The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson (40 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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