The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson (44 page)

In his opening, Cochran built a Potemkin village of assertions. There was nothing beneath the rhetoric. No matter; the evidence mattered less than what Cochran said it would be. He had planted the seeds: The LAPD was corrupt; O.J. was virtuous; Nicole deserved what she got.

Cochran’s opening statement was also an unethical piece of lawyering. California discovery law obligated each side to turn over to the other all statements by witnesses it planned to call over the course of the trial. As part of the discovery process, starting even before the preliminary hearing, the prosecution had given the defense tens of thousands of pages of material. The defense, in contrast, had given the prosecution next to nothing. This was not in itself highly unusual—the defense in a criminal case always generates far less investigatory material than does the prosecution. But as the prosecution continued to demand defense-witness statements throughout the summer and fall and into the winter, the defense lawyers responded that they understood their obligations but had nothing to share.

Then, during Cochran’s opening statement to the jury, his majordomo, Carl Douglas, announced that he had found statements of twelve witnesses whom Cochran had suggested the defense was going to call. Many of these statements, including one by Mary Anne Gerchas, had been taken by the defense several months earlier. This discovery failure, as it is known, put the prosecutors at a real disadvantage—not so much because they couldn’t prepare for Gerchas’s testimony in the defense case, which would not begin for months, but because if Clark had known about Gerchas’s claims, she could have addressed them in her opening statement. The news of the Gerchas statement blindsided Clark and her colleagues.

The next day, Carl Douglas addressed the issue of the discovery failures by the defense team. Douglas made his living by keeping track of Cochran’s schedule and making sure Cochran had the right file in his hand at the right time. When the center of operations in the defense camp shifted from Shapiro’s office to Cochran’s after the first of the year, it was Douglas’s thankless task to untangle the files.

Now, in his arch, almost archaic speaking style, he tried to explain that the withholding of the documents had just been an unfortunate mistake. “The Court is well aware that we have been working diligently in this matter,” Douglas said. “The Court is equally aware that the work in this case has been divided among a couple of offices and investigators, et cetera. It perhaps is regrettable that I stand before this Court, that we have not coordinated all of our defense efforts as well as I would have liked before this point. I say that because, Your Honor, I have some documents that I do intend to give over to the people.… Your Honor, I acknowledge and I anticipate that there will be strenuous efforts to impugn both my personal integrity and the integrity of the defense team. I tell this Court, looking the Court straight in the eye with all seriousness, that it had been an oversight, and I am embarrassed by it and I take full responsibility.”

Ito, who had been studying the prosecution table as Douglas spoke, observed, “I have to say, Mr. Douglas, I’ve had long experience with Mr. Hodgman. I’ve known him as a colleague, as a trial lawyer, and I’ve never seen the expressions on his face that I’ve seen today.”

The judge turned to the bearded and usually stoic prosecutor and said, “Mr. Hodgman, why don’t you take a few deep breaths, and we’ll take a look at this.”

Among his other responsibilities, Bill Hodgman supervised the discovery process for the prosecution. The disclosure about these twelve witness statements came on top of the defense’s disclosure, one day earlier, that it had a list of thirty-four new witnesses it planned to call during the trial. These were appalling violations of the discovery laws, and Hodgman felt personally wounded by what he regarded as a dirty trick. In the Todd Bridges attempted-murder case, Hodgman had enjoyed a cordial relationship with Cochran; in a prosecution of financier Charles Keating before Judge Ito, Hodgman had likewise had the confidence of the court and his adversaries. As Ito observed, Hodgman now looked stricken.

Shapiro noticed, too. When Hodgman rose to speak, Jo-Ellan Dimitrius whispered to Shapiro at the defense table, “You know, Bill doesn’t look too good.” Shapiro agreed, then quipped, “Yeah, tomorrow they’re going to take him out on a stretcher.”

14. THANK YOU, CARL

I
to broke for the day early on January 25 so that the prosecutors could regroup and decide what sanctions they would ask the judge to impose on the defense for its discovery violations. Hodgman trudged upstairs with his colleagues to weigh what they should do.

For Bill Hodgman, assignment to the Simpson case had paid few dividends. He did not escape all of his administrative responsibilities, yet he didn’t have full control of the trial, either. Though Clark had recently served as Hodgman’s assistant in the office, and though the two of them were nominally identified as co—lead counsel, the case remained fundamentally hers. Their temperaments were ill matched: Clark, mercurial, passionate, disorganized; Hodgman, methodical, contemplative, a little dull. He scheduled meetings at three-thirty, and Clark appeared at five. It wasn’t that Clark was slacking off—she probably worked more total hours than her colleague—but she did it in an anarchic manner that drove Hodgman to distraction. Hodgman felt betrayed, too, by the discovery violations and other ethical lapses of Cochran and his colleagues. In all, the pressure was great, the rewards few.

As Hodgman and Clark were briefing Gil Garcetti on the day’s events, Hodgman noticed a strange feeling in his chest. Not pain, exactly, but a tightening. He got up and walked around, but the sensation didn’t go away. At Garcetti’s suggestion paramedics were called, and at about 6:20
P.M.
, an ambulance took Hodgman to the California Medical Center. He was, at the time, forty-one
years old. Doctors found an irregular pattern in his electrocardiogram and decided to keep him overnight. A senior member of Garcetti’s staff called Ito at home to give him the news, and by morning word of Hodgman’s hospitalization had leaked out to the news media. The hospital was promptly besieged by television satellite trucks, and white-jacketed doctors began conducting briefings in a manner usually associated with presidential illnesses. In the end, Hodgman was fine; his condition was temporary, seemingly the result of stress and overwork. Though he returned to the D.A.’s office after only a few days at home—and he continued to supervise the case—Hodgman had to yield his courtroom role. Henceforth, the case would be tried by Marcia Clark and Chris Darden.

Hodgman’s departure would turn out to be one of the most important events of the trial. His absence deprived the prosecution of a day-to-day center of gravity, a voice of calm and maturity. Hodgman could tell the difference between an everyday dispute and a bona fide crisis. Clark and Darden, in contrast, tried cases in an atmosphere of perpetual turmoil, much of it self-generated.

The shift in mood was immediately apparent. Addressing Judge Ito about the discovery violations, Clark and Darden nearly became unhinged. True, the defense had engaged in rather cynical misconduct, but in the context of a long trial, the withholding of a few witness statements was probably not going to amount to much. What should have mattered more to the prosecution was simply getting the case under way and its witnesses on the stand. Instead, for several hours, Clark and Darden ranted.

Clark: “Unfortunately, because of the nature of this misconduct, which is egregious and flagrant and not the minor violation that [Cochran] attempts to represent to this court, he’s attempting to sweep it under the rug, claim ignorance and use Mr. Douglas as a sacrificial lamb, and that is absolutely inappropriate. Counsel should bear the brunt of his own misconduct, which is willful and deliberate and intentional, and it is in effect a thumbing of his nose at this Court’s order.…” And so on.

Darden’s behavior was even stranger. Cochran’s stature in L.A.’s black legal community was such that the relatively inexperienced Darden was, perhaps understandably, intimidated by his
mere presence (and the older man would use this against the younger man time and again during the course of the trial). Cochran’s hold over Darden bordered on the mystical—or, more precisely, the parental. This often led the prosecutor to behave like an adolescent, appearing alternately to disdain and beseech his elder. When Cochran spoke in court, Darden would often hunch over in his seat, hold his head in his hands, puff his cheeks, and pout theatrically.

On this day (and several others during the trial), Darden seemed to blurt out the first thing that came into his head. “Had we known about some of these witnesses,” Darden said to Ito (and, quite obviously, the television camera), “we could have informed counsel that they are heroin addicts, thieves, felons, and that one of these witnesses, one of their so-called material witnesses, is the only person I have ever known to be a court-certified pathological liar.” This was a scandalous remark to make about a dozen people who had done no more than have their names mentioned by a lawyer in a criminal trial. To be sure some of them, like Gerchas, were questionable characters, but others were upstanding, ordinary citizens who had cooperated with both sides and simply remembered events in a manner helpful to the defendant’s case. Darden’s group libel reflected his own immaturity more than the witnesses’ true natures.

Rambling on, Darden turned to the subject of Cochran. “You know, as I sat there yesterday … watching Mr. Cochran, I noticed that his opening statement, most of it was typed. He had time to type it, to type out that opening statement, and it was a very fine opening statement. And I’m always proud of Mr. Cochran whenever I see him in court, Your Honor. I love him. I just don’t like to go up against him. But if he had time to type his opening statement, then he had time to turn it over. And I’m disappointed in Mr. Cochran.”

So it went—for hour after hour. Darden at one point requested that the trial be delayed for thirty days as a result of the defense misconduct—a patently absurd idea when a sequestered jury was waiting to hear testimony. Ito, characteristically, said nothing during the lengthy harangues by the lawyers, not even when Darden made his bizarre profession of love for Cochran. After only about
fifteen minutes, the lawyers started repeating themselves, concentrating mainly on cranking up the invective. Ito froze. A stronger, more self-confident judge would have stopped the name-calling, limited debate, and focused on the jury, which had been sitting in a hotel room for two full weeks and had not even heard all of the opening statements.

In the end, Ito reached a reasonable resolution of the issue. He agreed to put off the conclusion of Cochran’s opening statement until Monday, January 30, to advise the jury that defense misconduct had caused the delay, and to allow Clark to make a brief reopening statement the following day.

It was 10:05
A.M.
on January 31 when Lance Ito asked, “Mr. Darden, who is your first witness?” (During jury selection in the fall, Ito had told the panel that he expected the
entire trial
would be over by late February.)