Without a Doubt

Double Solitaire

CAR TAPE. October 2, 1994. Everything’s coming back to him. He’s got her blood on his socks in the bedroom. We’ve got her blood and Ron’s blood in his Bronco. We’ve got her blood and Ron’s on that glove at Rockingham, and maybe Simpson’s blood too. After we finish the testing we’ll know more. Now it seems we’ve even pinned down the shoe print to a style of Bruno Magli shoe… The same size as the defendant’s shoe! I mean, it’s just unbelievable!

The defense is gonna come up with their space invader theories. It’s gonna be like something out of the National Enquirer. You know, police bungled and fumbled and goofed everything up. And so, right, that’s how the evidence all came back to him. If it’s a frame-up, why frame him, of all people? Couldn’t you think of somebody less likable to frame? I mean, who wants to try a case against Yogi Bear?

You shoulda tried this case in Santa Monica.

Gimme a break.

Ever since the verdict in the criminal trial, TV and radio commentators, print pundits, old armchair warriors with a whole lot more ego than common sense have weighed in with their theories about what went wrong. First off, they would have you believe that we blew it by not taking this case to the suburbs. What they mean-but never have the guts to come right out and say-is this: “Why didn’t you go shopping around for a congenial, white jury who’d convict the son of a bitch?”

The grumblers are usually people who should know better-former prosecutors like Vincent Bugliosi, who actually faulted us for moving the trial from Santa Monica. Gil Garcetti filed this case exactly where he should have filed it: downtown L.A.

Regardless of where a crime occurs, long-cause cases, as they’re called, virtually always end up downtown. In June of 1994, when the Bundy murders took place, this was not even discretionary; it was policy. Set by the Superior Court. Several years earlier, a panel of assignment judges put their heads together to try to figure out how to clear the backlog in the branch courts. One of the tougher measures the judges took to rectify this problem was to require that any case that stood to go on for longer than four weeks be filed Downtown, where the D.A. has deputies, clerks, and support services to handle it.

(People have asked me why the civil trial was tried in Santa Monica. The answer is simple: Civil litigants get to pick their forum. They don’t get directed to a particular venue at the command of the bench the way criminal cases do.)

Only by a fluke does a long-cause criminal case ever end up in one of the branch courts. The trial judge in the Rodney King case, for instance, was downtown but transferred to Simi Valley and dragged the case along with him. The results were disastrous. An all-white jury acquitted four white LAPD officers of beating King even though the crime was immortalized on videotape. Los Angeles erupted into a race riot.

Every time I hear about Bugliosi or some other clown mouthing off to the press, I have to grit my teeth and count to ten. You shoulda tried this case in Santa Monica. Do they realize what they’re saying?

To suggest that the D.A.‘s office should have ignored standard procedure and filed this case elsewhere for purely tactical advantage is, in my opinion, a shameless and inexcusable display of racism. It presupposes that only a white, upscale, West Side jury can deliver justice. Wrong. Dead wrong. I’ve seen Downtown juries made up of poor blacks and Hispanics do justice time and time again.

By the time the Simpson case landed on my desk, I’d been trying cases Downtown for more than ten years. I’d had defendants and juries of all races. I’d tried twenty homicides and won nineteen of them. I’d tried scores of lesser felonies. Won most, lost some. None of the verdicts seemed completely off the wall to me. Whenever I’d gotten to talk to jurors who’d delivered unfavorable verdicts, I found they’d had their reasons, usually good ones.

To Vincent Bugliosi and those who share his worldview, a good prosecutor is apparently a slick operator who works the angles. And the prescribed angle in this case would have been to steer clear of dark skins, particularly those belonging to middle-aged black women. Sounds ugly-because it is ugly. As well as impractical, unethical, and unconscionable.

One of the proponents of this embarrassing thesis seems to have been none other than our own jury consultant, Don Vinson. After the trial, he apparently met Bugliosi for lunch at-where else-the California Club. Like Cassandra spurned, Vinson wailed that he’d warned the D.A.‘s office of the dangers of picking middle-aged black women as jurors. When word of this got back to me, I just shook my head. I would like to take this opportunity to ask Don Vinson, “Exactly what would you have had me do?”

It must have been apparent even to someone as stubbornly ignorant of the law as Vinson that you cannot mount a campaign to target black women. It’s illegal, for God’s sake. And assuming for the moment that it was not illegal, excluding them would be an impossibility. Blacks accounted for over half of our eventual jury pool. A full three quarters of those blacks were women. Like it or not, black women were going to be a powerful presence on this jury.

I didn’t need Vinson to tell me that black women-or at least certain black woman-would be a tough sell. As I mentioned earlier, our grand jury adviser, Terry White, had let me know that a couple of middle-aged women among the grand jurors had seemed maternally inclined toward Simpson. Terry is a black man and had been one of the prosecutors on the Rodney King trial. He is infinitely better informed on issues of race and the law than Don Vinson. The fact is, Terry thought we could bring them around. We’d both seen many juries of black women who were more than willing to convict black men.

For my part, I was perfectly confident that if O. J. Simpson had been some black sanitation worker who had killed his white wife in a fit of rage, a jury of twelve middle-aged black women would have convicted the jerk in a heartbeat. The bedrock issue here was not race-but race coupled with celebrity. It was not so much that Simpson was a black man; he was a famous black man. And a well-loved famous black man. Black jurors of either sex were going to feel reluctant to knock an African-American icon off his pedestal. And in combination with race, celebrity complicated this case in ways that none of us had ever before had to consider.

That’s why so much was riding on the jury questionnaire.

Jury selection in the Simpson case was set to begin on September 26. Ito had ordered up an unusually large pool, one thousand candidates. He clearly foresaw a long, drawn-out contest and wanted to make sure we had the bodies to cover it. The first step was elementary triage: he would call in the whole bunch and hand out a one-page screening questionnaire to determine if serving on a long case would cause them hardship.

I always hated this phase. It was during hardship questioning that a lot of the better-educated, solid-citizen types would find a way to get themselves excused from service. People with steady jobs and career commitments can’t afford to take time off, because employers won’t cover their salary for more than ten days of jury service. Once they heard the estimated trial time for a long-cause case, as many as 70 percent of them would walk right out the door. These people, the ones with with steady jobs and career commitments, are usually pro-prosecution jurors. It was so ironic. The lengthy cases were by and large the most serious ones, often death-penalty cases where you want the most intelligent jurors possible. And yet if one candidate with a college degree ever made it through hardship and the gauntlet of defense challenges, we always regarded it as a miracle.

The survivors of hardship questioning-in this case a pool of three hundred-would receive the full-blown questionnaire containing questions submitted by both the prosecution and the defense. The questions themselves had to survive a rigorous weeding-out process: both sides would submit questions and, after a lot of angry rhetoric and head-banging, the judge would decide which ones made the cut.

By the time we got to drafting questions, Bill and I had already given the questionnaire a lot of thought. Our questions had to be blunt enough to hit the hot-button issues head-on: “Have you ever been beaten by a spouse?” “Have you ever been arrested by the LAPD?” “Do you fantasize about being O. J. Simpson’s date at the Rose Bowl?” That sort of thing. They had to be tactful enough to avoid offending anyone we might have hoped to win over. They had to be sly enough to trip up anyone who was lying. Usually you’ll find people who’ll lie like crazy to avoid serving. But here we had to entertain the possibility that the opposite would occur; at least some opportunists out there might be looking to cash in on their stint in the jury box at the Trial of the Century.

After we’d spent God knows how many hours clinking glasses with Don Vinson, I expected that he would at least send us a list of questions, if not a completed questionnaire, for our review. Jo-Ellan Dimitrius, after all, did the entire thing for the Simpson team. But the deadline for submitting our draft to the court was approaching, and Vinson had sent us nothing.

“What’s he waiting for,” I groused to Bill, “an engraved invitation?”

Bill promised he’d give Vinson a nudge; I assumed he did. But days passed. Nothing came by winged messenger from DecisionQuest. What Bill finally received was one question scribbled on a piece of legal paper. I don’t even recall what it was. I do recall it was not even remotely useful.

In the end, Bill and I just had to knuckle down and do the thing the way we normally did it: by ourselves. We recruited our DV experts, Scott Gordon and Lydia Bodin, to work on domestic violence. Our DNA expert, Lisa Kahn, oversaw the science part. Everyone pitched in on the celebrity issue. Question on the table: How do you get at the issue of fame? It’s one thing to prosecute a defendant who’s notorious-someone who’s well known but not particularly well liked, like Charles Keating, or the prosecutor’s dream defendant, Charles Manson. With a flaming psychopath in the dock, all you have to do is get up and recite your Social Security number to win a conviction. This was not the case with a sympathetic figure, one idolized the way O. J. Simpson was. I didn’t know of anyone who’d ever tackled a problem of this magnitude. Somehow we’d have to get the jurors past the defendant’s public image and get them to acknowledge that all they knew about O. J. Simpson was a slick facade.

We all agreed that we should seed the questionnaire throughout with celebrity questions, some direct, others indirect. First we’d ask jurors where they got their news: TV, radio, print? A juror who got most of his news from tabloids and watching evening news magazines like Hard Copy would obviously be a problem for us. Not only would he have been fed a steady diet of misinformation, but his viewing preference might show that he had a more than average interest in the cult of celebrity itself.

Some celebrity questions suggested themselves.

“Have you ever asked a celebrity for an autograph?”

“Have you ever written to a celebrity?”

Certain questions taken together provided internal checks. If, for instance, a juror wrote that he watched news on three channels daily, and yet insisted that he had no knowledge of the Simpson case, we’d have some reason to believe that he was being less than truthful.

I have to say that in this instance Lance Ito really came through for us. He gave us almost every question we asked for. Of course, he gave the defense almost everything they asked for, as well. The result was a document at least an inch thick. It was the longest questionnaire that either Bill or I had ever seen. Seventy-five pages each! I heard that when prospective jurors first saw it, they groaned. And I thought, What are you complaining about? You’re not gonna have to go through each and every one of these suckers comma by frigging comma.

One afternoon during the last week in September, a law clerk wheeled a steel cart into my office and unloaded four cardboard boxes of completed questionnaires. Three hundred of them. Bill and I just looked at each other. It was a look that said, The journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. He took half. I took half. Then we burrowed into our respective offices and started to work.

The job wasn’t as simple as reading through the questionnaire once and jotting down notes. I had to flag key responses and then summarize them on a separate ten-page form that Bill and I had devised for the purpose. We’d also come up with a system for grading each juror on a scale of 1 to 5, 5 being the best. It was incredibly clumsy, but we had no precedent for a job this large.

I lost track of the time. When I finally put my pen down and looked up, it was dark outside. My God, I thought. I’d started at three o’clock in the afternoon and it was already past seven. And I’d only gotten through three of these monsters!

I walked down the empty halls to Bill’s office. To tell you the truth, I liked this place a whole lot better when it was deserted. The feeling of being alone in the office gave me a sense of freedom that I found invigorating and at the same time peaceful. But right now I was feeling low and needed bucking up.

Bill’s door was open. I could see him hunched over his desk, poring over a document tidily flagged with Post-its.

“How many have you gotten through?” I asked him dourly.

“Only two. I can’t believe it.”

“We’ve gotta find a better system,” I told him.

We heard a rustle in the hall, and just then Jonathan Fairtlough stuck his head in the door. Jonathan, a freckled young Irishman with an unruly shock of brown hair, had been one of our first picks for the team. He was full of energy, optimism, and expansive ideas for graphic presentations. Jonathan was also an electronics genius, whom we called in whenever the computers or even the copiers went on the blink. He never seemed to get tired. At least not at that point.

“Hey, boss,” he said. It was directed at both of us. “Anything I can do for you?”

“As a matter of fact,” I told him, “we’re trying to come up with a way to streamline the summaries. Any ideas?”

Jonathan thought for a moment.

“Why don’t you just dictate the important stuff into a minicassette? Then get the secretaries to type them up for you.”

Bill and I looked at each other. Out of the mouths of babes!

After that, we picked up our speed a couple of knots, but we still remained in danger of drowning beneath swells of detail. We needed some way to make the task more concrete, more visual. I recalled a system I’d had picked up from another D.A. named Pat Dixon. He’d tried a lot of long-cause cases, and he’d devised a system for jury selection. Before voir dire, he would make up a pack of yellow cardboard cards, about three inches by three, one for each juror in the pool. He’d jot down pertinent information about each one on the front. Then he’d deal the cards. Twelve of them arranged in two rows of six, a simulated jury box. This helped him to visualize what those twelve people, each with his own history and set of prejudices, might look sitting next to the others. He’d take one candidate-maybe a crotchety contrarian-and try to figure out the rating each side would give him. Then he’d try to figure out which side was likely to get him struck for cause and which would have to use a peremptory challenge. The contrarian would stay, or he’d go. Pat would do this until he had combined the cards in all their plausible permutations. Whenever I went past his office, I’d see him sitting, staring hour after hour at the cards before him, playing this game of lawyer’s solitaire.

So I made up a pack for Bill and me. Three hundred yellow cardboard cards. In the late afternoon, or whenever we had a few moments, Bill and I would meet in one of our offices and pull out the pack and start dealing. We’d add a juror to the rotation to see how he or she fit into the mix. We’d rotate the least desirable candidate out. We kept looking for the perfect ensemble. Or at least an acceptable one.

It was dismal going. Any way you shuffled the deck, this was far and away the worst pool of jurors either of us had ever seen. Few of these people had ever taken college courses, let alone gotten a degree. Many were out of work. No one had anything good to say about the LAPD. An uncomfortably large percentage of them either knew someone who had been arrested or had been arrested themselves. The Bronco chase seemed to arouse in them nothing but regret for the sufferings of the defendant. “Poor guy, gone to visit his wife’s grave and all he gets is grief from the law.” At the very worst, Simpson’s actions were seen as “bizarre.” Almost no one believed that he had been trying to escape.

Before the questionnaires came in, Bill and I had been going back and forth on whether we should introduce the Bronco chase as evidence. Do we offer up the eight thousand bucks, the passport, the fake mustache and beard? To us, of course, these items seemed very incriminating. But in light of the responses we were getting on the questionnaire, introducing them carried substantial risks. First of all, the money had been found on Cowlings, not Simpson. The goatee, mustache, and passport were found in Cowlings’s Bronco. Proving that Simpson even knew about these items would be difficult. I was convinced he did, but demonstrating it was another matter.

Worse, if we introduced the Bronco evidence, it would give the defense an opening to slip in the records of the calls Simpson had made from his cell phone while motoring up the 405. We’d get the tape of Tom Lange talking him in off the freeway, telling him what a wonderful guy he was, how his children needed him; in the background, we’d hear Simpson’s groans of anguish. We’d get a parade of witnesses who would recall the tearful protestations of innocence and grief. All the defendant’s denials would come in through the back door of these phone-call witnesses. O. J. Simpson would be allowed, in effect, to offer emotional testimony on his own behalf without ever having to take the witness stand. (In a criminal trial, only the defense can call the defendant to the stand.) Whatever hope we had of getting to cross-examine Simpson would wash right out the courtroom door in a river of crocodile tears.

To make the risk worthwhile, we’d needed to offer proof of flight so unequivocal that it would expose the phone calls to family and friends as the shams they were. Now, I might hear one of these tapes and think, You sniveling bastard; what about the pair you murdered? But to our prospective jurors-at least the ones who revealed themselves in these questionnaires as an unchartered chapter of the Juice Fan Club-he would appear nothing but sympathetic.

During the months since the verdict, I’ve gotten hammered repeatedly for “failing” to introduce evidence from that chase. Certain old armchair warriors have gone so far as to call it a breach of prosecutorial responsibility. Let me set the record straight. No prosecutor is compelled to produce evidence that he feels might work to his detriment. There is no right or wrong in this matter. It’s a judgment call. I decided to keep it out; another prosecutor might have decided differently. But once he’d made that call, he’d better have been prepared to take the consequences should the thing jump back and bite him in the ass.

If I had it to do again, with the jury God saw fit to grant us, I’d make exactly the same call.

CAR TAPE. October 2, 1994… Constant anxiety… I feel like I can’t breathe thinking about all the work I have to do, and I don’t have the time for it. I’m so tired. Tired of seeing my face in the magazines and… tired of everything. Just plain tired.

By the time I’d read through eighty of the questionnaires, I was so depressed I could hardly speak. On our scale of 1 to 5, only ten ranked as high as a 4. The rest of the pool was grouped down around 2 or 1½.

But the worst of it was the lying.

An anthropologist reading through these questionnaires would probably conclude that he’d stumbled upon the remnants of some lost civilization. In the midst of the most media-saturated city in the world, we’d somehow managed to find three hundred human beings who claimed never to watch television, listen to the radio, or read newspapers. These pristine souls insisted that they didn’t know anything about a case that permeated every streetcorner conversation between East L.A. and Santa Monica. Under questioning, however, this astounding phenomenon would prove illusory. When we pressed the jurors for specifics about the Bronco chase, it would come out that they’d read and seen a great deal. But on the questionnaires, they told us anything they thought we wanted to hear, just to get on the jury.

My head ached. My eyes were burning. Why, on this of all cases, did we wind up with the fucking jury pool from hell?

For the three weeks it took to collate those questionnaires, I dragged myself home each night in a stupor of fatigue, bowed under the weight of the knowledge that I’d have to go in there and fight every day in a battle that might already be lost.

There seemed to be no safe corner. During my waking hours the phone was constantly ringing, or my beeper was going off. Every ten seconds someone was knocking on the door of my office saying, “Got a minute? Got a minute?” Patti Jo Fairbanks, our senior legal assistant, did her best to run interference for me. She screened my phone messages, handing over only the ones with top priority. She posted signs on my door that read, “Don’t Knock. Keep Out!”

At the end of three mind-numbing weeks, I completed my summaries of all three hundred questionnaires. I picked up Bill’s to compare our observations-and was stunned. Bill had uniformly rated all the jurors much higher than I had. In one instance he had given a 5 to a juror I’d rated a 0! Was I losing my mind?

That night I went down to his office. “Bill,” I asked, “have you noticed a discrepancy in our grading?”

“Yeah.” He looked glum. “Let’s talk.”

I pulled the problem juror-his 5, my 0.

“What about this one?”

He glanced over the summary. His face fell even further. “I don’t know what I was thinking,” he said. “Maybe I’m just trying to convince myself that we’ve got a chance.”

I knew exactly what Bill was feeling. He was in denial. I think we both were. The prospect of a bitterly fought trial we knew we could never win was just too much to bear.

You can’t acknowledge that a situation is hopeless. It destroys your will to fight. And so Bill and I reached a tacit arrangement in which we ended up supporting each other’s delusions about the candidates filling out those questionnaires.

Yeah, maybe this one isn’t so bad. Maybe we can get her to listen, even though she considers the defendant a “hunk” and named her firstborn Orenthal. Yeah, yeah. It might happen.

Something might happen. There might be a miracle.

Meanwhile, Bill and I racked our brains trying to come up with ways to keep the jury pool from being contaminated by the avalanche of misinformation issuing from the press daily. Normally, it’s the judge’s job to protect the jury pool from such pollution, but Lance didn’t seem to have a clue. We begged Ito to put off jury selection until after we finished arguments on admissibility of DNA, something that stood to be a long and complicated public brawl. Why pick a jury and then send them home, where they could listen to the defense belittle the science of DNA testing? But Lance didn’t see the problem.

Ito set voir dire for October 12. At the very least, we pleaded with him, bring the jurors into the courtroom one at a time. If you don’t, we told him, you’re going to have jurors discussing gossip and half-truths right in front of the whole pool. Once again, motion denied. It would be a cattle call, everyone sitting together, every juror questioned right out there in the open.

On the Wednesday morning we were to start voir dire I had arrived early and shut myself in my office to practice my questions. When finally I looked at my watch, it was half an hour to show time. Odd, I thought, I haven’t heard from Bill. Patti Jo knocked on my door. She looked worried.

“Bill’s sick,” she told me. “He can’t make it in today.”

“You’re kidding, right? Tell me it’s a joke. We’re supposed to start voir dire in about twenty-seven minutes!”

It was no joke. Bill had been looking haggard and drawn lately. I knew he hadn’t been sleeping well. The stress was taking its toll on him. Come to think of it, it had kept him home on the first day of hardship questioning, too. Now this! If Ito didn’t grant me a continuance, I was screwed.

When I got to court, with my heart in my throat, I asked to postpone the proceedings. Shapiro objected but, to my utter amazement, Lance backed me up. He pointed out to Shapiro that if “Mr. Cochran [were] similarly afflicted… I would exercise the same discretion and allow you to trail it a day.”

Lance caught me totally off guard.

I was so grateful and relieved that I couldn’t even manage a gracious reply. Maybe Ito wasn’t such a bad guy. Just in a little over his head.

Bill returned the following morning. Nothing to get alarmed about, he told us. Just a touch of the flu. He looked pale, but reasonably fit. Ready to kick ass.

The rail is the three-foot-high wooden divider that separates the lawyers and parties to the action from the spectators. But its importance far transcends that of a physical barrier. The rail is an unofficial line of demarcation separating the players from the watchers.

Don Vinson wanted to sit with us at counsel’s table. I was opposed to that. The last thing we needed, in my opinion, was our jury-most of whom perceived their fortunes as blighted by accidents or crimes of social injustice-associating us with this well-fed, monogrammed, cuff-linked fat cat.

Vinson’s gall seemed all the more amazing in light of his record of broken promises. He’d assured us that he would come up with a way to give us a computerized profile of each juror. But when we’d sent him the questionnaires, he couldn’t deliver. The format, he said, didn’t lend itself to that kind of analysis. And Vinson apparently didn’t have time to read through them all himself, so he sent a kid fresh out of college to help us.

“How many jury trials have you observed?” I’d asked the kid.

“None,” he replied.

Bill and I looked at one another.

“Let him do his thing,” Bill whispered to me.

So we listened as this boy read dutifully through his notes. His efforts were well intentioned, but there was nothing there that two seasoned prosecutors could not have intuited on their own.

I thanked him for his efforts and sent him home.

As for Vinson, we didn’t hear from him again until a few days before jury selection. He’d called to say that he wanted to present the results of his “findings.” This time I demanded that he come to our office. We met in the room we used for press conferences. Vinson spread out a set of elaborate pie charts and graphs on the table in front of us.

His staff, he explained, had conducted phone surveys in which they had compiled demographic and personal data on those who refused to believe Simpson was guilty, those who were undecided, and those who were leaning toward guilt. His findings showed a wide racial divide. Caucasians tended to feel Simpson was guilty; African Americans tended to think he was not.

Duh.

I waited for some fresh insights, the flashes of revelation that would cause the scales to fall from our eyes. The most original of the lot?

“We found that people involved in bowling leagues tend to be anti-prosecution,” Vinson announced.

I couldn’t restrain myself. I burst out laughing. Even Bill was having a hard time maintaining his respectful poker face. Bowlers! That’s what we’d been waiting for?

The real shame of it all was that Don Vinson probably could have contributed something of value, if he’d had a clue. Instead of warning us off black women as a class-an utterly pointless exercise since we were going to have black females on that jury no matter what-he should have helped us fine-tune our questions in such a way as to identify the most reasonable and reachable African Americans, male and female, in our jury pool. Then, he could have offered some advice on how to reach them. Our biggest frustration stemmed from the fact that our repeated entreaties for that kind of help fell on deaf ears.

Now this guy was angling to sit in front of the rail! He wanted to be on national TV!

“No,” I said. “Absolutely and unequivocally no!”

But Garcetti reminded me that Vinson’s company had provided us with a terrific set of graphics. Which was true. And now wasn’t the time to alienate him, Gil insisted. So Bill and I packed up our notebooks and trekked down to court, followed by two law clerks, Vinson, and a parade of others from our office, all of whom wanted a front-row seat on the action.

By the time we got there, the cramped, plywood-paneled courtroom of Department 103 was packed to capacity with the jurors who had made it past hardship screening. The bailiff called the court to order. Ito’s clerk, Deirdre Robertson, pulled eighteen names at a time. The candidates took their place in the jury box. First the judge would question them. Then the defense. Then we would.

In California, it’s routine to have a judge ask jurors the tough questions, which in this case meant those concerning police credibility, domestic violence, and race. Conventional wisdom holds that jurors are more likely to be candid with a judge than with the lawyers. Jurors are generally impressed with the power the judge wields and will think twice before lying. Some of the questions, like “Have you or any family member been arrested?” could arouse personal resentments. Better they resent the judge than the attorneys.

Ito, however, seemed reluctant to assume the role of the heavy. He couldn’t bring himself to ask the tough questions. If, for example, he asked a juror, “Have you or anyone in your family been the victim of domestic violence?” and the answer was yes, he should have been prepared to press:

“Who was involved?”

“My father hit my mother.”

“Were the police called?”

“Yes.”

“How did that make you feel?”

“Pretty terrible…”

And so on.

But Lance was too delicate, too fearful of offending, to probe.

He floundered politely for a while, then finally said, “Ms. Clark?” He was turning the questioning over to me.

And so I stood to face the twelve in the box. No surprises here. The first batch was largely black, largely female. I had no illusions about this group. Their questionnaires indicated that they believed overwhelmingly that Simpson was innocent. But they’d be damned if they’d say that to me. I tried to get one young black guy to admit that seeing a celebrity on camera didn’t mean that one actually knew him-the point being that someone who seemed to be a real nice guy on the tube could still be capable of drawing a knife across a woman’s throat.

You’ve seen the defendant on television, according to your questionnaire, right? I asked him.

I could see from the look on his face that he regretted admitting even that much.

A couple of times, he replied.

Do you feel that you know him?

I don’t know.

Well, has he ever invited you over to dinner?

No.

Have you ever gone out to the movies with him?

No.

Have you ever met his family? Ever talked about the weather, politics, or religion?

Of course, this elicited a litany of nos.

So, do you think you know him?

I guess not, came the reluctant reply.

Jurors begrudged me even the most obvious answers for fear they’d say something that might get them dismissed. Bill seemed to fare no better. I was so frustrated that I even turned to Vinson to see if he had any suggestions. He was slouched in his chair, twirling his glasses, wearing a detached, supercilious expression. He looked to me like some indolent white plantation owner. I was astounded to see that he’d taken no notes. On the other side of the room, perky little Jo-Ellan Dimitrius, jury consultant to the stars, was busy scribbling on Post-its and passing them to Shapiro and Cochran.

When it came the defense’s turn at the plate, I was curious to see who’d lead off. Officially, Shapiro was still at the helm, although rumors reached me daily about the internal conflicts on the Dream Team. Cochran, I heard, would call for a meeting, and Shapiro would refuse to go. Or Shapiro’d insist on meeting at his offices, and Cochran would refuse to attend. This struggle carried over into the courtroom. Every time it was the defense’s turn to do something, you’d see Cochran and Shapiro muttering to one another about who would take it.

This time Shapiro must have won the flip. It was clear that Bob had gotten some heavy coaching. His style was still phony and self-important, but he handled himself surprisingly well. He zeroed right in on the sensitive topics and hit them head-on.

Of one well-educated and fairly conservative white woman he asked, “You also saw the freeway incident?”

“Yes… “

“And your conclusion was that O. J. Simpson was fleeing?”

“Yeah. I think he was. Yeah.”

“And then, after all of this was done, your opinion that he was probably guilty was made even stronger, was it not?”

“From what? I am sorry.”

In three more questions, he had her admitting that she did indeed think it made Simpson look guilty.

She was excused for cause.

Perhaps I should take a moment to explain this business of excusing jurors. Each side gets a certain number of peremptory challenges. In this case, we got twenty. These allow you to excuse a juror without giving a reason. If you don’t like the way he parts his hair or don’t approve of the books he reads, you can exercise one of these strikes, as they are also called, to send him packing. Once your allotment is used up, however, you can’t go to the cashier and get more. That’s why we guard our peremptories like thousand-dollar chips in a poker game.

What we prefer to do is challenge for cause. But for that you need grounds-for example, the fact that a juror has already formed such a strong opinion about the case that he or she can’t promise to render an unbiased decision. It’s important to note here that the law does not require that a juror be excused simply because he’s got an opinion about some part of the case-or even because he’s got an opinion about the defendant’s guilt or innocence. The question is whether or not the juror can set that opinion aside and entertain the evidence with an open mind. If he says he can, and you can’t prove otherwise, there is no basis for cause.

The number of challenges for cause is unlimited. Naturally, it’s better to get a juror booted for cause than to use up a valuable peremptory. So even when the grounds seem shaky, attorneys for both sides will pop up with “Excuse for cause, Your Honor.” It’s then up to the judge to decide whether to allow it.

Here Ito gave the defense wide latitude. He gave us virtually none. If, for instance, a juror had written that he found Shapiro “slick,” he was gone in a heartbeat, kicked for cause. If, on the other hand, a juror found me “pushy, too aggressive, too strident,” Ito refused to dismiss him. If we wanted that juror out of there badly enough, we’d have to use a peremptory.

If a juror uttered a remark that was even remotely pro-prosecution, that was grounds for excusal. I’m thinking of one young black man who theorized that Kato would probably be loyal to Simpson because he’d given him a place to live rent-free. I thought this guy would make a great juror. The defense moved to excuse him for cause, and Ito granted the motion. I objected that his opinion was a matter of logic, not bias. But it didn’t matter; he was gone.

The defense didn’t want anyone with an IQ above room temperature. They were kicking jurors simply for being too smart. This happened to one of the alternates, a chemistry student from UCLA. This guy was absolutely brilliant. I knew that he sure as hell was going to understand our scientific evidence, and you could see that he gave the Dream Team agita. Sure enough, they struck him with a peremptory.

The UCLA student had another drawback from the defense’s perspective: he was Japanese. People from Asian backgrounds, courtroom wisdom goes, are law-and-order types. Naturally, we try to get them on juries, and the defense always tries to keep them off. Defense lawyers have to be savvy about this, because if they appear to be targeting jurors on the basis of race, we can file what’s called a Wheeler motion. If it’s successful, the entire jury panel may be dismissed and jury selection will begin all over again. It doesn’t stop there. If a judge grants such a motion, he’s required to inform the state bar, and the offending lawyer can be reprimanded or fined, or both. It’s a real bad mark on your record. But it didn’t keep Shapiro from going after Asians.

There was one elderly Filipino man whose questionnaire indicated a law-abiding attitude. Bill and I knew the defense would find some way to get him off. Since there was nothing in his background that gave grounds for cause, they’d have to use a peremptory. Shapiro should have just struck the guy and moved on. Instead, he went out of his way to humiliate the man.

“Give us your definition of reasonable doubt,” Shapiro commanded imperiously.

It was an obvious attempt to demonstrate the man’s supposed language deficiencies. But asking him to define reasonable doubt? Not even legal scholars can agree what it is. The poor juror blushed, stammered, and asked Shapiro to repeat the question, which he did in an even more challenging tone.

I was absolutely furious. How could Lance, whose own ancestry was Asian, allow minority jurors to be treated like this? In fact Shapiro treated all nonblack jurors with this same sneering contempt. If either Bill or I had tried a stunt like that, we would have been called up to the bench so fast it would have taken your breath away.

Johnnie’s approach was entirely different. He was warm and smooth with every juror. He came from the “call and response” school of voir dire. Johnnie was stupid like a fox. His questions were general, nonconfrontational ones that required only a yes or a no. He made no attempt to draw out a juror’s real thinking. If you’re sure you have a jury pool stacked in your favor, the last thing you want to do is let them talk enough to let slip a basis for cause. Judging from the answers I’d seen on those questionnaires, the pool was packed with O. J. Simpson fans. Why expose them by probing too deeply?

Still, I liked Johnnie, if only because he gave me somebody on the defense side that I could talk to. By that I mean someone who could tack through the choppy swells of a criminal case without losing his sense of humor. Squaring off against Johnnie was fun-at least in the beginning.

He’d come into court and greet me with that big, easy smile. “You’re looking very lovely today, counselor,” he’d say. And I’d reply, “No lovelier than yourself, Mr. Cochran.”

Once, at a sidebar, I grumbled about “this fucking case-TFC”; Johnnie thought that was hilarious. He picked it up from me. His colleagues picked it up from him. By the end of the trial everyone was referring to this case as TFC.

The press caught on gradually to the realignment in our respective camps. At first, the talking heads tended to see this contest as Clark versus Shapiro: Bob and I were the combatants who scrapped with each other in court while our more levelheaded counterparts, Bill and Johnnie, sat back and steered the steady course. As we got further into voir dire, however, that perception changed. My office was still billing Clark and Hodgman as co-counsel, but that didn’t fool anyone. The press could see that I was too aggressive and loud to be anybody’s second chair, or even co-chair. I was the de facto lead on my side. And Johnnie was the lead on his. He’d pulled away, leaving Shapiro in his dust.

It was inevitable, I suppose, that the easy give-and-take I enjoyed with Johnnie should be misinterpreted as a flirtation. There was one very amusing incident that occurred a few weeks after the trial started in earnest. One of the tabloids published a sequence of still photos of Johnnie and me at a public hearing. The jury wasn’t present and I’d been at the podium arguing to introduce some evidence that might have established Ron Goldman’s time of death. This caught Johnnie off guard, and he rushed to argue against in. In the process he put his hands on my elbows and gently moved me away from the microphone.

The gesture took all of three seconds. The camera caught me looking surprised, which I was. It is unusual for lawyers-particularly men and women-to touch each other in court. My guess, if I know Johnnie, is that he did it solely to throw me off my game. Good lawyers sometimes use guerrilla tactics. Okay, fair enough. I can roll with it.

CAR TAPE. October 1994. I don’t see how we can ever get a decent jury on this case. Every misstep in the world that could be made is being made, because all the judge and the defense attorneys care about is looking good in the press.

I’m really appalled at what’s going on, at the deepest level. I really fear for our system of justice. I don’t know how the jury system can continue without some serious revamping. It’s hopeless-we cannot rest easy with the knowledge that a jury will use its common sense and follow the law and the evidence to come to the right verdict. If popular opinion and celebrity and fame and the politically correct view is going to be what really sways the jury, if the jury will disregard the law, disregard the evidence, and everyone expects it to happen, then why bother?

Have you ever had a dream where you try to run but your feet are weights? That was what voir dire was like. Jogging through molasses. Lance had hoped to get through twenty jurors on the first day. We managed only four. We tried to move faster, but Lance, Johnnie, me, everybody seemed to have fallen under some kind of malaise.

On October 18, we were jolted out of our dream state by a bulletin from the real world. That morning on my way into court, I bumped into Ito’s clerk. Deirdre Robertson, a tall, stylish black woman in her thirties, was a classy lady. She had a young daughter and we used to talk about our kids a lot. Deirdre thought that O. J. Simpson was guilty and told me so. She was somebody I’d end up going to a lot for encouragement and solace during the trial.

“You put on the evidence,” she’d tell me. “All you can do is put it in front of them.”

I could tell by her face this morning that something ominous was afoot. We’d be starting late, she told me. Something had come up. When I asked her what, she just shrugged. A few minutes later, Ito huffed in, looking very agitated.

A tell-all had just hit the newsstands. The author, a friend of Nicole’s named Faye Resnick, had written some very damaging things about O. J. Simpson. Ito had worked himself into a lather over the possibility that our jurors might have seen the book. He sent Deirdre out to buy copies for each of us. Then he suspended the voir dire until we could all read it and assess the damage.

I’d already talked to Faye-or at least I’d tried. Early on in the case I’d hooked up with some of Nicole’s buddies, notably Kris Jenner, the former wife of Robert Kardashian, who had since married Olympic decathlon champion Bruce Jenner. Kris was an absolute gem, and she didn’t seem to care much for her ex. She had the strange habit of referring to him as “Kardashian.” I got the feeling they stayed on speaking terms only because they had four children in common. Kris and her friend Candace Garvey put me in touch with several of the Brentwood crowd. Among these was Cynthia “Cici” Shahian, who, coincidentally, was a cousin of Kardashian’s. She’d been elusive at first: I’d leave messages that were never returned. But after a couple of months, she showed up in my office, flanked by Kris and Candace. Cici was extremely valuable. She’d been standing next to Nicole when Nicole got Simpson’s letter threatening to turn her in to the IRS. Cici had been able not only to identify the letter, but to describe Nicole’s furious reaction to it.

During the first few weeks of the case, Kris and Candace had been working on my behalf to reel in Resnick. Faye, a wealthy divorcée and, as she was most often described, a “West Side socialite,” was a friend of the Jenners. Kris had introduced her to Nicole about two years earlier. Faye, too, was elusive, but Kris managed to coax her into my office late one night in July.

During that first encounter Faye Resnick came across as childlike and wary. She was a thin, waifish woman with an enormous mane of dark-blond hair. There was certainly nothing about her to prefigure the self-possessed siren who would eventually hit the talk-show circuit, to say nothing of the cover of Playboy. In fact, she sat almost curled up in a ball, staring at the floor.

“If it’s Simpson you’re afraid of,” I told her, “the best thing to do is come forward.” Even as I said it I was aware of the half-truths I am often forced to tell. Sure, she might be safer physically. But I had a feeling that if the defense got her on the stand, they’d cut her up pretty good. Clearly, this had occurred to Faye as well.

“You don’t want me for a witness,” she told me. “The defense will trash me for my drug habit. They’ll make me out to be so bad it will ruin your case.”

Faye’s “drug habit” was supposedly a thing of the past, but Simpson’s attorneys were already floating stories, claiming that she and Nicole had borrowed money from Colombian drug lords to open a coffee bar. Supposedly, that led to Nicole’s being murdered.

“Let me worry about that,” I told her.

If all she had to offer was hearsay, she’d never make it to the stand anyway. But any information at all was helpful.

“Faye, if you have anything that could help our case, please share it with us,” I said. “Do it for Nicole’s sake.”

Faye said she’d think about it. I didn’t put too much pressure on her that night. Kris had warned me that it would probably take at least one more meeting to draw her out. This meeting, at least, had served as an icebreaker. Before she left, I gave her a supportive embrace.

But now this! Deirdre handed me my own personal copy of Nicole Brown Simpson: The Private Diary of a Life Interrupted.

I took the slender volume back to my office and began to read. To my surprise, Faye devoted her first chapter to our interview. Her version wasn’t exactly as I remembered it, but was impressively accurate. She even described how I’d hugged her “warmly” before she left.

I read on, intending to underline and annotate the book for future reference, and as I did, my eyes grew wide. Faye asserted (as the defense team would later) that Nicole had been carrying on a secret affair with football star Marcus Allen, who was O. J. Simpson’s best friend. (Allen denied any romantic connection with Nicole.) This was not, strictly speaking, news. The rumors about Marcus Allen were out there from day one. I was just shocked that she came out and said it. I figured that O. J. Simpson would be way pissed off about that.

Faye wrote that she’d begged Nicole to cut off the affair with Marcus and warned her, “You may be signing your death warrant.” During the weeks before her death, Nicole apparently told her about beatings and abuse that had never come to the attention of our investigators. Once while they were staying at a Las Vegas hotel, Simpson allegedly flipped out, grabbed Nicole by the hair, and flung her into a corridor. She lay in the hallway sobbing, mostly naked, until a security guard found and rescued her. But the worst beating, Faye claimed, occurred about a year before their son, Justin, was born. Nicole had found a jewelry box in one of her husband’s drawers. It contained a pair of diamond stud earrings. Assuming he had bought them for her birthday, she put the box back. But the birthday came and went; no diamonds. Later, according to Faye, Nicole learned that one of Simpson’s steady mistresses, a former Miss New York named Tawny Kitaen, had been wearing them around town. When she confronted him about it, he punched and kicked her, and then locked her in a closet. For hours after that, she lay quivering. And what was O. J. Simpson, American hero, doing? Lounging in the other room, watching some sports special. Every so often he would come back to the closet, open it, and kick her some more.

I thought Faye’s book would be tabloid nonsense-Life and Times in the Brentwood Fast Lane-but it wasn’t. It impressed me. I believed she was speaking honestly; the book had the ring of truth. From a prosecutorial point of view, however, it was frustrating. Much of the information it contained, unfortunately, was hearsay. We’d have trouble getting it admitted at trial unless we could get independent corroboration. I began to focus my reading, trying to find isolate things that could be introduced as evidence. And about three-quarters of the way through the book, I found something. Around April 1994, Simpson and Nicole were on the rocks again. He’d extracted some bizarre promise from her that she wouldn’t see other men until August, when he was due to leave for New York to start a new sportscasting contract with NBC. Even though they’d broken up, he simply couldn’t bear the humiliation of seeing her, or others seeing her, with other men, at least when they were on the same side of the Mississippi.

Simpson had called Faye in a fit of distraction. “If… I find out she’s with any other man before August,” he allegedly told Faye, “I’ll kill her.”

If Faye herself had indeed heard Simpson make this explicit death threat, it would be admissible. I believed she had. I just didn’t know whether Faye Resnick had sufficient credibility to testify for the People.

The drug problem that Faye had alluded to during our first interview was only the first of several difficulties a jury would have with her. I could work with the drug history, maybe even turn it to our advantage by pointing out that it was Nicole who arranged for the intervention that finally got Faye into a rehab clinic. Our victim was a compassionate woman. A caring and responsible friend. The fact that she had intervened to stop Faye’s downward spiral also seemed to indicate that Nicole was not some wild-eyed cocaine freak.

But Faye gave the defense more ammunition as well. I knew they would zero in on chapter 18, where Resnick wrote, “How can I describe the intensity of my relationship with Nicole, particularly toward the end? We had become more than friends. Call it what you will, bonded sisters, soulmates, confidantes…” Yes, they were lovers, if Faye was to be believed. Resnick laid out a fairly graphic-and, she claimed, one-time-episode in which she and Nicole made love while listening to Madonna’s Erotica.

Airing this stuff in court would be disastrous-the defense would use it not only to attack Resnick’s credibility, but to damage Nicole Brown Simpson’s own image in the eyes of the jury. By the time the defense was through with Resnick, the jury would be writing off Nicole as one of those West L.A. cocaine bitches, who probably got what was coming to her.

Still, that was no excuse for Faye’s not telling us what she knew. It could have put us way ahead on the domestic violence part of the investigation. But what did she do? She squirreled away her nuts to sell in a confessional memoir. Didn’t she feel some kind of real duty to Nicole? Didn’t anyone in this case feel a duty to justice?

While the Resnick shock waves reverberated through the media, the Dream Team was going through the motions of a serious freak-out. Shapiro sputtered to the court that he’d been blindsided. He wanted the trial postponed for a year to let some of the frenzy around Resnick’s book subside.

Blindsided, my ass. I learned from a conversation with Resnick’s own publisher, Michael Viner of Dove Books, that Viner had run into Shapiro at a party over a month earlier. Viner claimed to have told Shapiro that the book was coming out the week of October 17; he told me the lawyer had not appeared particularly concerned. Now that the book was out, however, Shapiro was weeping and moaning that his client couldn’t get a fair trial. He not only wanted the case held over for a year, but he wanted Simpson to spend that time free on bail, his activities monitored by “private security” that Mr. Simpson himself would provide.

Not a chance, Bobby. A defendant charged with a capital crime is ineligible for bail under state law-even if the D.A. has decided not to ask for the death penalty.

But we couldn’t look to Lance Ito for decisive action on such an obvious ruling. Resnick’s Private Diary had knocked the judge off his moorings. He called in the jurors one by one to ask what, if anything, they knew about the book. Nearly every one of them admitted, either voluntarily or after some strenuous questioning, to having some knowledge of it. Ito sent the jury pool home for two days-a particularly boneheaded move under the circumstances, since it sent the message that the book was a very big deal. Any of them who hadn’t read it, of course, were headed straight for Barnes and Noble.

The next day, Ito held the bail hearing, closed to the public and press. I got up and argued that the option put forward by defense counsel was “unacceptable to the People,” since what the defendant was asking for was impossible under state law. Even if it that hadn’t been so, O. J. Simpson had already demonstrated before about 95 million fellow citizens that he had a propensity to flee. I reminded the court about the pursuit up the 405. I reminded Ito about the cash, the passport, the disguise. This defendant had made one obvious attempt at flight. It showed his consciousness of guilt. What would stop him from making another one?

“If the defendant wants a continuance,” I said, “he should remain in custody as would any other defendant charged with a double homicide and special circumstances.”

As I turned to leave the podium, I caught Simpson out of the corner of my eye. He was shifting in his seat, his face contorted with-what was it? Rage? Frustration? Disbelief? His lawyers had probably told him that he had a good shot at making bail. And here I’d gone bringing up all that Bronco business. Being at the mercy of a woman had to be O. J. Simpson’s personal idea of hell. That gave me at least a moment of satisfaction. But as so often happened in TFC, even my smallest triumphs were short-lived. Johnnie did an end run around me, announcing that his client wanted to “address the court.”

If the defendant has counsel there to speak for him, he shouldn’t be allowed to speak directly to the court unless he’s prepared to take the witness stand.

I started to object, but it was too late. Lance had granted the request.

“How do you feel?” he inquired amiably of Simpson, who now stood, hands clasped in front of him, the very picture of wounded virtue. How did he feel?

“Well,” he complained, “I feel I’ve been attacked here today.”

Attacked? Does he not get it that he’s the defendant in a double homicide?

“I’m an innocent man,” he continued. “I want to get to the jury… I want to get it over with as soon as I can. I have two young kids out there. That’s my only concern… I’ve got two young kids out there that don’t have a mother…”

It disgusted me to the point of nausea to hear this man use his children this way.

And then Simpson turned toward me. I didn’t meet his eyes-not because I was intimidated by him; I just didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing he had my attention.

“Mrs. Clark, Miss Clark, said I was trying to run,” he fumbled. “Everyone knows that I called my father-in-law… I admit I was not in the right frame of mind at the time, I was trying to get to my wife…”

“Excuse me,” Shapiro broke in, apparently agitated. It seemed to me that he was trying to create the impression that his client was straying out from under his control.

“I was headed back home,” Simpson continued.

Shapiro reared up theatrically and threatened to resign if his client kept talking. Finally, Simpson said, “Thank you,” and sat down.

Man, I thought, I’d love to get him on the witness stand. That monster ego of his would trip him up so bad. He wouldn’t be able to keep his cool with a woman firing hostile questions at him. He was too unstable. If the Dream Team had an ounce of sense, they’d keep him off the stand and try to sneak in these unchallenged statements wherever they could. Just like this one. The saving grace of this outburst, I told myself, was that this hearing was closed and the transcript sealed. I sure didn’t want Simpson’s self-serving spiel reaching the ears of the jurors.

There was a curious atmosphere in the courtroom that day. It was actually pretty relaxed. The cameras were gone. Everyone loosened up a little. Both Shapiro and I let down our guards and vented our frustrations about the jury pool. Bob complained to the judge that jurors wanted to get on this case so badly, they were telling the court whatever they thought we wanted to hear. His implication: they were lying to get on this case so that they could convict O. J. Simpson.

I agreed that they were telling tall tales, but for quite the opposite reason.

“Many, if not most,” I argued to Ito, “are lying to the detriment of the People because they are sitting there as the fans of this defendant saying, ‘We want to get on this jury… so we can acquit this man, no matter what.’… I wish that we could only put all the jurors on polygraph, because if the People could get just twelve fair-minded, impartial jurors to listen to the evidence, then we know what the outcome will be.”

The “polygraph” remark was a joke. Inside the courtroom that day, it was taken as a joke. Johnnie even laughed out loud. I didn’t think any more about it. I was more self-conscious about having accused our jurors of lying. But, again, I comforted myself with the fact that this session was closed, the transcript sealed. I had no reason to believe that that L-word would ever reach their ears.

By the time the session came to an end, Ito had checked the penal code, which confirmed what we all knew. The law would not allow bail for O. J. Simpson. End of debate. But not the end of mischief.

Bill requested that the transcript of this closed hearing be kept under seal.

Shapiro rejoined, “We want it open.” The defense clearly wanted Simpson’s unsworn testimony to become public for the edification of the jury pool.

“Judge, you can’t do this!” I protested frantically. “This is very incendiary… both sides accusing the jurors of lying. The defendant making an uncross-examined, unsworn statement about his innocence. None of this is fair. None of this is right.”

Ito released the transcript.

As I look back upon this episode, I still can’t figure out what possessed Lance. I know he was coming under a lot of pressure from the media, but that’s not enough to have caused him to act so unwisely. Lawyers need to know that there is someplace they can talk where their statements will be held in confidence. They shouldn’t be lulled into a false sense of security, then have the rug pulled out from under them. He could have kept the transcript sealed and never worried about being reversed on appeal. I think his heart was in the right place, but he was so weak. He let himself get pushed around by the defense.

I was totally screwed. I’d accused the jurors of lying. Can you imagine having to go back in and talk to these people after they read the L-word in their morning paper? I learned my lesson: never say anything in chambers or closed hearing that you wouldn’t say in public.

By the next day, those transcripts were everywhere. Shapiro exploited the opportunity to hold me up to ridicule. Oddly, it wasn’t the L-word he seized upon. I guess that’s because he, too, had accused the jurors of lying. No, it was the P-word. The “polygraph” comment, he told reporters, “was the most idiotic statement ever made in a court of law.”

Johnnie Cochran knew perfectly well that my polygraph remark was intended as a joke. But now he joined Shapiro in insisting that the remark had been serious. I just shook my head and thought, I’ve lost all my respect for you, Johnnie. You’re a two-faced, hypocritical bastard just like the rest.

CAR TAPE. October 1994. I’d like to see us abolish the jury system. Why leave the fate of our nation in the hands of these moon rocks?

After the Resnick fiasco, a lightbulb popped on in Lance’s brain. He realized, finally, that he had to do something to protect the jury pool from taint. So he started bringing jurors in one at a time for questioning-as we’d asked for from the start. And for the rest of the voir dire he limited the press to one pool reporter in the courtroom. The pool arrangement, however, only served to make the reporters now milling outside the locked doors more desperate for news from the inside. Johnnie and Bob took full advantage of this situation. Each convened his own daily press conference to fulminate over some new outrage. And on October 27, they dealt Bill Hodgman an ugly, low blow.

Bill had been questioning an elderly black man from South-Central L.A. He’d asked the guy, “Do you know what a polygraph is?” What he was trying to get at, of course, was whether the fellow had read my jurors-are-lying-their-heads-off comment and whether he had been offended by it.

The man shot back, “You’re pumping me as if I’m on trial or something. So I don’t like that. You are sort of riling me.”

Bill ended the questioning as gracefully as possible and sat down. He was stunned. So was I. Bob and Johnnie saw their opening. During the next break, they ran out and held a pair of press conferences. Bill, Shapiro charged, was trying to get jurors removed for cause “because they are black, because they have black heroes and because O. J. Simpson is one of them. There is no other reason.”

On another floor of the courthouse, Johnnie was busy making the same baseless charge. “We’re really concerned about the tenor of the questions and the way they go after certain jurors,” he said. “If there is a pattern, we’ll be asking the judge to look into it.”

I couldn’t believe it. They harass Asians, they boot nonblacks at every turn, and they accuse us of targeting minorities? Blacks made up nearly 60 percent of the initial jury pool. We couldn’t have gotten rid of them if we’d wanted to. The defense ended up bringing a raft of Wheeler motions against us, but we came prepared with a list of reasons for every black juror we excused. And they couldn’t make a dent in us.

It was clear that Johnnie and Bob’s intent was to poison the jury pool with insinuations of racism. And they succeeded. Several days later, Bill drew a black woman to question. We really had high hopes for her. She wore a smart, tailored business suit and had smiled at me warmly during the hardship questioning. Bill had just begun his very gentle questioning when she fixed him with an angry glare. “I don’t know. You make me feel like I’m on trial here, really.”

She’d obviously read the news accounts about the juror who’d felt “riled” and decided that she, too, would jump on the race bandwagon.

A look of shock and panic passed over Bill’s face. He struggled to find words to reassure her and then defuse the situation. But he was mortified.

I could see that this process was just tearing him to pieces. After that, we agreed that I would question nearly all the remaining black jurors.

We finished the formal voir dire early in November. By now the jury pool had been winnowed down to under fifty bodies. We had one last shot at them. Each lawyer was allowed seventy-five minutes to make an eleventh-hour pitch, hoping to evoke a reaction that might help us in the final selection. I decided to throw away the rule book and shake these people up a little. Somehow, I had to get them to confront their own racial anger. I needed them to consider how hero worship might distort their judgment. But how could I get them to admit to me things they might not even have admitted to themselves?

When it came my turn to speak, I hesitated a bit. I looked at the faces. Again, mostly black, overwhelmingly female. It was important to start off on the right foot. Whatever happened, I didn’t want these people thinking that I was condescending to them because they felt some sentimental fondness for the defendant.

“We’ve all seen Naked Gun,” I told them. “He made us laugh… We’ve had him referred to as the all-American hero… And that’s why it’s so very difficult to have to present to you that someone of this image can do a crime so terrible.”

They were looking at me as if to say, We can’t believe she’s saying this.

He’s such a famous guy, I continued. He’s such a popular guy that there’s going to be a real temptation to do something different than what the law requires. This is a horrible situation, none of us like it, but that doesn’t mean we suspend the rules of evidence. Just like in a football game-it’s always a hundred-yard game no matter who’s playing it. It doesn’t matter if Mr. Simpson’s on the team, it’s still a hundred-yard game. It doesn’t become an eighty-yard game, and it doesn’t become a hundred-and-twenty-yard game, either. Rules are rules.

I reminded them that there were a whole lot of angles to this case: interracial marriage, a black defendant, white victims, spousal abuse. Which one of these do I have to worry about with you? I asked. Are you guys going to vote on the basis of one of these agendas? Are you going to try and even some score you’ve got in mind? You all agree with me that that would be wrong? That the place to even the score is the ballot box, not in this courtroom?

A few of them nodded yes.

“Is there anyone here… rooting for one side or the other?”

No nods this time. I continued:

“I don’t care which side it is. If you are sitting there rooting for ‘guilty’ right now, I want you to get up and have the honor and the decency to excuse yourself from this panel.” Same thing, I told them, went for those who were sitting there rooting for a verdict of “not guilty.” “If you’ve decided how this case should end, then you cannot be fair.”

And how about all these conspiracy theories? I continued. The Mafia did it. A Colombian cartel did it. A crew of white burglars did it. Are you going to make me convene the trial of the People versus the Mafia? Are you going to make me shoot down all these screwball theories before you’ll listen to the evidence? How many trials do I have to do here? You could make the evidence fit anything, but that’s not justice. I reminded them of Rodney King.

That case was in trouble from the very start, wasn’t it? Because it had an all-white jury in a police community. And with a videotape, the most slam-dunk case you could possibly imagine. Our office lost that case, and we all know why.

“Do you know that had something to do with the fact they were being tried… by a jury that was all white? That it was tried in a community where a lot of police officers lived?”

Murmurs of “Probably…” “Yes…”

That’s what happens when you don’t listen to the evidence, when you vote on the basis of some private agenda.

Bob Shapiro objected to what he called my “unprofessional conduct.” It is against the canon of ethics for a prosecutor to criticize or comment on a verdict to a potential juror. My comments, he said, were deserving of “severe sanctions.”

That was technically true. So I apologized to the court. Then I looked at the jurors point-blank. “I hope I did not offend you with any of the comments I made concerning the Rodney King verdict… Have I?”

The whole bunch of them smiled and gave me a rousing “No.”

Shot yourself in the foot, Bobby.

For a moment there, I felt those jurors were with me. I’d gotten right up there in their faces, but they didn’t seem to hold it against me. They seemed galvanized. I really felt that some current was flowing between us. Bill leaned over.

“Little white girl up there talking about race issues,” he said. “One of the most dramatic moments I’ve ever seen in a courtroom.”

The following day, we went in ready to kick and pick. That’s the term we use for the last volley of the twenty peremptory challenges to get the pool down to twelve. So Bill and I got right in there and mixed it up. We kicked and we picked with a vengeance. And what we ended up with was one white woman, one man who described himself as “half American Indian,” two Hispanics, and eight blacks. Six of those blacks were females.

By the end, we still had four of our twenty peremptory challenges remaining. That’s right: we didn’t use every single one that we were entitled to exercise. I can understand why a casual observer could assume that we missed an opportunity because of this. And, in fact, our detractors seized upon those four unused challenges, claiming that we could have kicked some of the clinkers and fill the slots with better prospects.

No, we couldn’t. Let me explain.

During our nightly bouts of solitaire, Bill and I had kept precise tabs on the rotation of candidates within the pool. As days passed, the rating of the average juror in our pool-going by that 1-to-5 scale we’d developed-kept getting lower. Originally, our population had a very strong contingent of middle-class, educated citizens. But remember: the first round of elimination-the “hardship” phase-drastically changed that. The solidly employed middle class had no appetite to serve on this case, and Judge Ito let them off without looking back. There went most of our potential 5s and 4s. Then the defense began their attacks on two categories of jurors: those who were educated and those who were weren’t black. Ito let them strike many without using their peremptory challenges. We were left with virtually no 4s and 5s, and only a few 3s.

By the time the defense’s peremptory challenges had been exercised, we were down to our 2s. We were playing a defensive game, and we played it as cunningly as we could. The best we could do was make sure that the very worst jurors didn’t find their way into the box. And the way the numbers broke down, if we used even one more challenge we would have called up a batch of even sorrier prospects who would outnumber the peremptories we had left. What would be the sense of knocking off one of our 3s or even 2s if most of the bodies who would take their place were 1s, people who wouldn’t have voted to convict if O. J. Simpson stood in front of them with a knife in his hand and shouted, “I did it”?

The process of picking a jury had been so exhausting that when we finally got the twelfth juror, both sides of the room broke into cheers. We were kissing, shaking hands, hugging each other. It was unbelievable. Especially when you consider that only one side really had anything to celebrate.

Bob Shapiro ambled over to our table for some chat. He and Bill and I laughed and joked about the questionnaires. As I suspected, none of the Simpson team had ever had to soil his fingers flipping through those things. Their consultant had done it all for them.

“Gil made you read your own questionnaires!” Shapiro declared, astounded and amused. “He should give you hardship pay!”

Tell me about it.

Then Shapiro gave me a cartoon he’d drawn of me. There were two stick figures: “Marcia Before the Trial,” showing me with long hair and a short skirt. Then, “Marcia After the Trial,” where I had short hair and a long skirt. It was pretty funny. I kept it.

On balance, I’d never expended so much of myself picking a jury. The exhilaration that came from completing that phase, along with the positive feedback I’d gotten from my speech the previous day, led me to a false optimism. That night, on the way home, I spoke into my little tape recorder:

We knew we’d wind up with an almost all-black jury… We were guaranteed to have basically a female black jury and we do. But I think overall we’re not unhappy with the jury. I think there’s enough strong, fair ones that we’ll get some kind of fair shake. I mean, it’s certainly not the best panel I’ve ever seen, but maybe they’ll rise to the occasion.

I know I was livin’ in a dream world. But you have to leave yourself a little hope.