Without a Doubt

Strange Days

On most days Jim Morrison hovers on the periphery of my consciousness. During my last few years as a deputy, I kept a four-foot-high poster of him mounted on the wall behind my desk. Jim is onstage, wearing tight leather pants and that signature pout. As a teen, I was a big fan of the Doors, and Morrison’s expression just hooked me. Here was a guy who looked Strangeness in the eye without blinking. Well, ultimately he did blink. But it was my guess that throughout the preliminary hearings, Morrison was parked on a couch in the Valhalla of dead icons, watching CNN and grinning.

This is the strangest life I’ve ever known. It was Morrison’s line, but I found myself saying it over and over. In the days following the prelims I could not believe what was happening. What a freaking spectacle. In the space of three weeks this case had grown from a straightforward double homicide-which incidentally concerned a celebrity-into a national obsession. It was like Desert Storm with a docket number. Why is the American public such a sucker for any drama unfolding live? Will Baby Jessica make it out of that well? Will the baby killer whale make it to open sea? Will O. J. Simpson blow his brains out? The lure, I suppose, is the honesty of an uncertain outcome.

But even now, in the cold gray light of hindsight, I still don’t fully understand the appeal of this case. I know that the Bronco chase offered a powerful rush. The first hit is free… Liking the jolt it got during those two hours of unprogrammed airtime, the public came looking for another. And another. The media fed the addiction, covering every twitch in the case as a “stunning new development.” By the time we got through those preliminary hearings, nothing was ordinary. Nothing was allowed to be ordinary. It was all reported at the same hysterical, accelerating pitch.

God forbid there should be a slow news day, or the press would settle its frenetic, predatory attentions on me. No one ever came right out and asked the question on everyone’s mind: “Why’d Gil Garcetti pick a girl for this job?” The subtext, however, was clear: Criminal prosecution is guy’s work. You gotta be tough. And for a case this big you gotta be real tough. You gotta put your best man in there. Is your best man really a woman?

I’ve never been one to cry sexism. But I know the score. I know that I have to be tougher and better than the guys I work with. My attitude has always been, So what? Having to be tougher and better makes me just that, tougher and better. And I tried looking at this particular situation philosophically. I knew that anybody Gil picked for this job was going to come in for a lot of scrutiny and a whole lot of grief. But the kind of grief I got was the sort I thought had gone out of fashion with foot binding.

After that blast of exposure during the prelims, my appearance became the subject of seemingly endless speculation. (You remember, don’t you?) The circles under my eyes. When I’m tired, I tend to get circles under my eyes. People I scarcely knew would come up and say, “When are you going to do something about those circles?” And I’d tell them, “I’ll do something after the trial. I’ll get some sleep.” During the prelims, my facial features became one of the leading indicators of the prosecution’s fortunes. As in, “Marcia’s looking hagged out; the prosecution must be having a bad day.”

Once I wore a short-sleeved white dress. There was no significance to it except that it was clean, comfortable, and not something I usually wore in front of a jury because it was just a little too casual. Since we were in pretrial motions and didn’t even have a jury at that point, I could choose comfort over formality. And so, as I got off the elevator, reporters started hectoring me: “Marcia, what is the significance of the dress? What does it mean?”

What does it mean? The dress means nothing, but the fact that you have to ask means a lot. It means there sure as hell is such a thing as pink coverage versus blue coverage. It means “She may be the CEO of General Motors, boys, but she’s still a woman.”

The debate inevitably descended to the length of my skirts. Drive-time radio jocks wore themselves out complaining that my hems were “too short.” Let me explain something here. When I’m on my own time I wear my skirts any damned length I please. And that is usually about three inches above the knee. It’s not an attempt at seduction. It’s not the Dance of the Seven Veils. But when it comes to what I wear in front of a jury, I have always been conservative. I wear what I consider to be smart, lawyerly suits with hems slightly above the knee. Now, if you check the hems of the other female D.A.s, I suspect you’ll find a number of them at precisely the same length. (But, of course, while the controversy over my skirts was at full boil, none of them came forward to say “Check out my hems.”)

The real problem was that I was overexposed. During a single week, my image had been beamed for some seventy hours into the living rooms, bedrooms, bathrooms, and kitchens of strangers. That’s about five years’ worth of Seinfeld episodes in seven days! No wonder strangers felt a false sense of intimacy with me.

One day after work I swung by the grocery store to pick up some ground turkey and green peppers for dinner. By the time I got to the checkout counter, my cart was loaded with stuff, including the obligatory Popsicles and Cheerios. The girl at the counter looked up at me and said, “What are you doing here?”

Meaning, “Big shot like you must certainly have people to do this kind of stuff for you.”

I felt like telling her, “Look, honey. I live in a rat hole with a leaky bedroom. My car window is busted. I can’t pay the mortgage. My nanny doesn’t drive. Who do you suppose runs my errands?”

But I didn’t. Some kid who makes $4.25 an hour bagging groceries probably doesn’t care about the distinction between Princess Diana and a public servant who stumbled into the spotlight.

Like it or not, I was a celebrity. I guess I was getting a taste of what drove my man Morrison nuts. Everywhere I turned, people seemed to be grabbing at me. They felt that they were entitled to interrupt me, no matter what I was doing. When I went out to dinner, they’d come over to my table. Or worse, they’d make that cute gesture of sending a waiter over with a glass of o.j. I’d try to be gracious, but I’m not an extrovert by nature. And I found dealing with these flat-footed overtures very depleting.

Everywhere I looked, there were hands. Hands wanting to shake mine. Hands wanting autographs. Hands wanting to touch me. It was getting to me. I had a recurrent waking nightmare that one of those hands reaching out to me, slow motion, held a gun pointed at my heart.

This was not some irrational, free-floating anxiety. During the Rebecca Schaeffer case, I’d learned about the pathology of obsession from Gavin de Becker, a security consultant and perhaps the world’s wisest authority on the psychology of stalking. Gavin helped me develop a psychological profile of Rebecca’s killer. When the Simpson case broke, I didn’t even have to call him. He phoned me to see if I was okay.

“Marcia”-Gavin’s mellifluous voice is unmistakable-“have you been receiving mail?”

I had, in fact-by the box load. I hadn’t read it. I didn’t have the time. Gavin offered to sort through it for me to see if there was anyone to watch out for. He also told me how to mitigate the risk factor in signing autographs: “Never sign more than your name,” he warned. Even a meaningless expression like “sincerely” could give encouragement to an unbalanced fan. If a situation seemed the least bit weird-a guy looking twitchy, avoiding eye contact-I should get the hell outta there.

“Kind of ironic, huh, Gavin,” I told him. “Whoever thought I’d be on the receiving end of this bullshit?”

There were others looking after me, too-like Lieutenant Gary Schram, a big, barrel-chested ex-marine who was in charge of the D.A.‘s investigators. Schram was this sweet, wonderful guy who worried over me constantly. He assigned his men to follow me around. If I was out on the freeway, I’d look up and see one of them in my rearview mirror. If I changed lanes without thinking and lost my escort, my car phone would scream almost instantly. It would be Schram, chewing me out for my carelessness.

At Gary’s insistence, I began carrying a handgun, a.38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver. I wasn’t opposed to the idea in principle; a lot of criminal prosecutors carry guns. And I was certainly no greenhorn when it came to firearms. My ex-husband had been a gun enthusiast, and we’d gone out to the range together now and then for some target practice. Since I’d been living alone, in fact, I’d kept a handgun on the upper shelf of my kitchen cabinet.

Having one in your purse, though, is a whole different trip. It requires a CCW, a permit to carry. Schram took me down to the police firing range in the hills behind Glendale. The old cop who ran the range gave me a quick refresher on cleaning and loading procedures. We reviewed safety tips that I already knew. I fired a few shots at a silhouette to demonstrate I could aim at Van Nuys without taking out Long Beach.

It usually takes weeks to get a permit, but Schram and his buddies had one laminated and in my hands before I left the range. On the way out, Schram fixed me with his steady blue eyes. “I want this in your, purse at all times,” he told me. “It won’t do you any good in your desk drawer.”

I kept forgetting it. It was a form of denial on my part, I suppose. If I wasn’t in danger, I wouldn’t need a weapon. Right? Schram didn’t buy this pretzel logic. If I happened to pass the lieutenant on the way out of the office, he’d hold me up for a random inspection. If he didn’t find the Smith & Wesson in my purse, he’d send me back to my office to get it. I finally got used to carrying that gun as a matter of habit.

I’d gotten word through the rumor mill that one of the networks was having me tailed, that the National Enquirer was having me tailed, that O. J. Simpson’s private investigators were having me tailed. All of them were presumably competing for lane space with my own security detail. Every time I climbed into my car I felt like Goldie Hawn in The Sugarland Express.

It was no longer possible for me to walk down the hall to the D.A.‘s office and take a meeting with Gil Garcetti. Now, the sight of me opening those glass doors excited too much speculation. So Gil showed me a back way. There’s an entrance on the north side of the building that lets you circumvent the reception area and enter the D.A.‘s office unobserved. I’d spent ten years in this place and nobody had ever bothered to tell me about it.

Used to be that Bill and I could jump in a car and go visit a witness. No fuss. No armed escort. Now, we couldn’t leave the CCB together without staging a major military operation. One day, Bill and I had to interview a witness named Danielle Rose. She was a friend of Kato’s girlfriend, Rachel Ferrara. Danielle had called us about a conversation she’d had with Rachel a day or two after the murders. According to Rachel, Kato had seen Simpson outside the house within moments of hearing the thumps on his wall. It was hearsay on hearsay, but we still had to check it out.

Danielle was nervous about coming to our office. She’d seen how reporters pounced on anyone they suspected had been speaking to the prosecution, and she wanted no part of it. This distinguished her from any number of wannabe starlets who’d had even fleeting contact with any of the main players in the case and now were coming out of the woodwork and selling their stories to evening newsmagazines. This one wanted anonymity. Cool. We came up with a plan to meet her in an alley a short distance from the apartment of one of her friends.

Bill and I got into Phil Vannatter’s car, D.A. investigators flanking us before and behind. As we drove, Phil kept in radio contact with our escort. So far, so good. No tail spotted. I was beginning to think that we could all use a few weeks in therapy to lose the paranoia. No sooner had we pulled into the alley, however, than Phil pointed off to the left. Two men in sunglasses sat in a parked nuthin’-special car. One of the investigators checked them out-sure enough, they were reporters from a local TV station. He shooed them off like cowbirds.

We didn’t mention this little episode to Danielle. Poor kid was freaked out enough as it was. And all for nothing. As she stammered through her story it became clear to me that she might have simply misunderstood Rachel, whose main concern was not what Kato had done when, but that he had dragged her into this mess at all.

On the drive home, I was still boiling about the leak. What had alerted the station? A phone tap? A comment overheard in the hall? We never did find out. But after that we doubled our precautions. No more talking on cell phones. We had our cars and offices swept for bugs. From that point on, there was no more talking about the case in public. Not in the halls, not in the elevators, not even in the johns.

Meanwhile, the Fuhrman controversy showed no signs of slackening. It irritated the hell out of me to be drawn off the preparation of the case by diversionary tactics of the defense. But I also knew we’d never get back on track until we faced the problem head-on.

It did not seem logical to me that Fuhrman would try to frame O. J. Simpson with as little information as he’d had at the time he’d found the glove. How, for instance, could he have known that Simpson didn’t have an airtight alibi for the time the murders occurred? How could he know whether an eyewitness, or even an ear witness, might come forward to identify someone else? What if someone stepped forward to confess? How could he know whether Kato had already gone far enough down the south pathway to see the area where the glove was found? Did Fuhrman even have the opportunity to move evidence?

I’d asked the LAPD for a list of all of the officers who’d arrived at Bundy before Mark. There were sixteen of them. Only four had gotten beyond the perimeter to see the evidence near the bodies: Officer Robert Riske, first officer on the scene. Lieutenant Frank Spangler, one of the highest-ranking officers supervising the scene. Sergeant David Rossi, in charge of the patrol officers. And Detective Ron Phillips, Fuhrman’s supervisor, who arrived at precisely the same time Mark did. I interviewed those four men personally, and each was very clear about one thing: there had been one glove, and one glove only, lying between the bodies.

Except for Phillips, none of these guys knew Mark well. They would hardly risk their jobs, not to mention an indictment, to protect him. If their testimony was to be believed, it was a physical impossibility for Mark Fuhrman to have planted evidence.

From where I was sitting, Fuhrman was in the clear. I did my best to reassure him of that. But he was very anxious. Very paranoid. He complained about being treated like a “goddamned suspect.” He complained that the defense was targeting him, trying to destroy him. Things took a turn for the worse when the FBI found a single Caucasian hair on the glove from Rockingham. It most likely belonged to Ron Goldman, but no one could establish this conclusively. The defense asked for hair samples not only from Fuhrman, but from Phil, Tom, and Ron as well.

When I passed this request along to the cops, they went absolutely ballistic.

“We’re not going to be treated like goddamned suspects. Next they’ll want to take our blood,” they huffed.

I warned them that their refusal would look bad, but I said, “Fine. I’ll fight it.” I got myself charged up to oppose a court order for the hair samples. But before I could strap on my armor, the cops had a change of heart. Their attorneys had told them that in refusing, they’d appear to be hiding something. So they agreed to give the hair samples.

I got on the horn to Shapiro. “You won’t need a court order for the hair, Bob,” I told him. Fine, fine. Everything’s cool. I had barely gotten off the line when the cops did another flip-flop. “We’re not giving samples,” they insisted. “We’re not goddamned suspects.” Finally, they complied. And, thank God, when the results came back a few weeks down the line, nobody matched the mystery hair.

The thing that annoyed me was that I’d really gone to bat for those guys, and still they went around grousing that I was disloyal. I could already see the police distancing themselves from this case. By late September, Tom and Phil were “too busy” to do anything I asked. Finally, I just quit calling them and used our D.A. investigators instead.

Annoyed as I was with Tom and Phil, I felt very sorry for them. They’d been beaten down by a barrage of idiotic requests and make-work motions coming their way from the defense team. Shapiro had started his own “investigation” to find the real killer or killers. He’d set up an 800 number that during its first two weeks of operation drew over 250,000 calls. Most of them seemed to come from psychics, psychos, and general cranks who’d had dreams about where the knife was hidden. “Look in the sandbox.” “Look in the tree by the playhouse.” Like we hadn’t thought of that? We got our share of crank callers as well. My favorite was the one who theorized that Simpson, Nicole, and Ron had all sat around in a circle stabbing one another. Crazy stuff. But Tom and Phil had to follow up every lunatic lead or risk being harangued by the defense. After a couple of weeks of this, their expressions were hangdog, their eyes tired. I could just about tell what they were thinking: “We’re too close to retirement to take this bullshit.”

Naturally, Shapiro’s make-work motions ended up on my desk. He wanted murder logs. He wanted dispatching logs. He wanted records of all the people treated for dog bites at emergency wards. The message of this last request, I guess, was that any resident of West L.A. who’d been bitten by a dog during the late hours of Sunday, June 12, 1994, was a potential suspect in the murder of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman. That one gave me a laugh. The perpetrator of a grisly double homicide is going to walk into an emergency room to get treated for a dog bite?

As primary litigator, I shouldn’t have been saddled with these day-to-day distractions. I should have been concentrating on building what is called the case-in-chief-the essence of a presentation that proves the defendant committed the crime. But there was absolutely no time for overall planning or, indeed, any creative thought about this case.

After the prelims were over, I’d expected to have a little breathing room to sit down and organize the mountains of evidence gathering around my desk. A case like this one usually takes a year or more to come to trial. Generally, the defense wants to delay things as long as possible to give themselves time to prepare. They are also hoping that key witnesses will die or disappear in the meantime, so they’ll ask for postponement after postponement until either we or the judge says, “Enough, already. Let’s go.”

Shortly after the prelims, however, Shapiro announced that his client intended to invoke his right to a speedy trial.

When the news reached me, I just put my head on my arms and moaned. “Speedy trial,” by law, means no more than sixty days after an arraignment. It was a good strategy. In fact, I’m surprised that more defense attorneys don’t use it. What it meant was that we had to be ready in eight weeks. It was an absolutely impossible deadline.

I knew that Shapiro was no more ready than we were, but he didn’t have to prepare a case to prove his client’s innocence. All he had to do was stand by and be ready to kick us in the shins. He wouldn’t have to present any evidence until we finished our case. We were at a bigger disadvantage than he was.

The clock started running on July 22, the morning of the defendant’s second arraignment. (A second arraignment is standard. A prosecutor may have acquired more information that would change the charges. In this case, however, they remained the same.)

Simpson arrived at court that morning sporting an expensive dark suit and an irritating swagger. This was new. I remember thinking that his handlers must have adjusted his medication because he was clear-eyed and alert. He appeared confident, which gave me odd comfort. My guess was that Simpson’s confidence often led him to do stupid things. He seemed in the mood to bluster. I wondered if he was being coached to display that swagger in hopes that press and public would remember that the guy in the dock here was the ostentatiously confident O. J. Simpson.

“Do you understand the charges against you, sir?” asked the supervising criminal court judge, Cecil Mills.

Simpson stood up straight and answered as if breaking from a huddle. “Yes, Your Honor.”

“How do you plead?”

Simpson snapped to full attention and boomed, “Absolutely, one hundred percent not guilty.”

You asshole, I thought. You unregenerate, scum-sucking creep.

I watched Simpson as the deputies led him out of the courtroom. He gave the crowd a thumbs-up. Beneath that three-thousand-dollar suit he’s just one more sadistic punk, I told myself. You’ve put a lot of those away. He’s no different.

But, of course, he was.

By my estimate, O. J. Simpson had already sunk more than a million dollars into his defense, and the case was barely six weeks old. Shapiro alone must be pulling down a retainer well into six figures. Possibly seven. With each passing week, the defense team seemed to be doubling in size. There were at least three private investigators we knew of working for the team, with scores more P.I.s on the freelance pad. Their names kept turning up in the press-as did those of defense attorneys around town looking to get some ink.

One of those was Johnnie Cochran.

Johnnie’s name began circulating through the rumor mill almost immediately after Howard Weitzman dropped out of the picture. At first, Cochran demurred: he was too close to O. J. Simpson to take the case. “He’s a friend,” he would later be quoted as saying. “And that’s a mess, when you start trying to represent a friend.”

I was not surprised to hear that Johnnie knew Simpson. Johnnie knew just about everybody worth knowing in L.A. Smooth, affable, urbane, he was one of those guys who seemed welcome wherever he went, whether it was a political fund-raiser, a film screening, or the courthouse corridors. Johnnie joked and glad-handed like a pol. “Howyadoin? Howyadoin? Howyadoin?”

Everybody wanted to be his friend. He’d done a short stint in the D.A.‘s office as an assistant to John Van de Kamp. That was a political plum; his duties were largely ceremonial and administrative. As for private practice, no one in our office could recall his trying a single, big murder case, save one. During the early seventies he’d defended Geronimo Pratt, a Black Panther who’d been accused of murdering a white schoolteacher. He lost; Pratt was sentenced to life in prison.

Rather, Johnnie had made his reputation as a litigator in civil suits-ones brought against the city by blacks and other minorities who claimed they’d been roughed up by the LAPD. On the wall of his office hung larger-than-life blowups of the seven-figure settlement checks he’d won for his clients. Bill Hodgman had, in fact, tried an attempted-murder case against Johnnie and lost. To Bill’s way of thinking, Cochran was no legal scholar, nor was he a particularly clever tactician. But he was smooth and charismatic and judges seemed to love him. Bill warned me early on that Johnnie would play the race card. Johnnie always played the race card.

I doubted that Cochran would risk his reputation as a pillar of the community for the likes of O. J. Simpson. The defendant was not some brother who’d been shaken down by cops for driving in a white neighborhood. O. J. Simpson could have jogged nude through Bel Air without being arrested. He hobnobbed with white golfing buddies, married a white woman, lived in a mansion, and had effectively turned his back on the black community. He had, moreover, committed two murders of horrific savagery.

Johnnie certainly realized this. At age fifty-six, Johnnie was one of the best-known and best-respected black men in the county. He was in a position to be one of those conciliators to whom both blacks and whites could turn in times of racial distress. A word from him could help calm the waters. Why risk a citywide race riot to promote O. J. Simpson as a cause célèbre?

Shows you what I know. On the morning of O. J. Simpson’s arraignment, I walked into court to find Johnnie Cochran sitting at the defense table.

Johnnie, with his dark good looks and strange iridescent suits, was hard to miss. He was one of the most animated men in public life, and yet the thing that struck me that morning in late July was how quiet he seemed. He was hunched in an upholstered armchair, his chin resting on the tips of his index fingers, in a posture of deep thought. He appeared almost withdrawn. Shapiro was clearly running the show, and Johnnie wasn’t used to being anyone’s second chair.

From the moment he logged on as attorney of record, Johnnie was causing mischief. Word filtered back to me that he was telling reporters that Fuhrman should be grilled on his racial attitudes. “Give me one black on that jury,” he was reported to have said. He didn’t need to finish the thought. Clearly, Johnnie figured that even one African American would be enough to hang a jury.

Not long afterward, Johnnie announced-in open court-that there was a witness who purportedly would clear Simpson and provide an “important lead” on the “real killers.” Johnnie said this evidence was totally inconsistent with the theory of a lone assailant. And is entirely inconsistent with the fact that Mr. Simpson is that assailant.” He suggested that the LAPD had given this witness short shrift. As it happened, the “witness” to whom he was referring had already been checked out by the police. Frank Chiuchiolo, a self-described prowler who had called in shortly after the murders, said that he’d seen a pair of heavyset white men running from the rear alley at Bundy. Before the police could even dispatch detectives to the guy’s house, up north in a town called-I just loved this-Happy Camp, the media had sniffed him out and exposed him as a chronic liar and publicity seeker. This goon-the Happy Camper, we called him-had also surfaced in the Polly Klaas abduction-murder case, where he’d also tried to give the cops phony information. And yet here was Johnnie using this shaky lead, proclaiming that the cops and the D.A.‘s office had overlooked crucial evidence in their “rush to judgment”!

You might think that pulling a stunt like this would erode a lawyer’s credibility. But Johnnie Cochran would make these far-fetched or unsupported allegations time and time again, and the media never really held him accountable. Johnnie realized that journalists, by and large, have the attention span of gnats; the important thing was grabbing the headline. In the mad rush of events, he wagered that no one would follow up. And he won the bet, nearly every time.

Something more powerful than principle was operating here. Attorneys who should have known better were being drawn to this case like moths to a floodlight. By the time Simpson was bound over for trial, F. Lee Bailey was being cited as a possible addition to the defendant’s all-star team.

Shortly after joining the team in late June, Bailey gave an interview to NBC’s Today show in which he made ridiculous assertions about what the prosecution could and could not prove. He quoted misinformation inadvertently passed to the defense by Juditha Brown-that Nicole had spoken to her mother at eleven P.M. Bailey proclaimed triumphantly that this proved Simpson could not have committed the murders and that the case would soon be thrown out. It was a foolish, sloppy mistake. We’d already gotten phone records that showed that the call had been made at 9:45 P.M., not eleven, which gave Simpson plenty of time to kill two people and make the five-minute drive back to Rockingham. I don’t know what possessed Bailey to shoot his mouth off like that. I just think the guy could not resist an impulse to grab the limelight.

Neither, apparently, could others.

Early on, probably during the first or second week of the case, I’d seen Alan Dershowitz do one of his talking-head numbers on national TV. It seemed to me, at least, that he was convinced of Simpson’s guilt. To PBS talk-show host Charlie Rose, he professed indignation at the “excuses” defendants use nowadays to absolve themselves of guilt. He cited “cop-outs” such as the “battered-woman syndrome” and the “abused-child syndrome.” He predicted that the defense in the Simpson case would most likely mount a mental defense. “The Juice Excuse,” he would call it. Then, the next thing I hear, he’s being touted as one of O. J. Simpson’s “legal strategists.”

Do these guys think no one is listening?

People still ask me whether the sight of those big guns rolling onto the field intimidated me. “Didn’t you dread coming to court every day to face these guys down?” they say. The answer is no. Whenever we heard the press referring to this crew as the Dream Team, Bill and I just rolled our eyes. The idea that these were special forces carefully recruited by Commander Shapiro, a sort of Dirty Dozen of the bar, was ludicrous.

Because what you had, basically, were a set of incompatibly grandiose egos-lead horses who by definition could never pull easily in the same harness. As early as the week of the arraignment, Shapiro was already looking worried that Johnnie would muscle him out of the limelight. It didn’t take a psychic to predict procedural chaos if this bunch were not held in check by a strong judge. What we needed was someone who would be temperate but decisive. Someone who would be consistent. Someone who knew enough law and had enough confidence to rule from the bench. We needed the ump of all umps. A square-jawed, rock-ribbed referee with huevos of steel.

Instead, we got Lance Ito.

The announcement was almost anticlimactic after Simpson’s “absolutely, one hundred percent not guilty” performance. When Judge Mills announced, “I’m assigning the case to Judge Lance Ito,” I cast a quick glance at Bill. He seemed as taken aback as I was.

Judge Mills had about six to nine names to choose from. These were drawn from a pool of judges who were available for so-called long-cause cases, complex cases, usually murder trials, that were expected to go longer than a month. The lawyers on both sides get to look over the list of judges to see if there’s any candidate so objectionable that one side or the other might have to “paper” him. “Papering” means filing an affidavit of protest. It’s a little like a peremptory challenge; you can reject an appointment without offering a reason. The only problem is that you’re obliged to take the next name you’re given.

There were at least two candidates so awful they made the hair on my neck stand on end. I would definitely have papered them. And then there were three or four others who would have been terrific. But Lance Ito? He’d never, ever occurred to me.

“You’ve gotta be kidding,” I whispered to Bill. Why, I wondered, does the judiciary never pick its brightest stars for these cases?

Lance was certainly no bright star. When he was chosen for the Simpson case, he was presiding over the master calendar court, which sends cases out to be tried. It was a useful but mundane assignment. The judge in calendar either tries to get the sides to plea-bargain or sends the case out for trial. It’s strictly an administrative position, and one that takes a judge out of the loop of trial work. It’s certainly not the sort of assignment that would prepare one for dealing with the pressures of the Simpson case.

Lance always struck me as an overgrown adolescent. He was the only judge I knew who wore running shoes under his robes. I’d worked with him briefly in the D.A.‘s office-he’d been a prosecutor during the eighties. His reputation as a gun enthusiast preceded him. According to office lore, he’d been looking over a handgun with another D.A. when somehow the piece went off and fired a bullet into the ceiling-which happened to be the floor of the Public Defender’s Office.

Lance was one of those guys who can sniff out a new source of power in the office and always manage to attach themselves to the unit du jour. He got himself assigned to the Hard Core Gang Unit when it was a hot political baby. He prided himself on political correctness. His wife, Captain Margaret York, was the highest-ranking female officer on the LAPD. I could never figure that pair out. It became clearer and clearer to me as the trial went on that when it came to gender equality, Lance was stuck in a tar pit.

In his seven years on the bench, Ito had shown himself to be a typical ex-prosecutor judge. Don’t get me wrong. Some old prosecutors go on to the bench and turn out to be terrific judges, fair and decisive. A number of them, however, treat the D.A.s who appear before them very badly. If the prosecutor is any good, the judge feels competitive. The ex-prosecutor judge is usually so eager to show that he has no lingering loyalties to the D.A.‘s office that he’ll kiss the toes of the defense.

I hadn’t argued a case before Ito, but Bill had: the Keating case. I could remember Bill grousing about Ito at the time. He thought Ito had bent over backward to accommodate the defense and dismissed a lot of counts he shouldn’t have. But in the end, Bill and his team won a guilty verdict. It’s not unusual for a D.A. to be tweaked by a judge’s day-to-day rulings, only to recall him as a fine and thoughtful jurist when the outcome is favorable. Bill felt Ito had done a tolerably good job on Keating, which was by anyone’s reckoning a complicated long-cause trial. Keating, however, was strictly white-collar crime; accordingly, everyone kept his gloves on. The Simpson case was shaping up to be a sort of break-your-bottles-and-go-at-it street brawl. We would need a judge who could step in and keep the peace. I didn’t believe Lance had the fortitude for that.

My first inclination was to refuse him. But Judge Mills added a complication. He noted that Ito was married to a captain on the LAPD.

“In the event that either side desires him to do so,” he explained, “no affidavit will be required on the request of either side. He will recuse himself from handling this matter.”

Thanks a lot. Now, if we refused him on the grounds that his wife was a cop, what kind of message would that send? It would telegraph to our prospective jury pool that we didn’t think much of the LAPD, or that Lance had some inside information about the LAPD that would hurt us. The only politic option was to decline Judge Mills’s offer, use our one challenge to boot him, and hope for a better draw. Of course, then we’d have to accept the next name to come up. No arguments; no appeals.

I’d have papered him in a hot second if I hadn’t known there were a couple of worse judges in the building. (Although, looking back, it’s hard to see how they could have been much worse.) Instead, I turned to Bill, who knew Ito better than I did.

“What’s your gut tell you?”

He sighed and gave me a thumbs-up.

I wish that one of us had been endowed with some mystical gift of prescience that would have warned us off this train wreck. But you make your decision with the best information you have at the time.

Only four days after he took the case, Lance and I locked horns for the first time. It was bitter and it was public. The defense had filed a motion that would have required us to give them 10 percent of each of our blood samples so that they could do their own testing. I couldn’t let that happen. Some of the samples contained so little DNA that if we gave up even 10 percent, we might not be left with enough blood to get a test result. This was particularly true for the more sophisticated tests-for instance, the one that utilizes the RFLP method is very reliable but requires a fair amount of DNA. Remember, by law the defense is not obligated to come forward with their results-so if their tests proved Simpson guilty, they could and most assuredly would hide the information. On the other hand, if our diminished sample failed to yield a result, we’d wind up with nothing. So if we gave the defense a portion of bloodstains off the top-a concession that was based on no legal requirement-we might well destroy crucial evidence.

I was almost certain that Ito would reject the defense’s motion out of hand. Any reasonable judge would. Just to be certain, I drafted a proposal that would make it even easier for him: let the defense do all the testing. I was willing to go out on a limb like this because I knew the defense’s blood expert, Dr. Edward Blake, and I both respected and trusted him.

What I proposed was to give Dr. Blake the entire sample. Let him do all the testing-provided the defense would share his results with us. If the Dream Team was sincere about getting an honest result, they’d go for my compromise. The only possible reason for turning me down was if they knew the results would hang their client. My counter-motion, in essence, would call their bluff.

Get it, judge? They don’t want the truth; they want to hide evidence.

Sure enough, the defense flatly rejected my proposal. That figured. What surprised the hell out of me was the subsequent ruling from Ito. He granted the defense’s ridiculous request: 10 percent, he decreed, would be “available to the defense for their own testing.”

I leaned over to Lisa Kahn, the deputy who was handling DNA for our side, and whispered, “Did he say what I think he said?”

Lisa just shook her head in disbelief.

“Your Honor.” I jumped up, interrupting Ito in midsentence. “May I ask the court to take some further evidence?”

Ito fixed me with an icy glare.

“I think that perhaps defense counsel has misled the court as to the nature of the testing that is going to be performed. You’re depriving us of ever conducting the poly-marker test completely by giving that ten percent to the defense… You are taking evidence out of our hands forever.”

Ito seemed embarrassed and angry. I’d put him on the spot. On national TV no less. He must have realized that he could not safely ignore my objection. What if I was right? What if this screwy order wound up trashing all the blood evidence? So he ordered a hearing during which experts from both sides would testify as to how much evidence we had and what we could afford to give up.

I’ve wondered over and over again if I should have taken him on so boldly so early in the game. But every time I replay this scene in my mind, I come to the same conclusion. No good attorney would sit by and watch a judge throw away evidence. Meanwhile, the message was clear-Lance Ito lacked good judgment. If he’d strayed afield on such an obvious no-brainer, what could we expect on the complicated rulings?

We’d soon find out.

The defense had committed what I considered a serious tactical blunder by challenging the warrantless search during the preliminary hearing. Under California law, with rare exception, you are entitled to challenge a search or warrant only once. Shapiro and Gerald Uelmen had taken their shot before Judge Kennedy-Powell during the prelim, and she’d denied their motion. But now the defense wanted to mount a new assault upon that search in Superior Court.

Their grounds? “New evidence” had come to light involving police misconduct. They petitioned Ito to reopen debate on the warrantless search. He wasn’t, apparently, impressed with their showing and denied the motion. The defense then attacked the warrant, saying it was faulty and misleading.

In order to make any headway here, the defense would have to show that the warrant misstated or omitted crucial facts and that an accurate version, if corrected, wouldn’t have shown probable cause. And they must file a declaration itemizing those things that they considered errors.

In anticipation of this motion, I had put fellow D.A. Cheri Lewis to work on a set of tight, logical arguments showing how anyone could have made these mistakes under similar circumstances. The mistakes were, in legal terms, “merely negligent.” This phrase sounds more ominous than it is. It’s essentially an “oops”: mistakes anyone could make. They were not “reckless,” which means the cop knew or should have known what the truth was, but put down something else.

Cheri and I marched into court on September 21 loaded for bear. To our amazement we discovered that the defense team had not even produced a declaration listing the errors. Any judge with his eye on the ball would have admonished them for this omission and then ordered them home to write a proper motion. But not Ito.

And so we listened to Gerald Uelmen, former dean at Santa Clara University School of Law and one of the most boring speakers on earth, drone on for hour upon excruciating hour, before he got to his point: Phil’s claim that there had been “human” blood on the Bronco door was so devastatingly reckless that he’d misled a magistrate into granting the warrant.

Huh? You mean finding a bloody glove matching the one left at the crime scene wouldn’t be enough?

Uelmen concluded on a bit of tortured logic: getting a search warrant must have meant the cops considered Simpson a suspect, right? So why didn’t they arrest him when he got back to Rockingham on the thirteenth?

I wanted to stand up and concede the point. You know, Gerry, you’re right. They should have arrested him right then and there, but those nasty old conspirators let him walk right out the door. Phil Vannatter lied all over the warrant just so he could nail O.J… and then what does he do? Lets him slip right through his fingers. Yeah, I get it.

Far from making a persuasive argument, Uelmen had only underscored the cops’ innocent intentions.

In the end, Lance upheld the warrant. He really had no choice. He, like Judge Kennedy-Powell before him, had seen that the cops, acting under extreme stress in emergency circumstances, had performed imperfectly but properly. And yet Lance could not resist a gratuitous slap. He could not, he said, make a finding that Phil’s actions were “merely negligent.” Instead, he termed them “at least reckless.”

Even as I think back upon this now, it makes my blood boil. This episode was, for me, an education in the ways of Lance Ito. Lance, I was beginning to see, was so indecisive, so fearful generally of the “big guns” at the defense table, that he didn’t dare give us a decision without handing the defense something in return. Split the baby. Apologies to Solomon, it was Ito’s Law. In this instance, the cost of appeasement was high: a cop’s good name.

Throughout August and September, and into the early part of October 1994, prosecution and defense continued to wrangle over blood evidence. The defense claimed we’d intentionally delayed sending about two dozen blood samples from Simpson’s home and Bronco off for DNA testing. They claimed we were trying to buy time. That was ridiculous. If you measured our progress by any normal pretrial schedule, we were proceeding at the goddamned speed of light. The amount of evidence we’d managed to pull together and submit to date was staggering. But the labs had their own backlogs to deal with. Ito just didn’t get this. He felt somehow that the world should shut down for the Simpson case. The defense had dropped its request for a portion of our samples. This, however, only complicated matters because we had been ordered by the bench to have the testing conducted only at those times when the defense’s own expert, Dr. Blake, could be present. It had turned into a scheduling nightmare.

It was D.A. Lisa Kahn’s job to explain this to Ito. Unfortunately, she and the defense’s own DNA point man, a scrappy little New York import named Barry Scheck, could scarcely conceal their contempt for each other. Day after day she and Scheck went at it, he accusing us of bad faith, she accusing him of filing a flood of motions to confuse and mislead the court. The press dubbed these running hostilities “The Lisa and Barry Show.”

I could see that both of them irritated the hell out of Ito. Under the best of circumstances, Lisa wasn’t inclined to suffer fools, and she’d copped a snippy attitude with the judge.

One afternoon I was upstairs trying to get some of my own work done when a law clerk came running into my office.

“Marcia, have you seen what’s happening in court?” she gasped. “You’d better get down there ASAP. Ito’s furious at Lisa!”

I grabbed a pad of paper and flew downstairs, but court had already adjourned for the day.

Later, back in my office, Lisa gave me the unpleasant details. Ito seemed to be leaning toward keeping out blood samples, so she’d snapped, “If the court wants to make such a ruling, the court is entitled to… although I don’t believe there is truly any authority to support it.”

This had infuriated Ito.

“Fuck him, if that’s the way he wants to be,” she said angrily.

“You’re gonna have to do some begging and pleading to shore up our position,” I told her.

She wouldn’t do it. She wasn’t going to kiss butt for a motion she felt we shouldn’t have to argue in the first place. I sympathized with her, but I knew this intransigence would get us nowhere.

Ito was set to rule four days hence on whether our delays had been deliberate. If he found they were, he could impose sanctions that would exclude as many as two dozen blood samples. Among them was the blood of Ron Goldman, which had been found in the Bronco. It was a devastating piece of evidence against the defendant. And its loss would be terrible for us.

I knew we had to do something to pull Ito back toward the center-and fast.

I sat Lisa down and we drafted a letter, calmly laying out our position. I promised that I would take the letter in myself and spare her the humiliation of bowing to Ito’s wishes.

Friday morning, October 14, I took a deep breath, put my head down, and marched into court. I handed the letter to Ito’s clerk, Deirdre Robertson. This was going to be ugly.

When Ito took the bench I asked permission to address the court. He granted it curtly.

This is not the time to stand on your dignity, I told myself. Fall on your damned sword.

So, on behalf of the People, I apologized profusely for any slight His Honor might have suffered during Tuesday’s hearings, and I implored him to consider the letter we’d submitted. I begged him not to cripple the People’s case by keeping out evidence when the testing delays were really no one’s fault.

Ito was still petulant. Why, he asked, couldn’t Lisa have answered him civilly and satisfactorily when he’d asked her for explanations? He continued to take out on me all the animosity he felt toward her.

“I don’t know if I can telegraph this… more openly. You’re about to lose,” he warned me.

We all went home that weekend in very low spirits, thoroughly expecting that next week, Ito was going to cut our legs right out from under us.

But then Lance did another of his classic turnarounds. On the following Tuesday morning, when we reconvened on the matter, he announced that he’d found no deliberate attempt on our part to sandbag the defense or the court.

Defense motion denied.

I glanced over at the defense table. Johnnie looked stunned. Barry Scheck looked like somebody had killed his dog. I was nearly weak with relief.

It was only as we were basking in the afterglow of this victory that I let myself reflect on the dynamic that had turned the situation around. Lance Ito had really enjoyed watching me grovel.

I’m sure Gil thought twice before asking me to take a meeting with Don Vinson. He knew that I had very little patience with frivolous interruptions. Ever since this case had started I’d found that people in high places would find any excuse to “meet” with me or Bill. Often these meetings came in the guise of some kind of help or favor they wanted to offer, but what I suspected people really wanted was to pick up insider gossip on the case and pass it along at cocktail parties. Media biggies arranged for Suzanne Childs to bring them by my office in hopes of getting an interview. Under other circumstances I would have gotten a kick out of that. Some requests I could deflect with a polite refusal; others required that I break from my work and chat for a few moments for the sake of diplomacy. Each of these interruptions probably took less than ten minutes. But the minutes added up.

The meeting with Don Vinson was not so easily avoided. Vinson was the founder of Decision Quest, a firm that specialized in jury consulting. After the hung verdict in the Menendez case, Vinson had volunteered his services to our office for the retrial. Gil was touched by the gesture. Apparently, both he and David Conn were impressed by Vinson’s work, and when Vinson offered to consult gratis on the Simpson case, Gil thought we should go for it.

Now, I do not particularly like jury consultants. As far as I’m concerned they are creatures of the defense. They charge a lot, so the only people who can afford them are wealthy defendants in a criminal trial or fat-cat corporations defending against class-action suits. As a matter of principle, I don’t feel that the government should be in the position of market-testing its arguments.

Not long after the preliminary hearings, however, we’d heard that Simpson had retained a topflight jury consultant named Jo-Ellan Dimitrius. Jo-Ellan was a heavy hitter who’d been used successfully by the defendants in both the McMartin Preschool and Rodney King state and federal trials. The line on her was good; she was a decent person and a hard worker who handled everything for her clients, from drawing up a profile of the ideal juror, to writing the ideal juror’s questionnaire, to evaluating responses and rating prospective juror candidates. No doubt about it, the Dream Team had hired themselves a great big gun.

This had Gil very worried. There were a number of tricky currents in this case: race; public attitude toward the LAPD; the defendant’s celebrity. If the defense was out there gathering intelligence to help them navigate these waters, then, Gil’s thinking went, so should we. In this case I agreed. I wanted all the help I could get.

Vinson suggested that Bill and I meet him for lunch at the very conservative, very exclusive California Club in downtown L.A.

I balked.

“If they have ideas for us, let them come in here and hand them over,” I groused to Bill. “I’m in no mood to clink glasses.”

Bill, ever the voice of reason and conciliation, coaxed me out of my lair with the promise that if Vinson didn’t offer anything of substance, I’d be off the hook for future invitations.

In a private dining room within that very private club, we found Vinson, a heavy, florid man with huge jowls. Thin wisps of white hair had been combed into submission across his pate.

“Ms. Clark,” he greeted me, in a drawl that suggested an haut bourgeois pedigree. When he rose to shake my hand, I caught the flash of gold cuff links. Bill noticed them, too. They became our private joke. After that, any time we ran into something pretentious, we’d refer to it as “very cuff link.”

Vinson was full of grand plans. He urged us to let him try out our case in front of a mock jury. It would work this way: He’d recruit a demographically diverse group of people to serve as jurors. He’d make a videotape of me giving a final argument for the prosecution, and Bill giving one for the defense. The jurors would deliberate and vote to convict or acquit. We would be allowed to watch them through a one-way mirror.

Bill frowned. I knew that he, like me, favored doing things simply, without all the flash. But I just sipped my Chardonnay and tried to sort out my thoughts before speaking. It was absolutely imperative that the results be kept confidential. Bill and I would have to lay our evidence on the line. We certainly didn’t want that leaked to the press.

“Oh, don’t worry,” Vinson told us confidently. “We’ve never had a problem before.”

So, against my better judgment, and in deference to my boss, I gave my okay to this plan.

This would require some work. After all, pulling together a closing argument was not easy to do. At that point we did not have the DNA evidence back, so I would have to cobble something together from the prelims. It took time we didn’t have, but Bill and I completed our respective arguments, and taped our presentations one evening down in the conference room. Then we sent them off to Vinson.

Several days later, Vinson called me to say that he could not use my tape. It was important that the mock jurors not know which side, prosecution or defense, was sponsoring the testing. I had become “too famous,” he said. If he showed my tape, we’d give ourselves away. He now wanted to redo my argument, with one of his male associates presenting it.

On Saturday, July 23, 1994, Gil, Bill, and I met Vinson at an office building near the airport. The consultant ushered the three of us into a darkened room, where we got the first peek at our “jurors” through a one-way glass. There were ten. Four black, two Hispanic, two Asian, two white. They’d been warned to base their decision solely on the evidence, but they quickly tossed that admonishment to the wind and began kicking around the question of whether Mark Fuhrman could have planted the glove. The battle lines were drawn. Blacks were convinced he had; the others professed neutrality or disbelief. Then they moved on to the juicier, yet totally tangential issue of whether Kato and Nicole had been lovers.

“They were supposed to be talking about our videos, not gossip from the six o’clock news,” I complained to Vinson.

He stepped into the room to remind the group to confine its comments to the evidence.

“Well, yeah,” they argued. “But everyone knows about all this stuff anyway.”

Reluctantly, they agreed to try again. Within two minutes they were off and gossiping on another subject not mentioned on the tape-the Bronco chase. Black jurors believed Simpson had only wanted to visit Nicole’s grave. When one of the more neutral jurors suggested that it might-just might-have been the escape attempt of a guilty man, one of the female blacks shot back with a defense of Simpson, referring to him as “my man O.J.”

“My man?” I thought to myself. The only way he’d be your man is if you were white, twenty-five, and built like a centerfold.

The racial divide did not come as any great shock to us. As early as the second week of the investigation our grand jury adviser, Terry White, had come to us warning that a couple of black female jurors seemed protective of Simpson. They’d gone so far as to say that Nicole “got what she’d deserved.” What was disturbing to me was how the popular media had permeated the thinking of the mock jury. Not a soul among them seemed capable of critical thinking. If it was on TV, it must be true. Of course, many of the reports they’d seen were based upon nothing more substantial than a loose comment dropped in the hallway outside of court, but they had entered the canon as God’s own truth.

The jury hung, five to five.

Naturally, we were deflated. For my part, I was content to take what lessons we could from the session-specifically, the reaffirmation that black females would be a hard sell-and cut our losses. Not so, Don Vinson. He insisted we try again. This time, he wanted to go with a full-blown facsimile of a trial. We’d present more of the scientific evidence and maybe get an idea of how to simplify it. It was likely, he said, that a more detailed presentation would elicit more specific opinions than the knee-jerk loyalties we’d gotten in the first go-round.

I was uneasy about this. It was August now, nearly two months since the murders. If this case had had the normal life cycle of a major criminal trial, the media frenzy would have been slackening. But the madness was actually intensifying. It was a miracle that the results of the first mock jury had not gotten out. How would we keep the details of an even more elaborate dress rehearsal from leaking to the press?

Vinson agreed that keeping the experiment under wraps would be difficult. But the jurors, he said, were required to sign an oath of confidentiality.

“And what do we do if they violate this agreement?” I asked him.

Well, there was really nothing anyone could do, he conceded. But no one in his experience had ever breached an agreement of this kind. To assure secrecy, he proposed doing it out of state-specifically, in Phoenix, Arizona. No one would follow us there, he assured me. People weren’t as hot on this case outside Los Angeles.

So, on August 18, Bill and I met at the airport to catch a flight to Phoenix. When the idea of this trip first came up, Vinson had talked about flying us out on a private jet. He never came through with that. Instead, we were booked on a commercial flight. This should have been our first tip-off to the troubles afoot.

Bill and I hid out in the terminal bar, the only dark, quiet corner that would afford us some privacy while we waited for our flight. Immersed in reviewing our notes, we lost track of the time. Bill looked at his watch and yelped, “We’d better hustle.” We gathered our bags and sprinted to the metal detectors that separated us from the jetway. Just as I was about to send my purse through the metal detector, it hit me:

“Shit, I’ve got my gun in there.”

I’d forgotten to get clearance to carry it on board. Bill and I looked at each other, neither of us quite knowing what to do.

“Keep it for me,” I begged the security guard at the station. “I’ll get it on my way back.”

“No can do,” she told me. “You’ve got to fill out the paperwork.”

One look at her face told me she would not be moved.

“Go without me!” I shouted to Bill. Then I raced back to the ticket counter to find someone who could help me. One agent, a sweet and sympathetic woman, agreed to hold the gun for me. I thanked her breathlessly and was headed for the metal detector when I saw Bill walking toward me, forlorn, his suit bag over one shoulder.

“Stand down, partner,” he said. “We missed our flight.”

Man, did I feel stupid.

The airline gave us its conference room, where we spent a little time going over prospective presentations. Then we napped. The pace of this thing was sapping both of us.

When at last they called our flight, we were making our way wearily to the gate when I heard someone call my name.

“Do you ever read the National Enquirer?” the disembodied voice asked. I was about to say, “Are you crazy?” when I saw a guy with cameras slung around his neck. The tabloids! Somebody had dropped a dime on us. Bill and I turned and ran all the way to the gate.

“It’s over,” I told him. “News’ll be all over the place in about five minutes. They couldn’t have sent us on a private plane?”

“Stupid,” Bill muttered. “Just plain stupid.”

When we landed in Phoenix, I spotted the burly bearlike form of Frank Sundstedt, who’d arrived in Phoenix early and was now waiting for us at the gate. We told him about the reporters.

“How about a disguise?” he asked, only partly in jest.

“Hell,” I told him, “I’ll wear dreadlocks if you think it will help.”

On the way to the hotel, we nipped into a drugstore and I picked out a pair of clunky reading glasses. I looked at myself in the little round mirrors clipped to the top of the rack. Great! Pistol-packing nerd. I kept my head down as we entered the hotel where Vinson had booked our rooms. Frank went to check on our reservations. They’d been booked under our real names. Swell. Reporters had been calling the hotel asking about us. Once again, we’d been made.

That was it. There would be no mock jury. The only thing we could do was to turn around and go home.

God damn this case, I thought. I’d missed a night at home for this? I would have loved to be singing lullabies right now. You wouldn’t catch me humming Brahms. It would probably be something more like “Angel Baby.”

Bill, Frank, and I met Vinson for dinner at a restaurant near the hotel.

“It’s over, Don,” I said. “Call it off. The press is all over us.”

“No, no, no,” he protested. Vinson, I suspected, could see his claim to glory as guru to the Simpson prosecutors slipping through his fingers. He argued. He cajoled. He begged us to reconsider. I cast a glance Frank’s way. I could see that he, too, was hoping to salvage something from this debacle. After all, seventeen recruits were due to arrive tomorrow morning at a conference room in the hotel. I suggested a compromise.

“Why don’t you just go in and ask them what they think of the case so far? Ask them what they think of the witnesses, the evidence. Maybe even what they think about the lawyers. But no mock trial. No ballots. No verdicts.”

Vinson entertained this proposal. I could see that Frank and Bill were warming to it. Finally, we all agreed that Don would chair a discussion by a panel that had now been officially downgraded from “jury” to “focus group.” Bill, Frank, and I would watch on a TV monitor in an adjoining room.

I crawled back to my room that night, already feeling the strain of battle fatigue. I looked at the clock. Four A.M. I’d get only about four hours of sleep before I had to be up and going again. I turned out the light and was asleep before my head hit the pillow.

The phone was ringing. I reached blindly for the receiver.

” ‘Lo,” I croaked.

“Marcia, you’re late.” It was Frank speaking in soft, urgent tones. “They’ve already started-you’d better get down here.”

I squinted at the digital radio by my bed. Nine A.M. I’d forgotten to set the damned alarm!

I pulled on a pair of leggings and boots, threw on a shirt, and, grabbing a legal pad and a few binders with case reports, ran out the door. I quietly let myself into the viewing room and found a seat next to Bill. Vinson was on the monitor. He sat at the mouth of a U formed by conference tables. The seventeen panelists were seated around it. The breakdown, as I recall it, was about nine blacks or Hispanics and eight whites. Most of the blacks were women.

“What did I miss?” I whispered to Bill.

“Not much,” he whispered back. “They’re still getting acquainted.”

I remember one of the men saying something like “It don’t make no sense. Why would someone who had it all just throw it away over a woman?”

I’d heard that one before. To a guy who punches a time clock it probably seems incomprehensible to risk a fortune because you’ve been jilted. But that didn’t take into account the fact that even a guy who had everything could flip out in the throes of sexual obsession. I made a note to confer with our domestic violence people about this one.

As I wrote, Vinson’s voice penetrated my concentration. He was asking our focus group what they felt about the death penalty.

I stiffened with alarm. We’d given him a list of topics, and that most certainly wasn’t on it. They were not supposed to talk about sentencing issues. I looked over to Frank, who was already on the case. He whispered something to one of Vinson’s assistants, who promptly entered the conference room and in turn whispered to the boss. Vinson excused himself and came in to see us, chastened.

Vinson apologized, saying he did not know it would be a problem.

“There’s been no decision on whether we’ll seek death or not,” Frank told him. “That subject is strictly off limits.”

By this time, all of us in the D.A.‘s office knew that we wouldn’t be seeking the death penalty. It just wasn’t an option. No jury-not even one composed of white, middle-aged Republican males-was going to sentence O. J. Simpson to death.

Now, I know there is a school of thought that in a capital case, the district attorney should ask for the death penalty as a tactical ploy. If you have asked for the death penalty, every juror empaneled must be “death certified”-in other words, willing in principle to vote for death. And so, the reasoning goes, if you can pack a jury with law-and-order types, they will be more willing to convict.

I never believed that. What you’re likely to get, in my view, is a panel of tough talkers who, when push comes to verdict, can’t bring themselves to convict. Why? Because it has only just dawned on them that their actions may result in a person’s death.

There was an even more compelling reason for not asking for the death penalty in this case. I didn’t feel-and I don’t believe that any of my colleagues from the brass on down felt-that it was warranted. Apart from the incidents of battery, Simpson did not have a prior criminal history. Over the course of his life he had not shown the kind of callous disregard for society’s rules that you look for in a hardened criminal. O. J. Simpson was not an incorrigible, nor was he a danger to society at large. Under those circumstances it would have been immoral to seek his death.

Chastened, Vinson now steered the conversation onto another course.

“What do you think of the lawyers on the case?’ ” he asked them.

Of Robert Shapiro-Oily, insincere, said the nonblack jurors; Smooth, smart, said the black ones.

Bill Hodgman? A couple of jurors thought he was “smart” or “nice.” But the majority didn’t seem to recognize the name.

What do you think of Marcia Clark?

I found myself pulling my knees up to my chest to shield myself from the blows.

“Bitch!” two black women answered almost in unison.

I’ll make no bones about it. That stung.

Let me pause for a moment. I don’t want to make myself out to be some hothouse petunia who withers in the face of criticism. God knows I’d been called “bitch” before. But it was usually during the rough-and-tumble of trial work. And the taunts came from men, usually behind my back. They’re livin’ in a dream world if they think that stuff doesn’t reach my ears. Being called a bitch by some old-time gender bigot doesn’t bother me. In context, it’s a compliment. It means I’ve stood up to him, I haven’t let him have his way, and now he’s throwing a little tantrum.

But from women?

We all knew-virtually from day one-that a racial divide existed in this case, but I figured I could talk to women. In cases past, I’d always been able to reach them somehow. White, Hispanic, Asian, black. It didn’t matter. Even when they had failed to convict, I didn’t feel that they had it in for me personally. But these gals were ready to eat their own.

Interestingly, none of the men used such slurs in describing me. Most of them, including one black man, found me strong, smart, and tough. That didn’t count, somehow. It was the “bitch” remark that sailed right through the walls of the conference room and reverberated over the wires. So much for confidentiality. The story was out before we even made it back to L.A. The headlines all read that a Phoenix “jury” had voted to “acquit.” Of course, it was complete nonsense, since no vote was ever taken. But one thing that was true-the “bitch” business-was reported with rabid glee.

On the flight home, I gave serious thought to withdrawing from the case. I am not a quitter by nature, but, I thought, if my style, my gender, or my race could actually subvert the process of justice, I should offer Gil the chance to dump me gracefully. So I asked for a meeting with Gil and Don Vinson.

Now, I should say here that in the months since the verdict, Don Vinson has been quoted more than once as saying that his research showed that black women would be too turned off by me to render a fair and impartial verdict. He’s claimed to have counseled our office to downplay the domestic violence issue on the grounds that black women didn’t consider it any big deal-and that I resisted him, clinging to the delusion that I could make them care.

Reality check. By the time I returned from Phoenix, I knew perfectly well what I was up against. And if reaching jurors meant emphasizing physical evidence over DV, I was perfectly willing to do it. The domestic violence aspect of the case had gone largely undeveloped. It wasn’t that we’d neglected investigating the essential leads. Early on, we’d been in touch with the City Attorney’s office, which had handled the 1989 battery incident. We’d collected files of documents generated by that case as well as those from the 911 call from 1983. Throughout the fall I would conduct extensive interviews with prosecutors and cops who had spoken to Nicole on both occasions. But I hadn’t been able to get beyond the basic facts or to talk to domestic violence experts who might help us to interpret those facts.

I hadn’t a spare moment to deal with it. My concentration and energy had been centered upon blood and other physical evidence. I was also experiencing some emotional resistance within myself-which I was hard-pressed to explain, though the reasons for it would become plainer to me as time wore on. The idea that I was on some wild-eyed feminist jag is one of Vinson’s self-serving fantasies.

Vinson’s misrepresentations of me, when I later read them in print, seemed all the more fantastic in light of the little speech he actually delivered to me in the very presence of Gil Garcetti.

“Marcia,” he assured me unctuously, “those responses are nothing to worry about. When you’re in the courtroom, they’ll get to know and like you. I know they will. No question about it.”

I looked to Gil. He paused for a moment, then said, “I agree with Don.”

Gil Garcetti could have bailed on me, and he didn’t. I will always be grateful to him for acting so honorably. I think he wanted to send a message that neither race nor gender should disqualify a good prosecutor. Gil also realized, as a purely practical matter, that anyone he chose was likely to meet resistance from jurors like those who’d branded me a bitch. A white man would be written off as a representative of the power establishment. A black man would be reviled as an Uncle Tom. A black woman? Black female jurors would fucking lynch her. Bottom line, if we drew a panel of jurors who were determined to acquit O. J. Simpson, they were going to kill the messenger.

For several weeks, the mock-jury results were a hot topic of gossip. The “bitch” comment took on a life of its own. I could hear tongues wagging: Clark’s a bitch. Clark’s a hothead. Is it any wonder she doesn’t get along with the judge?

By now the Barry and Lisa Show had given way to the Lance and Marcia Show. Lance and I probably didn’t do nearly as much wrangling as it seemed from the headlines. But whenever there was a flareup, the five scrappiest seconds would make the ten o’clock news. In fact, Ito and I spent a lot of calm, normal moments together doing business-as-usual courtroom stuff. Sometimes we got along well; other times, not. We didn’t have great chemistry, but if we’d been left alone we probably could have arrived at a wobbly truce.

But that was never going to happen. Lance was just too sensitive to his own press notices. He saw that the media had set up the two of us as sparring partners and he wanted to make damned sure the public knew, the reporters knew, and I knew who was running the courtroom. Whenever I raised my voice to make a point, he scowled or dressed me down. While he always spoke respectfully to the defense, referring to them as “Mr. Cochran” and “Mr. Shapiro,” I was usually “Marcia.” I felt that I had to draw the line early and break him of the habit of condescending to me before this case came to trial. If a jury picked up his cues, they’d tune me out before I could finish my opening statement.

Gil had been watching all this from the sidelines. A week or two after the “bitch” episode, he called me into his office for a heart-to-heart.

“Why don’t you try laying back?” he suggested. “Don’t be so tough.”

I was flabbergasted. What the hell did he want me to do? Go in there with a pinafore and pigtails and threaten to hold my breath if Lance didn’t treat me better? I had a job to do, and if I was to represent the People properly, I had to show a little strength. Either that or be an empty chair.

I was tempted to say all this, but I held my peace.

Gil smiled. “Just try lightening up a little.”

I left Gil’s office pretty hot under the collar. The thing I found galling about the “lighten up” business was my suspicion that these suggestions had probably come straight from Don Vinson. By this point, Vinson had zero credibility in my book. If he’d offered his etiquette tips directly to me, I would have told him to go fuck himself. But they didn’t come from him; they came from my boss. I had a lot of respect for Gil Garcetti. He seemed to have faith in Vinson, and once I’d had a chance to calm down, I realized it was probably not a good idea to blow him off.

There were slight alterations I could make in my approach. I could couch my objections more deferentially. I could smile more. That wouldn’t be insincere, would it? In my private life, I am warm and gentle. At least, I can be. But being made to display, on command, a side of my nature that I normally don’t bring to the counsel table seemed awkward.

I went over and over this in my mind, trying to figure out what was right. Vinson told Gil that the people he’d polled perceived me as “hard.” I should speak more softly. I should get a softer hairdo. I should lose the business suits in favor of-get this-dresses. Just think about the logic here. Vinson claimed that black middle-aged women were carrying a grudge against me. And so the way to defuse them was to gussy myself up like Vanna White? Vinson’s line of reasoning was unapologetically sexist. It was demeaning to me personally. And in the end it was meaningless psychobabble. But we were spooked by a set of odds that were definitely not in our favor.

So I got a goddamned haircut. It was not a makeover. The style I’d been wearing to date was frankly unflattering. My hair had always tended to be thin, so I’d had it permed. Suzanne Childs took me to her own hairdresser, Allen Edwards in Studio City. He specialized in soft, natural styles. Allen saw exactly what had to be done. He pulled my fuzzy hair back to the nape of my neck and declared with a flourish, “This must go.”

The transformation was not, in my opinion, miraculous. In fact, it took several visits to Studio City to get it right. But even I had to admit that it was an improvement. My features appeared softer, less matronly. And let’s face it-who’s going to complain about being made to look younger? According to the wisdom of consultancy, these changes should have had a subliminal effect. I would come across as fresher, younger, and, as a consequence, less annoying to middle-aged black women. Go figure.

The “makeover” was big news. A week or so after the cut I drove into a car wash. The radio was on and I heard Howard Stern and Robin Quivers discussing my new ‘do. Howard thought it looked like I’d had chemotherapy. I have to say, I found it amusing. Some of the best commentary to come out of this trial actually came from those guys. But the point is, the buzz would not die. Every time I went in for another trim, or made the slightest alteration, there was another flurry of public commentary about my hair.

Several months down the line, I got my perm straightened. (I’d actually wanted to let it grow back to its natural straightness, but I’d put it off, fearful of calling attention to myself.) The next day, when I got off the elevator at the ninth floor, reporters gave me a standing ovation.

Look pleasant, I told myself. They mean well. At least they’re on your side.

When I walked into court, Lance did a double-take. He noticed the stir my altered appearance was causing.

“Miss Clark… I think,” he quipped.

There was laughter in the courtroom. I joined in, although later I felt uncomfortable about it. The experience produced in me that awful naked feeling of being a teenager changing her hairdo to please the popular crowd. And the irony of it was that this beauty offensive left me feeling more vulnerable than ever before.

A UPI reporter whom I’ve known for years pulled me aside in the hall and said, “Marcia, let me give you one piece of unsolicited advice. Don’t change. You know what you’re doing, just do your thing.”

Do your thing. I used to have a pretty good idea of what my thing was. Even when my private life was a mess, I could come into the courthouse of a morning and count on doing my thing. And I did it pretty damned well. Now my thing had turned into this weird and seedy game show. And when you’re standing confused and blinking in the klieg lights, it’s easy to lose sight of yourself altogether.

But of one thing I was certain. I couldn’t undo four hundred years of social injustice with a pretty dress and a soft voice.