The Run of His Life

by Jeffrey Toobin

  The defense team held weekly meetings around a big table in Cochran’s suite of offices. At these conclaves, Cochran would often take on the persona of a preacher and declaim in mock solemnity about each lawyer’s assignment. One day near the end of the case, Cochran was telling Bailey his plans for how they were going to win. “I will bring the brothers and sisters to the table of acquittal,” he told Bailey, “but you, sir, are responsible for the Demon.”

  The Demon was the defense team’s nickname for juror number three, Anise Aschenbach, a sixty-year-old woman who was one of only two whites left on the panel. The self-confident and poised Aschenbach had said during jury selection that her advocacy once changed the minds of all eleven of her fellow jurors in another case. Throughout the trial, Aschenbach was the one juror the defense feared might hold out for conviction. Along the way, Cochran and Bailey sensed that she particularly admired Bailey’s courtroom style, which led to Cochran’s instruction to him. (In fact, the defense missed Aschenbach’s signals about Bailey. “I couldn’t stand that creep,” she told me after the trial.)

  Still, the admonition to Bailey illustrated how Johnnie Cochran saw his role in the case. He would take care of the nine black jurors—the brothers and sisters—and one of the white lawyers could handle the rest. In the waning days of the trial, Shapiro lobbied Simpson to be allowed to deliver the second defense summation, but Cochran and the rest of the defense team shot down that idea. Shapiro didn’t know the facts well enough; he would only be reading what Barry Scheck had prepared for him. Simpson, too, thought Scheck deserved the white-lawyer slot. (Bailey had played too small a role in the trial even to be considered.)

  When Cochran began his address to the jury on Wednesday, September 27, he started in a conventional way. He attacked the prosecutors’ time line, principally their theory that Simpson had killed the two victims at 10:15 P.M. He dwelled on the glove demonstration and used a catchy phrase that had been suggested to him by Gerry Uelman: “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” Cochran continued to ignore or downplay domestic violence. “He is not perfect. He is not proud of some of the things he did,” the lawyer said at last. “But they don’t add up to murder.” Cochran even took a silly turn when he put a black knit cap on his head to suggest the absurdity of someone as famous as O.J. Simpson using a disguise. “If I put this knit cap on, who am I?” Cochran asked. “I’m still Johnnie Cochran with a knit cap.” (In fact, wearing a knit cap at night can be an effective disguise—one favored in particular by the navy SEALs, who had been Simpson’s tutors on the set of Frogman shortly before the murders.)

  But Cochran was only warming up to the crux of his argument, about the LAPD. “If you can’t trust the messengers, watch out for their messages: Vannatter, the man who carries the blood; Fuhrman, the man who finds the glove.” Cochran realized that Fuhrman’s role in the case was, in the end, fairly minor, so he threw Vannatter in with the disgraced Fuhrman. Cochran even had a chart for the jury, entitled “Vannatter’s Big Lies,” and he called the two men the “twins of deception” and then the “twin demons of deception” and finally “the twin devils of deception.” This was, of course, monstrously unfair to Vannatter, whose errors stemmed more from laziness than malevolence.

  This was, in the end, the classic Johnnie Cochran summation—a variant of one he had given many times before. He said the case was really about the police, not his client. The only difference in this case was that the stakes were so much higher. “Your verdict goes far beyond these doors of this courtroom,” he advised. “That’s not to put any pressure on you, just to tell you what is really happening out there.” It was, one supposes, just a sort of courtesy to warn the jurors what their lives might be like if they happened to vote to convict this man.

  So what was the jury to do? “Stop this cover-up. Stop this cover-up. If you don’t stop it, then who? Do you think the police department is going to stop it? Do you think the D.A.’s office is going to stop it? Do you think we can stop it by ourselves? It has to be stopped by you.… Who, then, polices the police? You police the police. You police them by your verdict. You are the ones to send the message.” Several times he referred to Fuhrman as a “genocidal racist,” so that there was only one appropriate point of reference for this man. “There was another man not too long ago in the world who had those same views.… This man, this scourge, became one of the worst people in the history of this world, Adolf Hitler, because people didn’t care or didn’t try to stop him. He had the power over his racism and his antireligion. Nobody wanted to stop him, and it ended up in World War Two.” Cochran then exhaled and muttered with disgust, “The conduct of this man”—and it wasn’t clear who, Hitler or Fuhrman.

  Scheck followed for a brisk tour of the forensic issues in the case. It was, at times, extremely arcane: “The EAP typing system is something that looks at antigens on the outside of that red blood cell.” But Scheck did make clear the defense position that the police had cleverly planted the blood on the socks at Rockingham and on the rear gate at Bundy—though at the same time they had incompetently contaminated the blood on the walkway at Bundy. The unifying theme came from Henry Lee. “In the words of Dr. Lee,” Scheck said, “something is wrong. Something is terribly wrong with the evidence in this case.”

  That evening, the last night of the case, the prosecutors gathered on the eighteenth floor to plot strategy for a rebuttal. Bedeviled by dental problems for years, Clark was now finding the pain excruciating. She made an emergency appointment with a dentist at six-thirty that evening, and it turned out she had an abscess. She was knocked out with general anesthesia, operated on, and sent back to the court house at around ten P.M. She stayed until just before four in the morning.

  Five hours later, on September 29, the prosecutors spoke for the last time. Frazzled and drained, Clark unwisely tried to respond to each of Scheck’s assertions. The defense lawyers interrupted her more than forty times with objections. Ito overruled most of them, but they succeeded in preventing Clark from establishing any kind of rhythm. For once Clark lacked the energy to fight back.

  There was one hint of what was to come. Bill Hodgman had spent much of the previous month working on an elaborate chart entitled “Unrefuted Evidence,” a summary of all the non-DNA, non-Fuhrman-related evidence in the case. It was arranged in the form of a big pyramid, and Clark saved it for her conclusion. The chart was extremely impressive, and it listed things like Nicole’s purchase of the gloves, Park’s fruitless buzzing for Simpson, the blood to the left of the shoe prints and the cut on Simpson’s left hand. It was a rather complicated graphic, and Clark did not discuss every point on it, so she offered the jurors an option.

  “If you would like to take notes on this,” Clark said, “I can leave it up for a little while.”

  Not one juror wrote down a thing.

  When I left Ito’s courtroom on September 29 and stood before the steam tables in the cafeteria of the Criminal Courts Building, I had only one thought: Praise be—the last lunch (at least before deliberations). Clark’s haggard appearance reflected the feelings of everyone involved with the trial. I ordered my umpteenth chicken burrito and staggered to a table with Sally Ann Stewart, a reporter for USA Today. The room was uncharacteristically deserted for that time of day, and we enjoyed the calm as we discussed the end of the trial and the resumption of our normal lives.

  A few moments later, though, Johnnie Cochran, Barry Scheck, Carl Douglas, and Larry Schiller arrived. They set their trays down at a centrally located table, and six Fruit of Islam bodyguards, dressed in their trademark bow ties, formed a circle with their backs to Cochran’s table and their eyes trained warily outward. The guards had first appeared in the courthouse at the beginning of that final week and had added a new level of uneasiness to an environment that was already extraordinarily charged. In truth, Cochran was probably more miser than provocateur. Cochran had received threats, and what really appealed to him about the Fruit of Islam guards was that they had volunteered t
heir services. Still, after the Fuhrman tapes, and after all of his fiery speeches around the country, Cochran had imported into the courthouse the very symbols of Louis Farrakhan’s strident black nationalism. At that Friday lunch, however, the presence of the grim-faced sentries seemed merely ludicrous, for they had only two reporters and Rose, the cashier, to monitor for false moves.

  Then, a few minutes later, Robert Shapiro arrived. There had been a time when he was probably the most famous lawyer in America, but by this final Friday, his voluble, visible role had been usurped. Though the other defense lawyers often came and went together, Shapiro arrived and left by himself, and on this day, he paid Rose, took a long look at his colleagues and their sentinels, and sat down by himself at a small table nearby.

  Sally and I, feeling a little sorry for him—and always eager to chat with an insider—asked him to sit with us. He picked up his tray, sidled over, and joined in our reveries of life after O.J. His own fantasy, he said, would be to take a month off and join Oscar De La Hoya’s training camp at Big Bear Lake. A serious and skilled amateur boxer at the age of fifty-three, he couldn’t wait to tear into the heavy bag. As always with Shapiro, though, the topic soon turned to his resentment of his fellow defense lawyers. He said he had been appalled when Cochran brought the Fruit of Islam into his entourage and that he had been disappointed by Cochran’s summation the previous day. “It was nothing but race, race, race,” he said. “And why am I not reading that in the paper? All I hear is how great his summation was. Why do I keep reading this?” In truth, some reporters had excoriated Cochran’s appeal for an acquittal based on racial solidarity, but Shapiro’s bitterness was such that he had registered only the favorable words about his colleague.

  Meanwhile, Marcia Clark took the Goldman family out for a drink after her rebuttal summation on Friday. She then fled Los Angeles. She took her two boys up the coast to Santa Barbara, to the home of her friend Lynn Reed Baragona. There, Clark slept in peace, played with her kids, and did the crossword puzzle for the first time in more than a year. On Sunday, Clark and Baragona decided to take a trip to the local mall. Amid the upscale stores in that tony Pacific Ocean setting, Clark started to absorb just how famous she had become: As she shopped, she encountered spontaneous outbursts of applause from fellow customers.

  Toward the end of the day, Clark and her friend were walking along a long corridor, and a pair of black women started coming toward them from the opposite direction. They were, it seemed, just about the only African-American shoppers in the whole place, and they clearly recognized the Simpson prosecutor. As their paths crossed, one of the black women leaned over and uttered a single word, just loud enough so that Marcia Clark would hear:

  “Innocent.”

  The jurors selected a foreperson on the afternoon of Friday, September 29, just after Clark completed the last summation. The assignment went to juror number one, Armanda Cooley, a fifty-one-year-old black woman who worked as an administrative assistant for the city of Los Angeles. Cooley was obviously a levelheaded and friendly person, and she had steered clear of most of the jury tempests during the trial. Both sides figured she would be the choice. Judge Ito did not allow the jury to begin considering the evidence on that Friday, however. After they selected the foreperson, Ito sent them back to the hotel; deliberations were set to begin on Monday morning.

  Shortly before summations, the sheriff’s deputies supervising the jurors at the Inter-Continental Hotel told their charges that they would have to start preparing for the end of their sequestration. Through eight months at the hotel, the jurors had accumulated a great many possessions in their rooms. The deputies told them that by the time of deliberations, all of their belongings would have to fit into one or two suitcases.

  Over the last weekend, the deputies made an additional announcement to the jurors. On Monday, and on each day of deliberations to follow, the jurors would be required to pack all of their remaining belongings and take them to the courthouse. This was a major imposition. It also made no sense, because once the jurors reached their verdict, Ito had decided that he was going to delay the announcement overnight. Yet the jurors, beaten down after so many months of confinement, did not protest. They accepted the prospect of rising daily at dawn and packing, then rushing off to court at their usual 7:45 A.M. for as long as it would take to reach a verdict. But this pointlessly strict policy by the sheriff’s deputies represented at least a subconscious cue to the jurors to reach a quick decision.

  At 9:16 A.M. on Monday, October 2, the twelve members of the jury settled into chairs in the deliberation room just across the back hallway from Ito’s courtroom. Twenty-five minutes later, Ito’s clerk, Deirdre Robertson, wheeled in a cart piled high with trial exhibits arrayed in black binders. Robertson closed the door and said the jurors could begin discussing the case.

  Armanda Cooley, the foreperson, asked her colleagues for advice about how to proceed. She had never before served on a jury. Several of the jurors suggested that they take an immediate straw poll. But Cooley said that a manual she had been given seemed to suggest that the jury should not call for a show of hands. After a little more discussion, it was agreed that Cooley would conduct a vote by secret ballot, just to get a sense of what everyone was thinking.

  “Just write ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty’ on a piece of paper and put it in the bowl,” Cooley said. After a moment or two, Cooley passed around a glass bowl that Ito’s clerks had kept full of candy over the previous months. When the bowl came back to Cooley, her friend Carrie Bess—like Cooley, a single black woman with grown children and a civil-service job—volunteered to tabulate the responses on a blackboard. Cooley called out the votes, and Bess wrote them down:

  Ten for acquittal; two for conviction.

  Turning for the first time to the facts of the case, Anise Aschenbach (the defense’s white “demon”) announced she wanted to say something. She had been stewing all weekend. Aschenbach had been so angry during Cochran’s summation that she almost got up and told the lawyer to shut up. “I was so outraged at what he said,” Aschenbach told her fellow jurors. “He wants us to send the LAPD a message. Does he think we’re so stupid that we’re going to send a message rather than decide based on what we heard in the case? I hope I was not the only one offended by his remarks.”

  Her fellow jurors responded to these comments with total silence.

  Armanda Cooley decided to distribute the exhibit binders. Jurors began leafing through them and offering comments about the evidence. It wasn’t so much a conversation as a series of random observations.

  Why wasn’t there more blood around the glove Fuhrman said he found at Rockingham?

  Goldman had bruises on his knuckles. If they were from fighting back, why didn’t O.J. have any bruises on his body? (The prosecution had argued that Goldman had injured his hand flailing against the fence behind him.) The jurors knew that Dave Aldana, the Hispanic man in seat four, was a martial arts expert. He got up and demonstrated how to defend in tae kwon do. He thought Goldman had put up a good fight.

  If the glove came off Simpson’s hand during the fight, why wasn’t it inside out?

  Aschenbach volunteered that she was one of the two votes for conviction. (The other never came forward.) Hearing this, Sheila Woods flashed an angry look at her. Woods was the last surviving member of the Jeanette Harris clique. Since Harris had been thrown off the jury, Woods had had little contact with her fellow jurors. “Why did they go after him as a suspect from the beginning?” Woods said to Aschenbach. “They insulted us with their testimony. They went after that man.”

  Someone mentioned the glove demonstration. Brenda Moran, Gina Rosborough, and Lon Cryer all said they thought it didn’t fit on Simpson’s hand.

  There was only one reference to DNA tests. Both Dave Aldana and Sheila Woods said they didn’t think it was reliable when all of the DNA came from the back gate at Bundy. This was important to them. (It was, of course, completely wrong, too. While the molecular weight o
f the DNA on the back gate was higher than that of the other samples, several other tests of blood at the murder scene tied it to Simpson.)

  After about an hour of discussion, the topic turned to the testimony of Allan Park, the limousine driver. Carrie Bess said Park didn’t know how many cars had been in Simpson’s driveway. A couple of other jurors disagreed about whether Park had seen a black man at the doorway to the house or walking across the driveway. Others were confused by the time that Park said various events occurred. The group decided by consensus that they would like another look at Park’s testimony.

  Shortly before noon, Cooley sent out a note requesting Park’s testimony. She thought the judge would simply send back a transcript the jury could examine, but the judge relayed word that he would have the testimony read in the courtroom starting at 1:00 P.M. The jurors then broke for lunch.

  As a former prosecutor, I have always hated read-backs. Even when I was trying my own cases, I used to have trouble staying awake when court reporters did their monotone recitals. This day was no different. I took my usual seat and tried to focus on the words as they were spoken. As he had from the beginning, Park struck me as the most powerful government witness in the case. It was absolutely clear that the Bronco was not parked on Rockingham when he arrived to pick up Simpson. Its absence, in my view, doomed O.J. Even worse, from Simpson’s perspective, was that Park was fairly certain that the Bronco had returned by the time they left for the airport—an even more incriminating fact.

  Still, when Ito called a break after seventy-five minutes of the read-back to give the court reporter’s voice a rest, I knew I had to escape. I was sure there were going to be lots of read-backs to come, and I didn’t want to embarrass myself by falling asleep in court.