Richard Grenier, “O. J. Simpson and the End of Trust,” Washington Times, October 6, 1995, and Kenneth J. Garcia, “Jury United, But Nation Remains Divided,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 4, 1995. Garcia wrote: “Rarely in America’s history has the country’s racial divide seemed wider or the cultural abyss deeper.” See also “Two Nations, Divisible,” Economist, October 7, 1995, 18.

  63. Ronald Brownstein, “Simpson Defense’s Focus on Racial Identity Further Divides a Nation,” Los Angeles Times, October 9, 1995. He further wrote: “Most Americans of all races do not want their society divided into hostile enclaves, but their aspirations are defeated by racial posturing that encourages all Americans to dwell on their differences.”

  64. Garcia, “Jury United, But Nation Remains Divided.”

  65. Richard Cohen, “America’s Racial Divide,” Washington Post, October 4, 1995.

  66. See Haya El Nasser, “Reaction Illustrates Racial Divide; Verdict Called a ‘Message,’” USA Today, October 4, 1995.

  67. See “Two Nations, Divisible,” 18.

  68. “Interview: Jeffrey Toobin,” Frontline, April 22, 2005, accessed May 23, 2013, www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/oj/interviews/toobin.html.

  69. Data cited here were retrieved from the Gallup Organization’s online “Gallup Brain” database.

  70. In Los Angeles, a survey conducted by Loyo
la Marymount University just seven years after the Simpson trial found that respondents overwhelmingly believed that racial and ethnic groups in the city were getting along well, a reading confirmed in a similar survey in 2012. The 2002 survey reported that 74 percent of respondents said they felt racial and ethnic groups in Los Angeles were getting along “very well” or “somewhat well.” Eighteen percent said the groups were getting along “very badly” or “somewhat badly.” In 2012, 68 percent of respondents said the groups were getting along well, and 27 percent said the groups were getting poorly. However, a similar survey in 2007 indicated greater tensions among the city’s racial and ethnic groups. Forty-seven percent said the groups were getting along well, and 51 percent said they were not. These data were reported in “20th Anniversary of the 1992 Los Angeles Riots Survey,” Center for the Study of Los Angeles, Loyola Marymount University (2012), 4.

  71. Data cited here were retrieved from the Gallup Organization’s online “Gallup Brain” database. In 1958, only 4 percent of Americans said they approved of interracial marriage.

  72. Data cited here were retrieved from the Gallup Organization’s online “Gallup Brain” database.

  73. Ibid.

  74. Ibid.

  75. See Robert D. Novak, “Farrakhan’s Tour de Force,” Washington Post, October 19, 1995.

  76. See, for example, Dick Polman, “Supporters Launch New Wave of Powell-Mania Speculation,” Philadelphia Inquirer, August 18, 1995.

  77. Ibid.

  78. Jonathan Yardley, a literary critic for the Washington Post, observed: “Powell himself is interesting, for obvious reasons. He is a black American, born in Harlem, who has not merely made it in white America but has conquered white America, not as an athlete or an entertainer but as, to all intents and purposes, a corporate executive. He has played the game by the white majority’s rules but has not abandoned his black roots or compromised his identity as an African American.” Yardley also noted, perceptively: “His promotional tour for his book will be a victory lap. One cannot expect the likes of Barbara Walters, Larry King, David Frost and Katie Couric—all past masters of genuflection—to do anything except fawn as he passes through the television shows on which they reign.” Yardley, “Powell and the Political Trenches,” Washington Post, September 11, 1995.