Dancing Naked in the Mind Field (7 page)

I saw O.J. only in the courtroom. They had him locked up at night. He was presumed innocent, I reckon, but considered to be a little dangerous. They might have made better provision for him, like guarding him in his own house, just in case he won. I guess they were still a little put out about him driving around on the Santa Monica Freeway with a pistol and his friend Al.

There was a line on the floor of the courtroom. O.J. was confined behind it by a congenial marshall who seemed to enjoy his job. He had a good seat. Only lawyers were allowed to cross the line. But when court would adjourn in the afternoon, the lawyers would crowd around O.J. and the horde would extend back over to the witness side of the line and the marshall wouldn’t notice who was who. O.J. noticed me immediately. The first thing he asked me about was my refrigerator.

An article about me in
Esquire
had included a photograph of my kitchen. On my refrigerator were pictures I had taken of several women who had passed through my life, some of them without clothes. O.J. asked me about the woman who graced the upper right-hand corner. “She’s gotten married,” I told him. He offered his condolences. I never asked him about the killings. It’s a tough subject to broach even in a courtroom.

I passed him a note one time through Peter. There was some former cheerleader appearing as a material witness who had a tape of a phone message O.J. had left for her on the day of the murders. As was their habit, the lawyers had buzzed around it furiously like flies in the backyard of an untidy dog, and Ito had finally decided to admit some of the text of it. The cheerleader had appeared in court that day looking somewhat bewildered. She was a breath of fresh air, and I helped her get situated. While she was testifying, I scribbled a note to O.J.
inquiring about her phone number. He replied, through Peter, that in order to maintain my loyalty to getting him out, he would rather not furnish it. He would be interested himself, once this was over. Throughout the trial, O.J. maintained this level of playful charm and humanity. It just wouldn’t mesh with the awful things that occupied us there.

Almost from the beginning, even after I arrived in L.A. and started working with the lawyers and the other expert witnesses, there was a question of whether I would be called. Rockne Harmon, a deputy D.A. from northern California, had made a career out of handling the DNA evidence for prosecutors in various jurisdictions around the state. Rocky had a reputation for playing dirty pool with DNA witnesses on the other side. Most of it he probably deserved. When he heard I might testify, he made a clumsy preemptive strike on Court TV in an area that he must have assumed would make me personally uncomfortable. It concerned my past LSD use. His attempts certainly made my mother uncomfortable. I had made her a little uncomfortable myself, talking about LSD in a magazine interview the year before. Rocky had picked it up from there and decided it belonged on the evening news. That was right in line with Mr. Harmon’s well-known method of responsibly prosecuting a case in the name of the People.

Neither my mother nor Rocky understood that it didn’t make me feel uncomfortable. I pictured myself the honest self-admitted defender of LSD use and clearly on the high moral ground. If I took my honesty seriously enough to admit that I had broken the law by taking LSD, why would I lie about anything else? I was pretty much alone in that viewpoint.

On the phone from South Carolina, Mother pleaded. “Now, Kary, you don’t need to be telling them about that, do you?”

“You want me to tell the truth, don’t you?”

“I certainly do. Tell the truth but not that truth.”

I told her I had no choice in the matter. Having a fairly poor memory for certain details, I had discovered early in life that the truth is much easier to tell than anything else. It saves a lot of confusion. “I have been a difficult son in some ways, Mother. But don’t you love my simplicity?”

“No.”

“Sorry.”

Theoretically the jury did not know that Rocky had suggested in the courtroom that he would like to have some assurances that Dr. Mullis would not be on LSD while testifying. That kind of foreplay was allowed only during their absence, but everybody in the world got to hear it replayed over and over, and sequestering a jury while allowing conjugal visits from spouses is a little preposterous. Do we really believe that the twelve people most curious about what’s going on know less about a case than a literate canary could glean from the morning paper?

Legally speaking, juries don’t volunteer. They shouldn’t be tortured. But isn’t what we do to them now for the sake of our cognitive dissonance in regard to their supposed sequestration torture? Isn’t it torture to subject someone “on his honor” and with “fear of retribution and public embarrassment” to conditions guaranteed to lead to either their non-compliance or the break-up of their marriages? As a public concerned about fairness, we should put a little effort on the “Plight of a Juror in the Age of Long Highly Publicized Trials.” At least we shouldn’t be snotty when we catch some juror failing in his public duty.

We have another problem—jury selection. Are you supposed
to be tried by a jury of your peers—or by a bunch of people that a professional jury selection team chooses from hundreds of candidates based on the probability that they will vote one way or the other? What’s going on here in the name of professional jurisprudence?

When I first appeared in the courtroom a week or two before I was scheduled to testify, I looked at the jury. I had never seen them before because the TV camera had been intentionally located above them, but they knew me. Their eyes said, “Boy, are we gonna have fun with you!” I nodded agreement. I, too, was looking forward to injecting a little candor into the drama. Most people are grateful when you educate them about anything other than their own flaws, and I figured we were going to do that. Because of the Nobel Prize, I am a free agent. I don’t owe anything specifically to anybody. I think it makes me a good educator and a good witness.

I also know how to speak to an audience. I don’t think Rocky Harmon realized that. It didn’t say, in their collection of documents describing me, that I had a rare talent for cutting through the garbage to the issue, to pull the forest out of the trees and into the light where the jury could see it for what it was. It didn’t say that I could help them understand, without their knowing anything about chemistry and blue spots and statistical analysis, just what had gone wrong in the LAPD’s lab. I think he figured I was the flake he claimed I was, and he was not afraid of me. He wanted me on the stand as much as I wanted to be there, and we were both disappointed when it didn’t happen.

I had had a plan of my own for Rocky Harmon on the stand. I had explained to Barry, after reading about Rocky running
roughshod over defense witnesses in previous cases, that I thought it would serve him right if we allowed for him, who had lived by it, to “die by the dirty sword.” Barry has a sense of humor and, for a lawyer, an amazing sense of justice.

I was going to let Mr. Harmon decide, before the courtroom, that what one had done in the past did indeed have relevance for judging the truth of what one had to say in this case. I would do this with a question that would be out of order, because lawyers are supposed to ask the questions. If I was lucky, he would think I was trying to avoid his questions about my life, and he would quickly answer that yes, it was relevant. Then, with the Q&A rhythm on my side, I was going to slip in another question of my own—about some outrageous thing he had “done” in the past. Something like an incident with two young boys in the park. I would be extremely out of order—he would loudly protest—and Ito would slam his gavel down to silence me. But the answer wouldn’t matter. The question, like so many Rocky had asked in his days of fervent prosecution, would be transformed by the alchemy of the courtroom into a statement.

Whatever happened after that—maybe a fine for me, maybe a movie contract, or maybe a night in jail—I think my points from direct testimony would have survived intact. Pressing my luck further, I would conjecture that the jury and most of the courtroom would have been happy to see Rocky catch some grief in exchange for what I considered abominable misbehavior. Any further interaction between Mr. Harmon and me would have been related to the DNA issue only on the surface. Underneath it, there would be those two boys. He had been trying to set up a diversion, centered around my LSD use. I
think LSD would have paled beside fictitious young boys. Innuendo does have its charm.

Sadly, my favorite cross-examination never happened.

I was dropped from the roster at the last minute. For those few who were concerned about me—yes, I did get paid. The amount is a professional secret, but I drove back to La Jolla in the same 1989 Acura Integra I had come in.

Johnnie thought the jury was convinced and saturated on the DNA issue before I was scheduled to testify. He could probably tell by the way their eyes glazed over when they heard the DNA discussed. They had been subjected to tedious and technical testimony for weeks. The prosecution had certainly failed to fulfill its obligation of proving the value of the DNA evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. I felt that the jury would be even more convinced after hearing my testimony, and I thought some of the things I would say could influence the whole case. But the question Cochran rightly asked was, do we need to take a chance by going further when it looks like we’ve already won on DNA?

My horoscope says I shouldn’t expect to be a corporate kind of guy, and I’m not. Bob Shapiro and Johnnie Cochran couldn’t help liking me—I have good manners, I’m well informed and often funny. But there was a danger there, and they didn’t get to be successful lawyers by holding their hands over their faces and saying, “Well, here goes.”

In the light of day, the scientists had had their moments and the issue of the physical evidence had settled somewhere between “indeterminate” and “contrived if I heard it right.” It was a long way from the gory trail of blood with which Deputy D.A. Clark had opened her case.

Things were looking good for O.J. The prosecution was starting to fade. Marcia’s hair needed upgrading. But where can you go from curls?

I packed up my white shirts and coats and ties and rolled them down to my Acura, where the valet parking people probably didn’t know that I wasn’t going to testify. On the way out of town I stopped by a strip joint that I had frequented years ago when I was working in L.A. In the last few weeks, I had become aware that people recognized me. I decided I wouldn’t let that bother me.

I was having fun in the club, losing myself in the pleasures of the flesh. Every one of them was different, every one of them a little story in herself. I am easy to entertain, I thought. The possibilities are endless—tropical trees, sunsets, waves, females, quantum physics, crimes, biochemistry—then a flashbulb drew me out of my reverie. A woman sitting across from me had just snagged a photo of me enchanted by a pretty girl dancing in the nude. The bouncer was on the photographer right away. Cameras were not permitted. I thought he would usher her out. He took her camera and brought it to me. “What should I do with it, Doc?”

I was now known as the “DNA Doctor.”

After a few months, I would be less and less surprised. That night at the club I decided that my new public identity didn’t matter, and I wasn’t going to start acting any differently. “Give it back to her,” I said to the bouncer. He delighted in the concept, and he took it back to her without pulling out the film. It’s probably the only time he ever allowed anyone to get out of there with a photo. I nodded my head to the woman with the camera and continued enjoying the show.

I was ready to go, but I stayed another half hour just to let the bouncer know that I wasn’t leaving on account of the picture. When I left, he followed me out to the sidewalk. We chatted a few minutes about the case and whether I thought Simpson was guilty. I agreed with him that it would be good to hear O.J. testify. But I had learned a little bit about justice and police and people accused of crimes. We didn’t really have the right to make him come upfront and talk to us about it. Furthermore, we don’t have the right to conclude that, because he didn’t want to testify, he was guilty of something. At first it seems like a strange law. The defendant, who must know his whereabouts that night, is not required to tell us.

It seems weird until you think about how horribly askew the scales of justice can be. It’s a balance. In O.J.’s case, he was able, by spending most of his money, to bring a defense together that had more clout than the state, and more persistence. Persistence is the state’s big card. It’s what bureaucracy inevitably substitutes for brains. O.J. bought brains and persistence. Most of us couldn’t afford it.

Back on San Diego Freeway, heading for home. I figured that most trial watchers would remember me as the guy who smiled directly into the camera and waved. They were talking about me that day in the courtroom. I was sitting in the audience, and the camera had found me. I could see where it was pointing. Why should I ignore it? I looked up to the TV watchers of the world and waved. My mother thought it was cute.

Another day Mother had called and warned me against sleeping in the courtroom. “You were sleeping this afternoon,” she said. “I saw you.”

“Mother, what the hell are you talking about?”

“You had your head down on the table,” she continued. “They had the camera on you. It looks disrespectful, Kary, and that man was talking about DNA.”

“Oh. Shit!” I realized what she was talking about. “Mother, there’s a TV monitor right under the table in front of me that lets me see what’s on the screen in front of the jury. I have to lean down to see it.”

“Oh.” She laughed reluctantly, without losing the offensive, “But it looks like you’re sleeping.”

My mother is seldom impressed by alternative explanations of her own discoveries. I kept her observation in mind for future reference. She also doesn’t approve of my language, although I explain to her that it is expressive.

Back in San Diego, I thought about what my least favorite image from the trial was. When the verdict was announced and the tired jury was released, the district attorney of Los Angeles County, who had mostly stayed clear of the courtroom, roped all the prosecutors together, and in front of the cameras, they cried. They cried because they had not been able to convict O. J. Simpson.