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

15. A DIRTY, FILTHY WORD

The voice of a victim from beyond the grave, lawyers always say, never loses its emotional power. Nicole calling 911 on October 25, 1993: “He’s back. Please… He’s O.J. Simpson. I think you know his record. Could you just send somebody over here?” Weeping: “Could you please send somebody over?”

When Darden played the tape for the jury, the courtroom went absolutely still. Most people who listened to it on that day, including several jurors, had heard portions of the tape at one time or another, so many of Nicole’s words had a familiar sound to them. Yet the playing of the tape in its entirety gave it a fresh meaning-and horror. Nicole could not have feigned the terror in her voice, the trembling, the weeping, as she alternated between beseeching the dispatcher and pacifying her ex-husband.

“Okay, just stay on the line,” the dispatcher said.

“I don’t want to stay on the line. He’s going to beat the shit out of me,” Nicole said, then she drew a long breath to try to calm herself.

There was a simple barometer of Simpson’s reaction to testimony during his trial: The more it hurt, the more he talked. During innocuous testimony, O.J. would sit quietly, doodling or listening in a casual way. But incriminating testimony set him to responding, although he only had Shapiro to his left and Cochran to his right to lobby. Though ultimately unpersuasive to the jury, the domestic-violence evidence particularly set Simpson off. It hit him in the ego, and he played his favorite themes in response: But she wanted to get back together with me. The backdoor to Nicole’s house on Gretna Green, which Simpson damaged during his October 1993 tirade, was already broken. Simpson yammered through almost the entire playing of the tape. Cochran nodded vacantly at his client; Shapiro winced and tried to ignore him. O.J., oblivious to either reaction, talked on.

It was almost impossible to make out most of what O.J. was saying on the tape, but his voice conveyed astonishing rage, in both the intensity of his tirade and its duration. For the full thirteen and a half minutes of the telephone call, Simpson’s screaming just went on and on, with no diminishment of fury.

Nicole pleaded, “O.J., O.J. The kids. O.J., O.J., the kids are sleeping.” O.J.’s response was one of the few times his words could be made out clearly: “You didn’t give a shit about the kids when you was sucking his dick in the living room. They were here. Didn’t care about the kids then.”

The dispatcher jumped in: “Is he upset with something that you did?”

“A long time ago,” Nicole sighed. “It always comes back.” The reference was to Nicole’s encounter with Keith Zlomsowitch in 1992, which O.J. had observed from his stalking post outside her front windows.

Nicole: “Could you just please, O.J., O.J., O.J., O.J. Could you please leave? Please leave. Please leave.”

“I’m leaving with my two fists is when I’m leaving.”

For all the power of the tape, the next two witnesses demonstrated the limits of Darden’s domestic-violence presentation. Carl Colby and Catherine Boe, husband and wife, had lived next door to Nicole on Gretna Green. They testified that they sometimes saw Simpson standing on the sidewalk looking into Nicole’s house. But it was all pretty vague, especially because O.J.’s children lived there and their father had a right to visit them. Boe was especially spacey. At a sidebar conference, after Darden said, chuckling, “You just never really know what you are going to get from Mrs. Colby,” Cochran chimed in, “She is an alien from another planet.” At one point, when Boe began an exegesis on which varieties of trees around her house shed berries and why O.J. might not have wanted to park his white car beneath them, Darden had to turn his face away from the jury box because he was laughing so hard.

Denise Brown was supposed to be different. She had extensive firsthand exposure to O.J. and Nicole’s relationship, including its darker sides. Since the moment Detective Tom Lange called her parents’ home on the morning after the murders, Denise was convinced that O.J. had murdered her sister. If anyone could explain how this had happened, it would be Nicole’s older sister. When Denise walked to the witness stand on Friday afternoon, February 3, she did not so much as glance at her former brother-in-law.

The four Brown sisters all looked and sounded alike, and they reflected the values of their moneyed Orange County upbringing. All four had breast implants, but not one had a college degree. The two oldest sisters, Denise and Nicole, the brunette and the blonde, came closest to embodying a certain California ideal: lithe, athletic, out for a good time, each a homecoming princess at Dana Point High School. Denise graduated in 1975 and became, briefly, a New York model. Nicole graduated on May 20, 1977, and met O.J. Simpson three weeks later.

Denise circulated on the periphery of Nicole’s life for many years, alternately competitive and supportive, combative and loving. She dated many of Simpson’s friends, including Al Cowlings, boutique owner Alan Austin, and advertising executive Ed McCabe. Married briefly in 1984, Denise had a child with another man several years later. In 1994, she and her son were living in her parents’ home. The month before Nicole’s murder, Denise spent eight days-from May 9 to May 17, 1994-as an inmate in the Huntington Beach jail, after pleading guilty for the second time to drunk-driving charges. (She had pleaded guilty to the same crime in 1992 but was not sentenced to jail.)

Though still beautiful, Denise Brown had an unmistakable hard edge. Taking the stand in a black pantsuit and a large gold cross, she obviously wanted this jury to convict.

“Miss Brown,” Darden began. “You are Nicole Brown’s oldest-older sister?”

“Yes…”

“Do you have other sisters?”

“Yes…”

“How many?”

“There’s Dominique and Tanya and of course Nicole.”

Darden began by asking when Denise first met “the defendant.” She said that Nicole had invited her to travel to Buffalo in 1977, to see a Bills game with her. She said that at the game, “a friend of O.J.’s was there. He came over and said hello to us, and Nicole said hello, kissed him on both cheeks.”

Darden asked if anything unusual then happened.

“Yeah,” Denise said. “O.J. got real upset and he started screaming at Nicole.”

This was less than five minutes into her testimony, and it brought both Shapiro and Cochran flying out of their seats to object. When the lawyers approached Ito at the sidebar, Ito wondered what was going on. “Mr. Darden,” the judge said, “I thought we were just going to do a few more foundational things, not incidents, and my ruling on domestic violence doesn’t include anything in this era. What are we doing here?”

“I’m not about to allege or solicit any testimony that the defendant beat Nicole in 1977, Your Honor,” Darden said. “I’m just trying to define and explain the nature of their relationship, how it developed over the years.” The judge didn’t even have to hear from the defense lawyers to reject Darden’s argument. The prosecutor was trying to pile on additional misdeeds by O.J. in front of the jury without having allowed the judge to rule on them first. Of course, the defense lawyers were wise to this game as soon as Darden started playing it, and Ito shut him down immediately.

It was an amateurish mistake by Darden, and bad strategy to boot, putting Denise on the stand and immediately eliciting tales of O.J.’s misbehavior from her. Properly prepared, Denise could have given the jury some real understanding of Nicole and O.J.’s relationship, the good times as well as the bad. She could have helped explain why Nicole was so attracted to O.J., indeed why she loved him so much and why she stayed with him even though he abused her. An honest summary of their relationship would have given Denise that much more credibility when she started describing O.J.’s bad acts. Instead, Darden tried to present O.J. as simply a domestic-violence machine, which was untrue and, in any event, unlikely to be believed by a jury already sympathetic to him.

Darden walked back to the podium still miffed at Ito’s ruling and said to the witness, “Miss Brown, we’re not going to talk about anything that occurred between 1977 and December 31, 1984, you understand that?” In other words, no context: Darden would just head straight to the first of the domestic-violence incidents. With just a question or two of introduction, Denise recalled a scene in 1987 at the Red Onion restaurant in Santa Ana. “At one point,” Denise said, “O.J. grabbed Nicole’s crotch and said, ‘This is where babies come from and this belongs to me.’ And Nicole just sort of wrote it off as if it was nothing, like-you know, like she was used to that kind of treatment and he was like-I thought it was really humiliating, if you ask me.”

It was obvious that Denise was trying her best to bury O.J.-volunteering the additional (and inadmissible) details that Nicole was “used to” this treatment and that Denise found it “humiliating.” Cochran understood what was going on. Back at the sidebar, Cochran implored Ito, “Now, we may look back on this and smile when the jury verdict comes in May or June [sic]. But for right now, we can’t allow this to take place. I just don’t think it’s right.”

Ito invited Darden’s response.

“Your Honor,” said the prosecutor, “I don’t know what Mr. Cochran means by ‘we can’t allow.’ Is he wearing the robe in this courtroom today?” Cochran so flummoxed Darden that the prosecutor thought he could use personal attack in lieu of legal argument.

Cochran responded as if he were speaking to a child: “I said we can’t allow this without objection. That’s all I said, Counsel.”

Again, Ito directed Darden to take better control of his witness. Once more, with barely any introduction, Darden moved to another domestic-violence incident, a fight between O.J. and Nicole at the Rockingham house sometime in the mid-1980s. It started, Denise said, when she told O.J. he took Nicole for granted.

“Why did you tell him that?”

Shapiro objected, and Ito sustained it for the obvious reason: “Why this witness thinks that Miss Brown Simpson was taken for granted is not relevant.”

Darden asked what happened next.

“He started yelling at me, ‘I don’t take her for granted. I do everything for her. I give her everything.’ And he continued, and then a whole fight broke out, and pictures started flying off the walls, clothes started flying.” Denise seemed on the verge of tears at this point. “He ran upstairs, got clothes, started flying down the stairs, and grabbed Nicole, told her to get out of his house, wanted us all out of his house, picked her up, threw her against the wall, picked her up, threw her out of the house. She ended up on her-she ended up falling. She ended up on her elbows and on her butt… We were all sitting there screaming and crying, and then he grabbed me and threw me out of the house.”

“Are you okay, Miss Brown?” Darden asked.

“Yeah,” said Denise, pausing between tears. “It’s just so hard. I’ll be fine.”

Darden turned to the judge. “Your Honor, if it pleases the Court, can we adjourn and continue this Monday morning?”

It is classic courtroom strategy to end with a dramatic moment on Friday afternoon-something for the jury to think about all weekend-and Darden had chosen this closing with care. As usual, however, Cochran was about three steps in front of him. In a heated sidebar conference before they broke for the weekend, Cochran lectured Darden for staging Denise’s crying stunt at the end of a Friday. “They’re not fooling anybody with this stuff,” Cochran said. “I mean, I’m telling them it’s going to backfire on them. They keep doing it, and it’s not right.”

Darden protested his innocence. “Mr. Cochran,” he lectured his counterpart, “how else do you expect her to react, especially given these circumstances, given her relationship to the defendant, given how long she’s known him? She is grieving, Mr. Cochran. It happens when people lose their loved ones. And I can’t control that. I can’t stop that. I didn’t wield the knife. I didn’t kill her… Frankly, I’m touched by it. I feel bad about it. Maybe I’m a little slow to stop her, but I will attempt to do better. I will say, however, that Mr. Cochran has been my mentor for years, and I’ve learned-”

His “mentor” cut him off.

“Well, he’s going to see what effect it has on the jury,” Cochran said. “I don’t think it’s going to have the effect you think you are having.” Cochran was going with the focus groups-and his gut. “Watch them,” the defense lawyer urged. “See if they’re manipulated or not. You guys keep trying this and see how it ends up… I’ll remind you about it.” (Cochran was right. Several jurors said after the trial that they were offended by Denise’s obvious bias and had discounted much of what she had to say.)

Monday morning started with another Darden fiasco. Shortly after he started examining Denise Brown again, Darden placed a photograph of a battered Nicole on the courtroom overhead projector, which was known throughout the trial by its brand name: the Elmo. The prosecution had already shown the photographs taken by the police following the incident on January 1, 1989. This one showed similar, but not identical, bruises.

Denise said she had seen this photograph in Nicole’s bathroom drawer. “Did you and she discuss the photograph?” Darden asked.

“Yes, we did.”

“What did she tell you about the photograph?”

“Objection,” said Shapiro. “Hearsay, Your Honor.”

Ito called the parties to the sidebar. Darden’s question, quite obviously, did call for hearsay evidence in response. But that was not the worst of it. The judge asked Darden which incident of domestic violence this photograph involved.

“I don’t know what the incident is that relates directly to this photograph,” Darden said.

Ito sighed, asked the jury to return to the jury room, and demanded that Darden explain how this photograph might be admissible. Darden said only that it had been found in Nicole’s safe-deposit box after her death, with the photographs from the 1989 beating.

“Counsel,” Ito said with mounting impatience, “you can’t just show horrible photographs without tying it to something relevant to this case.”

For once, the defense histrionics that followed were justified. “I have been practicing for a long time,” said Shapiro, “and I have never seen anything quite this extraordinary where a photograph that is clearly inadmissible is just thrown up on a giant-screen television for the jury to see…”

In legal terms, Darden had failed to establish the photograph’s “foundation”-this is, the time and place it was taken, along with the relevant surrounding circumstances. By showing the photograph to the jurors, Darden obviously intended for them to draw the inference that O.J. had caused the wounds. But he had no way of proving it. In shorter, less-publicized cases, this is the kind of error that results in convictions being overturned on appeal. As Ito put it, with characteristic restraint, “What concerns me is the rather inflammatory nature of that photograph, and to show it to the jury, without any foundation for it, is more than inappropriate.”

Ito levied less of a sanction than some judges might have. He simply instructed the jury to disregard the photograph and asked Darden to move on. From there, Darden wrapped it up with Denise pretty quickly. He brought out that O.J. had called Nicole a “fat pig” when she was pregnant-loathsome behavior, to be sure, but not exactly wife beating, either. She concluded her testimony with a description of O.J.’s behavior at Sydney’s dance recital in the early evening of June 12, 1994.

Darden asked about O.J.’s demeanor that night.

“Um,” said Denise, “he had a very bizarre look in his eyes. It was a very faraway look… It wasn’t like O.J., just walking into a place and being, you know-‘Hey, here I am’-you know, kind of sure of himself type of attitude. It was more of a-of a-like a glazed over, kind of frightening, dark eyes. It just didn’t look like the O.J. that we knew.”

Perhaps Denise really did see O.J. this way. But Cochran had these jurors pegged; unmoved by her tears, they regarded Denise with cold, hard stares.

Denise Brown’s testimony essentially closed the domestic-violence part of the prosecution’s case. To a jury predisposed to believe such evidence-or one inclined toward hostility for the defendant-the presentation might have had considerable impact. After all, O.J. had been convicted of beating his wife, and there had been a handful more of incidents of violence, at least according to her sister. The 911 tape from 1993 suggested that O.J. was certainly capable at least of violent anger toward his wife, and the stalking evidence, even if ambiguous, suggested a continuing obsession on his part. Overall, however, the domestic-violence evidence was just short enough of overwhelming that the defense could continue to ignore it. Shapiro, for example, barely cross-examined Denise Brown. Cochran’s mantra from his opening-this is a murder case, not a domestic-violence case-remained the core of the defense strategy.

So the prosecution, at this point, set out to prove its murder case. Marcia Clark called a series of witnesses who had testified at the preliminary hearing: the waiters at Mezzaluna who had served Nicole and her family on June 12; the bartender who took the call from Juditha Brown at about 9:40 P.M. and then ran out to the sidewalk to locate her dropped glasses; the dog walkers who tended to Nicole’s bereaved Akita and then located the bodies. The defense lawyers mostly gave these early witnesses a pass-until the police officers started taking the stand.

Cochran’s entire demeanor changed when he rose to cross-examine Robert Riske. A uniformed patrol officer, Riske had been the first member of the LAPD on the crime scene at Bundy, arriving at 12:13 A.M. on June 13. Under Clark’s questioning, Riske had testified about being directed to the bodies by Sukru Boztepe and his wife, Bettina Rasmussen. Riske had actually done very little. After briefly inspecting the bodies, he had walked through the house, collected Justin and Sydney from their upstairs bedrooms, and called for reinforcements. (Racial antennae were high even during this innocuous testimony. Riske mentioned that a sergeant named Coon arrived on the scene, prompting Clark to ask, “That Sergeant Coon, is he any relation to another one?” As this jury surely knew, Stacy Koon was one of the officers who had beaten Rodney King. There was no relation.)

Two themes stood out in Cochran’s cross-examination. First, he asked any number of questions about the cup of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream that Riske had discovered on a back stairway. Riske had said the dessert was “melting,” not “melted.” To Cochran’s way of thinking, that meant that the time of the murder must have been at 11:00 P.M. or even later; otherwise the ice cream would have been completely “melted.” What kind of ice cream was it? Did you take any pictures of it? Where exactly did you find this ice cream? Why didn’t you photograph the ice cream, preserve it, analyze it? Incredibly, Cochran spent several hours on this trivia with Riske and the officers who followed him.

The other theme was the coroner, who had not arrived on the scene to remove the bodies until 9:10 A.M. Again, according to Cochran’s suggestions to the jury, if the coroner had arrived on the scene earlier, he might have been able to pinpoint the time of death. Many more hours of cross-examination were devoted to this subject as well.

These two subjects had another common thread: As defense arguments, they were absurd. The police had no way of knowing for sure how melted the ice cream was when it was first placed by the stairs, presumably by Nicole. Thus, examining or photographing the ice cream later would have yielded no relevant information. Likewise, even if the coroner’s representatives had come to the murder scene within minutes of Riske’s arrival, they could not have made a relevant finding on the time of death. The prosecution asserted that the murder took place starting at about 10:15 P.M.; the defense claimed 10:35 P.M. or later. Forensic pathology is simply not capable of narrowing down with such precision a time of death. However, these arguments over the ice cream and the coroner still served Cochran’s purposes. As the questions were raised over and over again-to Riske; to his boss, Sergeant David Rossi; then to Detectives Ron Phillips and Tom Lange-Cochran put the officers on the defensive. By sheer force of repetition, Cochran made it sound like there had been some major police lapse at the crime scene. The focus thus shifted from O.J. Simpson to the deficiencies of the LAPD.

Cochran spent four days cross-examining Lange, the co-lead detective with his partner, Vannatter. Lange would not be riled. In fact, sometimes it seemed the detective was having trouble staying awake. Bald, with a bushy mustache that seemed to camouflage any change in expression, Lange met each of Cochran’s sallies with a phlegmatic reply. No, he didn’t call the coroner right away; no, he didn’t preserve the ice cream. In some respects, Cochran broke the rules of cross-examination. He didn’t ask closed-ended questions-that is, questions that can be answered only yes or no. Cochran’s attention wandered, and he let his witnesses wander, too. But what Cochran did very effectively was tell stories. The answers to his questions almost didn’t matter. Cochran was talking to the jury.

Telling a story is precisely what Cochran was doing when, early in the cross-examination of Lange, he asked about the detective’s arrival at the murder scene. “And then you drove from your home in Simi Valley down to the location, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“And how long did it take you to get from Simi Valley to the location in Brentwood?”

“Perhaps fifty minutes…”

The incantation of the fact that Lange lived in Simi Valley was anything but accidental. The place-even just the words “Simi Valley”-was anathema to black (and many white) Angelenos because it was the site of the notorious acquittal, on state charges, of the police officers who beat Rodney King. Overwhelmingly white, highly conservative, and not coincidentally the home of many Los Angeles police officers, Simi Valley had a reputation as the paradigmatic racist Southern California community. Cochran wanted the jury to know that Lange lived there.

The reference had actually been long planned. Bill Pavelic, the ex-LAPD renegade working for the defense team, had run the detectives’ names through several directories and never learned where they lived. But one time when Pavelic and the detectives were standing around during a search at Simpson’s property, Pavelic decided to make conversation with Lange. It was all very casual.

“Did you get much damage in the earthquake?” Pavelic asked.

“Not too bad,” said Lange.

“Oh, where do you live?”

“Simi Valley.”

Knowing he could use it, Pavelic filed the information away, and eventually he passed it along to Cochran.

During the cross-examination, shortly after the first two references to Lange’s home in Simi Valley, Cochran asked another question about some evidence the detective had found at Simpson’s home.

“You took those shoes home to Simi Valley with you?”

“That is correct,” Lange said.

Cochran used the early part of his cross-examination of Lange to expand on his theme of Nicole-as-sexual-predator. He asked pointedly if Lange had requested that Nicole’s body be tested with a rape kit. Since there was no evidence that she had been sexually assaulted-no removal of her clothing, for example-the only purpose of such a test would be to see if she had recently had intercourse. Cochran dwelled lovingly on the number of candles burning in the house when Lange arrived. In the living room? Yes. In the bedroom? Even in the bathroom? Yes. And, of course, the large bathtub was full of water.

“So would you say there were at least nine candles altogether burning at this point?”

“Yes.”

There was even music playing. “What kind of music did you hear?” Cochran asked.

“It seemed to me to be a new-wave-type music, instrumentals,” Lange said, apparently searching for the term New Age.

Cochran asked: “Kind of soft, romantic kind of thing?”

Lange said he couldn’t be sure, but the answer to a question like that one doesn’t matter.

Cochran interspersed a series of questions about frequent visitors to Nicole’s home, pointing out that Marcus Allen, the football star, seemed to be among the regular guests. He let linger the issue of what Allen was doing with Nicole.

“Did you know whether or not Miss Nicole Brown Simpson had a visitor that evening after 10:00, a male visitor? Do you know that?”

Ito overruled an objection and let Lange answer: “The only male visitor I’m aware of is the other victim.”

As if the point could be missed, Cochran followed up with “But in your investigative capacity, you decided not to order this rape kit which you could have ordered. Isn’t that correct, sir?”

It was correct, and Cochran wasn’t asking about rape. It was as if he had heard every argument made by Don Vinson, the prosecution’s ignored jury consultant. The questions reinforced the jury’s picture of Nicole as a slut who pursued men in general and craved black men in particular.

Chris Darden suffered as he watched Cochran push these buttons, and he took out his frustration in a particularly inappropriate way. On the night of February 22, the first day of Lange’s cross-examination, Darden was working in his office when he saw the daily discussion of the trial on Rivera Live, on the CNBC cable network. Darden called in to the station to add his own analysis (although, implausibly, he later asserted that he did not know his comments were being broadcast). Speaking with Geraldo Rivera, Darden laid into Lange’s performance as a witness. “I would like the officers to be a bit more aggressive,” Darden said. “They are answering the questions being put to them, and I think some of the questions, I think, are a bit ridiculous. And I wish that they would point that out to the jury on occasion.” Speaking of Cochran, Darden added, “I am sure he is scoring some points.”

Darden’s ill-advised phone call did nothing but make trouble for him. For starters, it was unseemly for a prosecutor in the middle of a murder trial to shoot the breeze with a talk-show personality. That alone violated the D.A.’s office policy. More important, Darden was publicly criticizing an ostensible ally, Lange, and implicitly chastising all of the officers who had testified. On Thursday morning, February 23, Darden’s colleagues made it clear to him that he should cease his role as a TV trial analyst. Lange and Vannatter-who stewed throughout the trial about a perceived lack of support from Clark and Darden-were furious.

Cochran sensed this prickly atmosphere and sought to exploit it. His suggestions on his second day of cross-examining Lange were even more outlandish, especially when he returned to his favorite project, dirtying up Nicole.

“Now,” Cochran began, “during the course of your investigation, do you know who Faye Resnick is?”

“Yes.”

“And how did you become aware of the name Faye Resnick during the course of your investigation?”

“When I learned that Faye Resnick was a friend of victim Nicole Brown Simpson,” the detective explained.

Cochran wanted his Faye Resnick theory in front of the jury-the idea, which never had any evidence to support it, that the murders had been committed by drug dealers looking for Resnick. To that end, Cochran needed to establish that Resnick had lived with Nicole for a few days in the beginning of June. But Cochran did not want to call Resnick as a defense witness. She loathed Simpson, thought he was guilty, and asserted that O.J. had told her he wanted to kill Nicole. Under the rules of evidence, Cochran couldn’t call her as a witness to tell some things (that she had moved in with Nicole) but not others (that O.J. had told her he wanted to kill Nicole). So Cochran tried to get his desired sliver of the story in through Lange.

“Did you learn,” Cochran asked Lange, “whether or not Faye Resnick moved in with Nicole Brown Simpson on Friday, June 3, 1994?”

Clark objected. The answer called for hearsay-i.e., what someone had told Lange. Ito sustained it.

Cochran tried another tack. “Did you ever ascertain whether or not Miss Nicole Brown Simpson had anyone who lived with her in the month before June 12, other than the children?”

Yes, said Lange.

“Did you find out… that Faye Resnick moved in with Nicole Brown Simpson on or about June 3, 1994?”

Clark objected, but this time Ito let Lange answer, and the detective said he had heard that Resnick had moved in on that date.

When Cochran asked another question about Resnick, Judge Ito called the lawyers to the sidebar. He posed a question that revealed much about his judicial philosophy, asking Clark if Resnick really had lived with Nicole. “Is this a disputed fact?” As always, Ito cared more about getting accurate information to the jury than about some of the finer points of evidence law. Clark was so angry she could barely speak. “I’m not-” Clark sputtered, “I’m not sure when Faye Resnick lived with her, if they ever lived there on any kind of a permanent basis… It doesn’t matter whether it is a disputed fact or not… We have all kinds of slop in the record now that has been thrown in front of this jury through counsel’s method of cross-examination by saying, ‘Have you heard this,’ ‘Do you know about that.’ ” Clark said Cochran should call a witness who could testify from firsthand knowledge that Resnick lived there.

Hearing this, Cochran decided to twit his adversaries. “I can choose the witness that I want,” Cochran said. “They obviously haven’t tried any cases in a long time, and obviously don’t know how, but this is cross-examination.”

Darden rose to Cochran’s taunting, saying in a voice loud enough to be heard across the courtroom: “Who is he talking about, doesn’t know how to try the case?”

“Wait, Mr. Darden,” Ito instructed. In an effort to keep some semblance of order, the judge had made a rule that only one lawyer per side could speak on any issue. This was Clark’s issue-and besides, Darden was just sparring with Cochran.

But Darden didn’t wait-he couldn’t control himself where Cochran was concerned, and he kept on talking against the judge’s orders. “Is he the only lawyer that knows how to try the case?” Darden blurted out.

Ito was appalled at Darden’s direct violation of his order: “I’m going to hold you in contempt,” the judge threatened.

Darden couldn’t stop. “I should be held in contempt. I have sat here and listened to-”

“Mr. Darden,” Ito continued, “I’m warning you right now.”

“This cross-examination is out of order,” Darden shot back.

Ito moved from his position by the sidebar back to the bench. Sighing, he excused the jury. The lawyers returned to their respective tables. The brief pause should have broken the tension and given Darden a moment to compose himself.

After the jury left, Ito turned to Darden. “Mr. Darden, let me give you a piece of advice. Take about three deep breaths, as I am going to do, and then contemplate what you are going to say next. Do you want to take a recess now for a moment?”

“I don’t require a recess,” Darden said.

“I will hear your comments at this point. I have cited you. Do you have any response?”

“I would like counsel, Your Honor,” said Darden. (It is not a good sign when a prosecutor feels the need to have his own lawyer in the middle of a murder trial.)

“You can have counsel,” Ito said coolly.

It was so simple. All Ito wanted was an apology. Every trial lawyer knows that judges sometimes act irrationally, rule incorrectly, act impetuously. Here Ito had arguably made a mistake by letting in hearsay evidence, and Darden had exploded. His job, his obligation as a prosecutor, was to apologize and get on with the case. Gracious and tolerant to a fault, Ito could not have been clearer about what he wanted, saying, “I invite counsel to… think very carefully about what they are going to say to the Court next. That is an opportunity to get up and say, ‘Gee, I’m sorry, I lost my head there, I apologize to the Court, I apologize to counsel.’ When I get that response, then we move on.”

Ito gave Darden a moment to confer with Clark. They stepped aside, and Darden shook his head. When Ito asked what they had decided, Clark said again that Darden wanted a lawyer for the contempt proceeding. Ito gave Darden more time to think it over. Once again, Clark said that Darden wanted to be represented by counsel. He would not apologize. Darden stood alone by the jury box, head down, arms crossed in front of him, agonizing.

Ito would be pushed no farther. “I’ve offered you now three times an opportunity to end this right now. This is very simple.” More silence.

Gerry Spence, the Wyoming attorney, was seated in the press section of the courtroom. (He was doing commentary on the trial for CNBC and other television stations.) Spence was so frustrated by Darden’s intransigence that he slammed a pad down on his thigh and said, “Jesus Christ!”

“Mr. Spence, your comments aren’t necessary,” Ito said.

Still, Darden said nothing.

Christopher Darden was no fool. He knew he should have learned to ignore Johnnie Cochran. Yet Darden’s feelings were so intense that he couldn’t help himself.

In some respects, Darden’s family story bore an uncanny resemblance to Cochran’s. Both their families had come from the South, and both had arrived on the West Coast as part of the great migration of African-Americans drawn by the prospect of work in factories during World War II. The Cochrans came from Louisiana and settled first in Oakland; Chris Darden’s father came from outside Tyler, Texas, and settled in Richmond, the city next door to Oakland. While Johnnie Cochran, Sr., had found work building troop ships for Bethlehem Steel, Eddie Darden welded submarines for the navy.

Despite these similarities, the two black families were separated by a gap that is no less real for being mostly invisible to white Americans, who tend to regard African-Americans as a single struggling social unit. To be sure, the Cochrans were no aristocrats and the Dardens no paupers, but still, the difference between them was class. Johnnie Cochran, Sr., bolted the blue-collar world as soon as Japan surrendered. His first son came of age with not just a hope but an expectation that he would surpass the considerable success of his father. Eddie Darden, in contrast, had a blowtorch in his hand until the day he retired, decades later. His son Chris, the third of eight children, had no family guide in the hunt for entree into the professional world.

Richmond itself conferred few advantages. A sleepy community of 21,000 at the outbreak of the war, it became a veritable metropolis of 100,000 within a year. Kaiser, Southern Pacific Railways, and Bethlehem Steel-not to mention the great military shipyards of Port Chicago and Mare Island-inhaled new workers as quickly as they could settle into the flimsy shacks that were being thrown up along treeless streets every day. But unlike Oakland, where black folks eventually gained political power comparable to their numbers, Richmond remained for years under the control of a small white elite. Services were poor. Richmond had no superior court, no county hospital. “It was a plantation,” according to one of the few prominent black lawyers in Richmond, “the Mississippi of the West.”

In Eddie Darden’s case, that racism extended to the workplace as well. He toiled as a civilian employee in the vast naval shipyard at Mare Island, in nearby Valeo. The better-paying and higher-skilled positions at Mare Island were called journeymen jobs; they were for welders, pipefitters, sandblasters, and the like. Those jobs went overwhelmingly to whites. For many years, the black workers, like Chris’s father, were allowed to work only as helpers, the lower-paid assistants to the journeymen. It was only with the birth of affirmative-action practices in the 1960s and 1970s that blacks like Eddie Darden became journeymen in any significant numbers. In addition to raising her eight children, Chris’s mother, Marie, worked in a school cafeteria-another typical dead-end occupation traditionally filled by the African-Americans of Richmond.

The Dardens had enough money to buy a small, two-story frame house in the working-class south side of Richmond, but there was no money for luxuries, or even such basic necessities as dentist visits for all the children. An absence of early care sentenced Chris to a lifetime of dental miseries.

The Darden family did have, however, similar attitudes about education to the Cochrans’. Mr. and Mrs. Darden believed that only schools with significant numbers of white children received adequate resources, so those would be the schools for their children. Here the Dardens were fortunate, because John F. Kennedy High School opened within a few blocks of their home just as their first children were coming of age. A modern building, with a pool and several athletic fields and a fully integrated student body of about two thousand, Kennedy High drew the city’s most motivated students. Edna, the oldest Darden child, served as student body president in 1972; Chris’s beloved older brother, Michael, came next and was a standout on the track team, though he later succumbed to a life of drug addiction. Never the favored son like Johnnie Cochran, Chris Darden took his place in the Kennedy High class of ’74 with something to prove.

A quiet kid, with a temper that heated and cooled quickly, Darden worked hard in school, made a mark as both a student and an athlete, and held down a job in a liquor store besides. His passion was football, where he played wide receiver. (He neither wore number 32 nor especially idealized O.J. Simpson; like most people in Richmond, Darden rooted for the Oakland Raiders.) Darden never had much of a chance to shine on the football field because he played behind Robert “Spider” Gaines, who went on to the University of Washington, where he would win the most valuable player award in the Rose Bowl. More dogged than especially talented, Darden shifted his energies to track, where he ran the quarter mile and served as captain of the cross-country team. A National Honor Society student, he scraped together the money for junior college and then, a year later, for San Jose State.

The mid-1970s were a dramatic time to be a young track athlete at San Jose State. In the 1968 Olympic games in Mexico City, Tommie Smith and John Carlos-who were students at San Jose State-won the gold and bronze medals in the 200-meter dash. During the awards ceremony, the two young men shocked the world by giving black power salutes during the playing of the national anthem. Smith and Carlos had left the university by the time Darden arrived, but their fiery spirit still resonated on the track team and, indeed, among black students there in general. Yet even more than the track team, the formative experience of Darden’s college years came from his membership in the Alpha Psi Alpha fraternity.

Predominantly black fraternities play an important role in African-American life. Denied access to many of the networks that whites take for granted, many black college men form lifelong attachments to these institutions, whose influence stretches well beyond campus walls. It is a far cry from the Animal House model of many white frats, especially at Alpha Psi Alpha, the oldest and most prestigious black fraternity (Martin Luther King, Jr., and Thurgood Marshall were members). Alphas at San Jose State had an activist, even militant, cast. (In a characteristic difference, Johnnie Cochran belonged to the UCLA chapter of Kappa Alpha Psi, which was known as the “playboys,” the most social of the black frats.) The Alphas didn’t even have a building on the San Jose State campus, so they met in classrooms, where they devoted themselves to organizing projects like a tutoring program for kids in the city’s poorer neighborhoods.

Darden’s frat name was Sugar D-because, it is said, he was sweet. He led quietly, more by example than exhortation, but his passionate commitment to his fellow African-Americans stood out even in that politicized era. At the stylized interrogation sessions for prospective Alphas, Darden always had the same question for pledges: “What are you going to do for your people?” Even before Chris Darden became famous in the Simpson case, a younger Alpha had saved for many years a note that Darden had written to him upon his joining the fraternity: “It matters not who you are, where you come from, or how you think-what matters is whatever the hell you do with it.” Signed, Sugar D.

He quit track suddenly. A history professor in Afro-American studies, Gloria Alibaruho, had become a mentor to him. Darden later wrote that when he studied the world of his ancestors, “my eyes opened like slipped blinds and all of a sudden my own life was explained to me. Martin Luther King had taught me what was fair; the Black Panther newspapers screamed at me what was unjust; but it was Gloria Alibaruho who taught me who I was. It was like discovering gravity. It explained the universe to me. So, this is why people treat me the way they do. This is why women grab their handbags when I get on an elevator.”

Alibaruho sat Darden down and appealed to his growing political consciousness. Speaking both metaphorically and literally, she asked him, “When are you going to stop running in circles?” He did just that and, soon after, applied to law school. He took an apartment in Richmond and commuted across the Bay Bridge to Hastings law school, in San Francisco. His passage was anything but smooth. As Darden later admitted, he shoplifted regularly through college, and he fathered a child out of wedlock while a student at Hastings. He graduated in 1980 and took a job with the National Labor Relations Board for $17,000 a year. A few months later, he moved to Los Angeles and the district attorney’s office. The money was better-$24,000 a year-and, as he said at the time, “I want people like me making the decisions.”

Darden had come farther and overcome more than any of the principal lawyers in the Simpson trial, and probably bore the best intentions as well. But he was also different from Cochran, Shapiro, and Marcia Clark in another way. Chris Darden was not, alas, an especially talented trial lawyer.

For one thing, Darden had tried relatively few cases. After the customary few years of working minor cases, Darden spent the bulk of his fifteen years as a prosecutor in the Special Investigations Division of the district attorney’s office. SID has the most politically sensitive duty on the D.A.’s staff: the investigation of public officials, most notably officers in the LAPD. The lawyers at SID, including Darden, approached their work meticulously. In light of the difficulties of prosecuting the D.A.’s usual ally, the cops, the lawyers in SID filed charges only in the strongest cases. It was not unusual, for example, that Darden had only one major trial at SID during his tenure there. As it turned out, though, he was the prosecutor in one of the most notorious episodes in the modern history of the LAPD, the 1988 police raid on apartments at Thirty-ninth Street and Dalton Avenue. It was supposed to be a rather minor drug bust, but the eighty LAPD officers who went to the scene wreaked havoc that had lasting repercussions. The raid eventually cost the city more than $3 million in civil settlements to the victims, and Darden investigated and prosecuted the three top police officials responsible. “Chris felt very strongly that we needed to hold the command level responsible, and at that point Daryl Gates got involved,” Ira Reiner, who was the district attorney at the time, said later. The police chief wrote Reiner a letter claiming that Darden was pushing too hard, being too aggressive. “Anyone else would have laughed it off,” Reiner continued, “but not Chris. He wanted to fire back a letter. This was a classic case of police misconduct, and of course we went ahead with it. Chris handled it with commitment and emotion. That’s just the way he operates.” In the case Darden tried, all three officers were acquitted.

Darden’s first important moment in the Simpson trial came shortly before opening statements, when Ito was weighing whether to allow the defense to cross-examine Mark Fuhrman about his prior use of the word “nigger.” Other prosecutors had conducted the bulk of the legal argument on the issue, but Darden rose on January 13 as a sort of expert witness on the subject.

“It is a dirty, filthy word,” Darden said. “It is not a word that I allow people to use in my household. I’m sure Mr. Cochran doesn’t. And the reason we don’t is because it is an extremely derogatory and denigrating term, because it is so prejudicial and so extremely inflammatory that to use that word in any situation will evoke some type of emotional response from any African-American within earshot of that word.”

Darden said allowing use of the word “will do one thing. It will upset the black jurors. It will issue a test… and the test will be, Whose side are you on? The side of the white prosecutors and the white policemen, or on the side of the black defendant and his very prominent black lawyer? That is what it is going to do: Either you are with the Man or you are with the Brothers. That is what it does. That is exactly what it does.”

Darden’s speech was about evenly divided between text and subtext. In part, he simply meant what he said; “nigger” is a uniquely offensive epithet, and Darden thought Ito should exercise caution before he allowed anyone to utter it in court. But Darden’s words also reflected his frustration at how the defense had seized the racial high ground in the trial from the beginning. The strategy Shapiro advocated from practically the day Simpson was arrested-which Cochran embellished even beyond the original conception-called for placing race at the center of the defense. That strategy started with Fuhrman and went on to include the focus on race in jury selection, the defense obsession with police misconduct, and the trashing of Nicole. As a prosecutor who had devoted his career to ferreting out genuine police racism, Darden seethed to see O.J. Simpson-who had done precisely nothing for his fellow African-Americans over the course of his lifetime-capitalizing on his race. In his frustration, Darden started to ramble.

“Mr. Cochran and the defense, they have a purpose in going into that area, and the purpose is to inflame the passions of the jury and to ask them to pick sides not on the basis of the evidence in this case. And the evidence in this case against this defendant is overwhelming,” he went on. “I don’t have to educate the Court on this point, but we have a right to a fair trial just like the defendant has. We are not running around or talking about or seeking to introduce to the jury the notion that this defendant has a fetish for blond-haired white women. That would be inappropriate. That would inflame the passions of the jury. It would be outrageous.”

It was Darden at this point who was outrageous, in floating the white-women obsession for the benefit of the television cameras. After nearly twenty minutes of stream-of-consciousness babbling, Darden finally sat down.

Johnnie Cochran had planned to leave court early that day, but he remained to respond to Darden’s monologue on the “n-word.” Cochran walked slowly to the podium. Bigger, older, stronger, wiser, Cochran dominated Darden in both physical and intellectual terms. “I have a funeral to attend today, [and] there are few things in life more important than attending the funeral… where you have been asked to speak, but I would be remiss were I not at this time to take this opportunity to respond to my good friend Mr. Chris Darden.”

“Good friend”-that was a tip-off to the assault to come.

“His remarks this morning are perhaps the most incredible remarks I’ve heard in a court of law in the thirty-two years I have been practicing law. His remarks are demeaning to African-Americans as a group. And so I want, before I go to this funeral, to apologize to African-Americans across this country. Not every African-American feels that way. It is demeaning to our jurors to say that African-Americans who have lived under oppression for 200-plus years in this country cannot work within the mainstream, cannot hear these offensive words… I am ashamed that Mr. Darden would allow himself to become an apologist for this man [Fuhrman].”

Darden was beside himself. He stood up and walked in a tiny circle behind his chair, as if he were weighing whether to walk out. Finally, he sat down and swiveled his chair away from the podium in symbolic, if rather childish, protest.

By overstating his own case about the “n-word” so dramatically, Darden had opened the door for Cochran’s righteous indignation. “All across America today, believe me, black people are offended at this very moment,” Cochran went on, “and so I have to say this was uncalled for, it is unwarranted, and most unfortunate for somebody that I have a lot of respect for-and perhaps he has become too emotional about this.” Which Darden certainly had.

When Cochran finally finished this peroration, he pushed to an even greater theatrical height, emotionally embracing Simpson and all the other lawyers at the defense table. Leaving at last for the funeral, he had time only to whisper a brief word to Darden-the classic rebuke: “Nigger, please…”

Darden never really recovered his composure. In repartee among the lawyers at the sidebar, he often revealed an astonishing lack of professionalism. One day early in the trial, Darden suggested that Ito should make an instruction clearer to a witness, then added, “I’m not criticizing you, Judge. You’re my bud.” A shocked Cochran interrupted: “It’s not a question of him being your bud. I move to strike that.” Sometimes Darden’s humor misfired. On another occasion at the sidebar, he protested that Cochran “has stepped on my shined Ferragamos. You know, I think he should have to buy me another pair of Ferragamos.” The ever tolerant Ito answered, “Come on, guys.” More seriously, Darden wore his emotions on his sleeve in front of the jury, alternately mugging and scowling to telegraph his reactions to the testimony. Sometimes he jangled his keys in irritation. Whatever the message Darden intended to send with these gestures, the jury only picked up on his nervousness and immaturity.

Of course, the jury had been excused when Darden had his showdown with Ito on February 23, during Lange’s cross-examination. After a third invitation to apologize-and several more agonizing moments of silence-Darden broke down and offered the most grudging words of conciliation.

“Your Honor,” he said. “Thank you for the opportunity to review the transcript of the sidebar. It appears that the Court is correct, that perhaps my comments may have been or are somewhat inappropriate. I apologize to the Court. I meant no disrespect.”

Ito, in contrast, was far more gracious than Darden had any right to expect. “Mr. Darden,” the judge said, “I accept your apology. I apologize to you for my reaction as well. You and I have known each other for a number of years, and I know that your response was out of character, and I’ll note it as such.”

Ito then invited the jury back to the courtroom, and Cochran resumed his cross-examination of Detective Lange. It didn’t last long, however, because a new and even more bizarre crisis erupted. The star of Johnnie Cochran’s opening statement-Rosa Lopez, the maid in the house next door to O.J.’s-was threatening to return to her native El Salvador.