The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson

12. A VISIT FROM LARRY KING

The decision-the last roadblock to opening statements in the Simpson trial-was the most important of Lance Ito’s career. At one level, the issue was a simple one: Would the prosecution be allowed to present to the jury evidence of Simpson’s history of physical and emotional harassment of his former wife? At another level, however, the domestic-violence motion raised profound questions about the nature of criminal trials. Should any information about a defendant be kept from a jury, even if it is accurate? What evidence, if any, is too prejudicial to a defendant? If a husband abuses his wife, does that mean he is more likely to murder her? Does a defendant stand trial for what he did or for who he is?

On this and all issues raised in the Simpson case, Ito proceeded methodically. The judge came to work early, around seven every morning, when the traffic from his home in Pasadena was still light. The Criminal Courts Building was mostly empty when he slipped into his chambers on the ninth floor, just across a battered linoleum hallway from his courtroom, which was known as Department 103. A window at one end of his long, narrow office looked out over the Los Angeles Times building and beyond, to the many towers of downtown, but the vista was obscured by piles of papers on the windowsill. Ito decorated in Neo-Workaholic style. Just two personal touches stood out from stacks of files and computer wires: a handsome formal photographic portrait of Ito and his wife, Margaret York, who was one of the highest-ranking women in the Los Angeles Police Department, and a small stand of historic Japanese flags. As an adult, Ito had come to take his heritage seriously. A third-generation Californian, he grew up knowing that his mother and father had met in a Wyoming internment camp during the Second World War. Even Lance Allan Ito’s name bore witness to the difficult days of the war: It honored a lawyer, Lance Smith, who helped protect the Ito family’s property while they were interned, and a minister, Allan Hunter, who brought food and moral support to the inmates of the internment camp.

Shortly before the camera on the wall of his courtroom came to life, around nine o’clock, Ito would stroll from his office to his bench and check to see if the day’s paperwork was in order. He wasn’t wearing his robe then, so a pocket full of pens-his nerd pack-peeked out from the breast pocket of his shirt. When dressed in full judicial regalia, Ito tended to hunch over; his robe would blend into his black beard, giving him a soft, pudgy look. This was misleading. The forty-four-year-old judge was trim, almost wiry, and the veteran of a pair of marathons.

In contrast to the adversaries before him, Judge Ito worked with very little assistance. A handful of students from local law schools rotated through his chambers over the course of the trial, but Ito did all the writing-and the deciding-alone. He had a fear, almost a phobia, of appearing unprepared on the bench, so he read all the cases the lawyers cited to him. This meant long hours of work after court sessions, either in his chambers or at his home, which was electronically linked to his office computer network.

Ito, as much as anyone, understood the importance of the domestic-violence issue to the prosecution’s case. The prosecution had asked him to rule on fifty-nine different “alleged significant events or incidents of misconduct by the defendant”-including Simpson’s conviction in 1989 for beating Nicole, and Nicole’s 911 call in 1993, when she begged for police assistance while O.J. bellowed at her in the background. Ito’s decision would determine whether the prosecution’s case would be a rather dry and technical one based exclusively on circumstantial and scientific evidence, or a melodrama of increasing domestic violence ending in death.

Ito agonized in a characteristically meticulous way. He asked the parties to make a chart for him listing each incident, along with a thumbnail argument for why this evidence should be admitted or excluded. As he would several times in the case, Ito asked the lawyers to give him the information on a computer disk, so that he could tinker with it himself. He read the cases, reread some of them, then began working his way through the domestic-violence incidents, one by one. In order to avoid delaying the trial, Ito had to issue his decision by January 18. Up to that point, he shared his conclusions with no one-or almost no one.

The judge did tell Larry King how he was going to rule.

Lance Ito was a paradoxical figure. Although he is a thoughtful jurist whose work reflects his earnest and rigorous approach, in the crucible of the Simpson trial, he displayed another facet of his character, too. Unfortunately, over the course of this long case the less appealing side of Lance Ito came increasingly to the fore. Frequently during the trial, Ito behaved like just another celebrity-crazed resident of Los Angeles, but the problem went deeper than a simple case of starry eyes. Ito suffered, in the end, from an undue eagerness to please, an unwillingness to offend-and a fatal lack of gravitas.

The outrageously inappropriate disclosure to King (which the talk-show host, fortunately for Ito, kept to himself at the time) was only one symptom of Ito’s affliction. His extraordinary interview with KCBS-which came about because Tricia Toyota’s husband, an old friend of Ito’s, had asked him to do it-was another. A third example came when Ito heard arguments about whether cameras should remain in the courtroom.

At his core, Ito loved the attention that the cameras brought, and he never seriously entertained the possibility of exiling the viewing public from the trial, but the judge did love to tweak the news media. On the day the media lawyers were to appear before him, November 7, Ito decided to play to the courtroom camera in his own way. The judge directed that twenty-one boxes of mail he had received urging him to ban cameras be stacked up beside the bench. (A letter-writing campaign had been prompted by Chicago newspaperman Mike Royko.) Noting the mail, Ito asked Kelli Sager, the lawyer representing the various news operations, “When you say you speak for the public or that the public has an interest in knowing this, the public has overwhelmingly told me that they want me to pull the plug. How do you respond to that?”

Sager, who made regular (and highly distinguished) appearances before Ito throughout the trial, dismissed Ito’s box-stacking stunt in a flash. “Certainly my clients would be happy to organize a letter-writing campaign if that were the way the Court was to decide issues in this case,” she said. “But I would urge the Court not to make rulings… based on public opinion. If twenty thousand people wrote in and said, ‘We think the DNA evidence should come in,’ I’m sure the Court would not then make a decision based on the fact that the public has spoken.” Ito quickly retreated. The cameras stayed in place, and the stacked boxes joined the KCBS interview as symbols of Ito’s naïveté.

First-time visitors to Ito’s courtroom who had previously seen it only on television always said the same thing: It’s so small. The room was about the size of a tennis court, with only four rows of benches for spectators. In courtrooms, as in weddings, where you stand determines where you sit, so the prosecution and defense each marked its territory from the start of the case. Behind the prosecutors, on the side of the courtroom near the jury box, sat the victims’ families. Ron Goldman’s sister, Kim, came virtually every day, as did her stepmother, Patti. Ron’s father, Fred, made it several times a week. The Browns came more sporadically-Nicole’s mother, Juditha, most often; the three surviving sisters, Denise, Dominique, and Tanya, rarely. The press corps, sitting in their twenty-five tightly rationed seats, surrounded the victims’ families. Behind the reporters stood three still photographers and a pair of technicians who ran the remote-controlled video camera on the wall.

The defense side featured a similarly consistent cast. O.J.’s two sisters, Carmelita Durio and Shirley Baker, along with Shirley’s husband, Ben, came every day. They passionately believed in Simpson’s innocence, yet they treated those who didn’t-including the victims’ families and many of the reporters-with consummate grace. Ito kept four seats on the defense side for his own friends, and in the back row, a half dozen winners of the daily lottery for public seats took their places. That was it-about fifty people. It was the kind of place where newcomers were quickly noticed, and on January 14 there was no way to miss the arrival of Larry King.

Larry King Live was among the shows on which Faye Resnick had been scheduled to speak after the release of her book in October, and Ito had written to CNN, along with the other networks, asking that their interviews be postponed. Unlike Connie Chung’s program at CBS, King’s show had canceled the interview, and Ito had written him a note of thanks and invited King to drop by his chambers. (It was a gracious gesture, but also one of a man who liked to have stars visit him.) So, during the mid-morning break in court on the fourteenth, King, his senior executive producer, Wendy Walker Whitworth, and King’s daughter, Chaia, were ushered into Ito’s chambers. Ito was thrilled by King’s presence, and started rambling about the domestic-violence decision he had to make. “I know Nicole’s call to the shelter is powerful evidence,” Ito told his stunned guests, “but it’s hearsay. I can’t let it in.” The talk meandered for about forty minutes on various topics-Ito’s plans to work on the juvenile court someday, Chaia’s course work at American University-until King finally asked, “Don’t you have to get back to court?”

The break had been scheduled for only fifteen minutes, so Ito found a fidgety group before him when he returned to the bench. Incredibly, King and his entourage followed him through the rear door into the well of the courtroom. O.J. rose in deference to the visiting celebrity and reached out to shake hands. The bailiffs, however, hustled the defendant back into his seat. Chastened, O.J. said to King, “Thanks for being so fair.” Next, King moved to Robert Shapiro, who gave him a bear hug. Then King shook hands with Lee Bailey. All this attention to the defense camp disturbed Suzanne Childs, Gil Garcetti’s peripatetic director of communications (and a future romantic interest of King’s). Childs rushed from her seat to the defense table and steered King over to the prosecutors. “I watch you all the time!” Marcia Clark told him.

At this point Wendy Walker Whitworth started to feel self-conscious about the commotion they had caused, and she hustled to leave. Unfortunately, she reached for the door to the holding cell where Simpson sat during breaks. A bailiff stopped her.

“Most people try to stay out of there,” he observed dryly.

At last King and his entourage, having worked the courtroom like the deck of a cruise ship, left through the spectators’ door. Judge Ito had observed the whole scene with a serene smile.

My own visit with the judge during the trial reflected this same puzzling longing for the favor of the well known. Late one morning early in the case, the superior court’s director of public affairs, Jerrianne Hayslett, said that the judge wanted to meet me at lunchtime. (The judge met with many reporters over the course of the trial, even though most judges in high-profile cases feel it is preferable to never so much as say hello to journalists.) Hayslett took me back to Ito’s chambers.

Mostly, Ito and I made small talk-the weather, my decision to give up law for journalism, his passion for the flea market at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. At one point, I told him that I thought he had a very tough job in this case.

Ito paused, then smiled. “Want to see something?” he asked me.

Sure, I said.

“Want to see something great?”

I did.

Ito reached into his desk and pulled out an envelope that he cradled like a precious heirloom and handed to me. I opened it and found a letter that the sender had thoughtfully backed with cardboard, suitable for framing.

In the brief message, the author said he had been watching the Simpson case unfold on television, and he thought Ito was doing a terrific job under difficult circumstances. It was signed with a flourish: “Arsenio Hall.”

I said it was a very nice letter. Ito beamed.

The contradictions-between the serious judge and the ditsy Angeleno-reflected Lance Ito’s background. Of all the principals in the case, he was the only one born in Los Angeles, and he had deep roots there. The judge’s grandfather had helped found the first interracial Methodist church in the city, and his father, James Ito, was raised in the solid middle class. James had graduated from college, started a truck farm on twenty-seven acres in West Covina, and even joined the California National Guard when World War II began. As it would for so many Japanese-Americans, the war turned James Ito’s life upside down. He was ordered to resign from the Guard, sell his assets, and report to an internment camp-all within two weeks.

Lance was born in 1950, and his parents, who eventually became schoolteachers, settled in the middle-class district of Silver Lake, near Dodger Stadium. James Ito had once harbored hopes for a more exalted career for himself, but the war dashed those dreams, and instead he focused his hopes on young Lance, who had an almost stereotypically all-American boyhood. He became president of the student body at the racially mixed John Marshall High School and excelled in the Boy Scouts, earning the coveted Eagle Scout badge. His scoutmaster, a young lawyer named Delbert Wong, became a mentor and role model. (Wong would go on to become one of the first Asian-American superior court judges in California. He was retired from the bench when Ito chose him as the special master to examine the contents of the “mystery envelope” in the Simpson case.)

Ito’s teenage rebellions were modest, limited mostly to his refusal to take the Japanese-language lessons his parents urged upon him. When he arrived at UCLA in 1968, he brought a first-rate mind and all the accoutrements of the good life in the Beach Boys era: a collection of Playboy centerfolds to decorate his room, a stereo system, an attractive girlfriend, and a Boss 302 Mustang with rear window slats, air intake on the hood, and chrome Magnum 500 wheels. He also had a less-than-reverential attitude toward the traumatic Japanese-American experience in the United States. Ito lived on campus in Sproul Hall-nicknamed Bacchus House, after the god of wine-and on Pearl Harbor Day, the future judge would put on a battered leather aviator’s helmet and an improvised cape, and run through the halls yelling, “Banzai!”

Still, the roots of a judicial career were in place. As a college student, Ito served as the director of student parking at UCLA, a crucial mediating assignment in a car-crazy city. Ito also excelled in his studies, graduating cum laude in political science and earning admission to the University of California’s eminent law school, Boalt Hall, in Berkeley. After graduating from Boalt in 1975, Ito spent two years at a law firm, and then became a deputy district attorney in Los Angeles.

Ito’s experience as a prosecutor shaped his judicial outlook. He specialized in cases against violent Los Angeles gangs, and he was eventually assigned to a special unit dedicated to trying these large and complex cases. (As a fringe benefit of this kind of work, he first met his future wife, who was then a homicide detective, at a murder scene at four o’clock one morning.) It was in 1983 and 1984, during the tenure of Robert Philibosian, one of the few Republicans to serve as Los Angeles district attorney in recent years, that Ito’s career took off.

According to Philibosian, “Lance was a Democrat, and I was a Republican, but he was very sympathetic to the things we were trying to do in those days.” One of the most important things Philibosian did after he left the D.A.’s office was to help launch a revolution aimed at toppling the California Supreme Court, which at the time stood out as perhaps the most liberal court in the nation. Led by Chief Justice Rose E. Bird and other appointees from Jerry Brown’s two terms as governor, the seven-member court fought a long and rancorous war with prosecutors, which ended only when voters recalled Bird and two colleagues in 1986-the fight Philibosian helped conduct. (The court is now solidly conservative.) “Lance was not crazy about Rose Bird,” Perry Mocciaro, a law-school classmate of Ito’s who is still a friend, said. “His feelings about her were no different from any other prosecutor’s in the state.” Ito didn’t directly participate in the recall effort, but he made his feelings about the Bird court unusually plain. His car in those days bore a license-plate frame with the words CALIFORNIA’S SUPREME COURT; the young prosecutor’s vanity plate read, in commentary, 7 BOZOS. In 1987, Philibosian recommended Ito to a fellow Republican, Governor George Deukmejian. The governor appointed Ito to the municipal court that year, and to the superior court, where he remains, in 1989. Once elevated to the bench, Ito changed his license plate but not, it seems, the sentiments behind it.

One of the most important buzzwords used in the attack on Justice Bird and other judicial liberals was “truth.” Ito would also use it in one of his early written rulings in the Simpson case. “The Court must always remember this process is a search for truth,” he wrote.

The observation that a trial is a search for truth might sound axiomatic to nonlawyers, but the idea is in fact the subject of intense ideological warfare in the legal community. An approach based on truth cuts across the traditional battle lines between government and defense. The “truth school,” as it is sometimes known, asserts that the paramount value is protecting innocent defendants from being wrongly convicted. But it is not at all troubled by guilty defendants who are convicted, even if the police may have violated some provisions of the Constitution in collecting evidence against them. That, of course, is the rub.

For more than a generation, the judicial system’s remedy for improper police work has been to exclude the evidence gathered by these means-and therefore sometimes the guilty go free. Truth-school adherents say that while they do not countenance unconstitutional action by the police, they believe that suppressing evidence is not necessarily the way to address such misbehavior. If the police violate someone’s rights, they suggest, it might be better if that person sued the cops for money damages in a civil lawsuit-or, alternatively, if the offending officers were administratively sanctioned for their violations of the Constitution. But in any criminal case, according to the truth school, the jury should be able to hear all reliable evidence against the defendant, regardless of how the police behaved. As Akhil Reed Amar, a professor at Yale Law School and a leading truth-school adherent, puts it, “Criminal trials shouldn’t be a sport or a game where judges just try to even the odds between the two sides. The point is that the jury should have all the facts available to it to make the right decision.” When judges must decide whether or not to provide all available information to the jury-about a defendant’s prior record, say-truth-school adherents generally believe that jurors should hear it and draw their own conclusions.

The day Lance Ito selected to hear argument on the admissibility of evidence about the domestic-violence incidents-January 11, 1995-turned out to be critical in the evolution of the Simpson case. It was the day he ordered the jury to report to a secret location-the Inter-Continental Hotel in downtown Los Angeles-for sequestration. The jurors were now officially twiddling their thumbs, with nothing to do. This personal imposition on these citizens, as well as the accompanying financial burden on the county’s taxpayers, gave a new urgency to Ito’s desire to get the trial started. Before January 11, reporters and other spectators were allowed in the courtroom on a more or less first-come, first-served basis. But on this day, for the first time the seats in the spectator section of Department 103 were marked with numbers, and the bailiffs admitted only those with passes for specific seats. Final preparations were nearly complete. A full complement of both victims’ family members filled the seats. No one could mistake that the crucial moment had drawn near.

The defendant showed the strain. O.J. Simpson has long been a compulsive talker. His friends knew that when they were speaking with O.J. on the telephone, they could safely put down the receiver for minutes at a time and return to a flowing monologue. No subject moved him to speak more than his relationship with Nicole. Visitors to Simpson in jail found him nearly obsessed by the subject. “Nicole wanted to get back together with me,” O.J. would say over and over again. “I wanted to get away from her. How can they say I killed her because I wanted her back?” Simpson even talked a lot in the courtroom. Every judge allows lawyers and clients some leeway in communicating in court, but Simpson always seemed to intimidate Ito to a certain extent, and throughout the trial the judge gave this defendant nearly free rein to jabber. This was never more true than on January 11. As the lawyers dissected O.J. and Nicole’s relationship, O.J. offered his own audible commentary as well.

The defense was represented by Gerald Uelman. The slow-talking professor from Los Angeles had something of a tin ear for public relations, and he began by making a gesture that neither Cochran nor Shapiro would have attempted. Uelman asked that Judge Ito exclude from the courtroom members of the Brown family because they might be asked to testify about issues that would be discussed in court that day. In fact, Nicole’s family had been exhaustively interviewed on this subject by police investigators; the defense had copies of all these reports. Uelman’s request only invited the prosecutors to wave the banner of victims’ rights. The Brown family, Christopher Darden said, “have an interest in hearing the truth and learning the circumstances surrounding and leading to the death of their daughter and sister. Having already suffered the death of a daughter and sister at the hands of the defendant, I doubt that there is anything that will occur in this court today… that can affect them any more than what has already happened.” Ito agreed. The Browns stayed.

The defense position on the domestic-violence evidence was simple and well stated by Uelman at the outset. He quoted the prosecution brief, which had stated, “This is a domestic-violence case involving murder, not a murder case involving domestic violence.” Uelman responded, “By attaching that label, by saying this case is a domestic-violence case, they seek to transform these proceedings from an inquiry into who killed Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman on June 12, 1994, into a general inquiry into the character of O.J. Simpson, in which he will be called upon to explain every aspect of his life for seventeen years. And there is a fundamental problem with what the prosecution is trying to do here.” The problem, Uelman said, quoting a well-known case, was that “it is fundamental to American jurisprudence that a defendant must be tried for what he did, not for who he is.”

This was an unexceptional and entirely appropriate argument. But Uelman’s ponderous manner and tony credentials hid a street fighter’s soul. Uelman had his own “label” for this case. “None of the traditional earmarks of a domestic-violence or a relationship-violence homicide are present here,” he said. “How many domestic-violence cases involve multiple victims?

“How many involve the commission of a murder with the use of a knife?

“How many involve a complete silence preceding the murder, suggesting that the murder was committed by stealth rather than being preceded by any sort of violent confrontation or argument?

“In fact, if we had to put a label on this case based on these factors, the label we would put on it is that it bears all of the earmarks of a drug-related homicide, in which the frequency of multiple victims, the use of knives, the use of stealth, is much more frequent than it is in the case of domestic violence.”

As Uelman uttered the words “drug-related,” there was an audible intake of breath in the courtroom. The suggestion was (and remains) preposterous, even on Uelman’s own terms. First, by any theory, Nicole was the real target of the crime and Ron Goldman just happened on the scene-and his murder was entirely consistent with jealous rage from Simpson. Second, Uelman was simply wrong about knives. Drug dealers overwhelmingly prefer guns. Finally, most domestic-violence murders take place in or near homes, which means that frequently they are not overheard by others. Most important, neither Nicole nor Goldman had any ties to the drug world that would make them targets of a “drug-related homicide.” Uelman’s suggestion-a real calumny on the graves of these two dead people-marked the beginning of a new phase in the defense strategy. The red herring of the “drug hit” theory was the kind of move most characteristic of F. Lee Bailey, who, seated at counsel table beside the podium, gave Uelman a wide smile at the sheer deviousness of his gesture.

Uelman then proceeded to respond to the fifty-nine domestic-violence allegations one by one. He did so virtually in tandem with the defendant, who, seated between Shapiro and Cochran, provided a running commentary on each of the accusations against him. (Shapiro also recorded in a memo Simpson’s responses to all of the domestic-violence allegations against him.)

The first incident was from 1977, when Simpson was alleged to have broken some picture frames during the course of a fight with Nicole. “She broke them,” O.J. muttered to Cochran.

Uelman moved quickly to one of the most important incidents, the fight at their home on January 1, 1989, after which O.J. pleaded no contest to battering Nicole. “With respect to this incident,” Uelman told Judge Ito, “we have police reports, we have accounts in the form of letters of explanation written by the defendant himself, interviews, and a good deal of information about what actually took place. And what apparently took place was that at the conclusion of a New Year’s celebration in which both Mr. Simpson and Nicole Simpson had a lot to drink, they got into an argument in their bedroom. And the culmination of that argument was a physical assault in which Mr. Simpson admitted that he slapped and punched Nicole Brown Simpson.”

Hearing this, O.J. nearly vaulted out of his chair. “I did not!” he told Cochran, who patted him on the shoulder and urged him to calm down. Both in conversations with friends and in several interviews following his criminal trial, Simpson had a precise, and narrow, view of his misdeeds in that New Year’s Day fight. In a deposition in the civil case against him, he said, “Never once did I ever hit her with my fist, ever… Never once have I ever slapped Nicole.” As for what happened on that January day, he said, “I rassled her… That means I had my hands on her, and I was trying to force her out of my bedroom. [A curious choice of pronoun, since she lived there, too.] She fell when she was outside.” Uelman’s description of the event-that O.J. “slapped and punched” Nicole-thus conflicted with Simpson’s own interpretation of it.

The prosecution had alleged that O.J. also beat Nicole after a gay man kissed their son, Justin. In his memo on O.J.’s responses, Shapiro wrote, “O.J. says this took place in Hawaii with the entire Brown family. Nicole said to O.J., ‘Lots of people think your daddy’s gay.’ O.J. got mad. Words were said, but there were no physical actions taken.”

The list of incidents went on. In 1993, after the divorce, Simpson hid in the bushes outside Nicole’s front window on Gretna Green and watched her have oral sex with Keith Zlomsowitch. O.J. to Cochran: “It was the sidewalk.”-i.e., he watched from a public place, not from among the bushes.

After that incident, Simpson stared Nicole and Zlomsowitch down at a restaurant in Brentwood. O.J.: “I just said hello to her.”

He stalked Nicole and sometimes wore disguises. O.J.: “Where does that come from?”

In the middle of the afternoon, during the course of the argument, a lawyer representing the Sojourn battered women’s shelter in Santa Monica appeared in Ito’s court and handed a thin envelope to the prosecutors. At the end of a long day in court, Lydia Bodin, one of the deputy district attorneys, disclosed the envelope’s contents. “We have received information from Sojourn shelter that on the date of June the 7th, 1994, Nicole Brown Simpson made a contact with Sojourn. She complained that she was being stalked. She was afraid. She felt confused. She didn’t know what to do, and she named the defendant as the person who was stalking her.”

Again, many in the courtroom gasped: The date was just five days before the murder. On hearing the words “June the 7th,” Cochran and Shapiro looked stricken.

It was a sad moment. By any measure, Nicole Brown Simpson was a wealthy woman, even after her divorce. Yet at her time of greatest fear, with her life literally on the line, she apparently felt unable to turn to the police, to her friends, or even to her family. She had nowhere to go except a public battered women’s shelter-the very charity that her husband was forced to contribute to after he beat her in 1989. And even Nicole’s final appeal to Sojourn, the courtroom recognized at once, did not manage to save her life. For once, not even O.J. Simpson had anything to say.

Uelman’s opposite number on the prosecution team was Hank Goldberg, and he seemed, in some respects, a miniature version of the professor. Soft-spoken, with a paleness of skin and hair that seemed to render him nearly invisible at times, Goldberg gave the nearly perfect legal argument on the domestic-violence evidence-especially for a judge like Ito, who had a predisposition toward the truth school.

Goldberg began with a hypothetical question for Ito. “Let’s imagine that we tried the case, Your Honor, without telling the jury that Nicole Brown Simpson was ever married to the defendant-was just a woman who was murdered,” Goldberg said. “Ronald Goldman was just a man that was murdered, and we did not tell them of the existence of any relationship at all.”

The proposal, Goldberg said, was self-evidently absurd. “It’s almost unimaginable, because the jury would have to call into question all of our evidence, no matter how strong it was, pointing to the defendant as the murderer, because why on earth would Orenthal Simpson kill an entire stranger, just this woman named Nicole… Why would he have killed them so brutally? It wouldn’t make any sense, and it would undermine the prosecution’s case, clearly.

“It is only when you understand the relationship, and you understand the jealousy, the possessiveness, that the killing and the brutality of the killing of Nicole makes sense.”

Ultimately, in a scholarly ten-page single-spaced opinion issued on January 18, 1995, Ito allowed the prosecution to prove most, but not all, of the domestic-violence incidents it wanted to introduce. The prosecution would be permitted to use the most powerful evidence-the 1989 beating, the 1993 call to 911-but not all of it. With some apparent regret, Ito excluded Nicole’s call to Sojourn on June 7 (this was the part of the ruling the judge had shared with Larry King several days earlier). “To the man or woman on the street,” Ito wrote, “the relevance and probative value of such evidence is both obvious and compelling, especially those statements made just before the homicide.” But Ito correctly excluded Nicole’s statement as inadmissible hearsay-as are all “statements by a homicide victim expressing fear of the defendant, even on the very day of the homicide.”

Over all, Ito’s domestic-violence ruling amounted to a paradigmatic, and admirable, example of his truth-oriented judicial philosophy in action-as well as a buoyant send-off to the prosecution for opening statements. The judge’s preference for truth in packaging extended even to nomenclature. As Ito stated in his opinion, Simpson’s defense team had asked him to prohibit the prosecution “from using such terms as ‘battered wife,’ ‘battered spouse,’ ‘spousal abuse,’ ‘stalker,’ and ‘stalking’ because they are unduly prejudicial, inflammatory, and not supported by the evidence.” Ito dealt with this argument quickly. On the basis of what he had seen of the prosecution’s evidence, he noted dryly-and chillingly-“such restriction is not warranted.”