The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson (47 page)

“Yes.…”

“Do you have other sisters?”

“Yes.…”

“How many?”

“There’s Dominique and Tanya and of course Nicole.”

Darden began by asking when Denise first met “the defendant.” She said that Nicole had invited her to travel to Buffalo in 1977, to see a Bills game with her. She said that at the game, “a friend of O.J.’s was there. He came over and said hello to us, and Nicole said hello, kissed him on both cheeks.”

Darden asked if anything unusual then happened.

“Yeah,” Denise said. “O.J. got real upset and he started screaming at Nicole.”

This was less than five minutes into her testimony, and it brought both Shapiro and Cochran flying out of their seats to object. When the lawyers approached Ito at the sidebar, Ito wondered what was going on. “Mr. Darden,” the judge said, “I thought we were just going to do a few more foundational things, not incidents, and my ruling on domestic violence doesn’t include anything in this era. What are we doing here?”

“I’m not about to allege or solicit any testimony that the defendant beat Nicole in 1977, Your Honor,” Darden said. “I’m just trying to define and explain the nature of their relationship, how it developed over the years.” The judge didn’t even have to hear from the defense lawyers to reject Darden’s argument. The prosecutor was trying to pile on additional misdeeds by O.J. in front of the jury without having allowed the judge to rule on them first. Of course, the defense lawyers were wise to this game as soon as Darden started playing it, and Ito shut him down immediately.

It was an amateurish mistake by Darden, and bad strategy to boot, putting Denise on the stand and immediately eliciting tales of O.J.’s misbehavior from her. Properly prepared, Denise could have given the jury some real understanding of Nicole and O.J.’s relationship, the good times as well as the bad. She could have helped explain why Nicole was so attracted to O.J., indeed why she loved him so much and why she stayed with him even though he abused her. An honest summary of their relationship would have given Denise that much more credibility when she started describing O.J.’s bad acts. Instead, Darden tried to present O.J. as simply a domestic-violence machine, which was untrue and, in any event, unlikely to be believed by a jury already sympathetic to him.

Darden walked back to the podium still miffed at Ito’s ruling and said to the witness, “Miss Brown, we’re not going to talk about anything that occurred between 1977 and December 31, 1984, you understand that?” In other words, no context: Darden would just head straight to the first of the domestic-violence incidents. With just a question or two of introduction, Denise recalled a scene in 1987 at the Red Onion restaurant in Santa Ana. “At one point,” Denise said, “O.J. grabbed Nicole’s crotch and said, ‘This is where babies come from and this belongs to me.’ And Nicole just sort of wrote it off as if it was nothing, like—you know, like she was used to that kind of treatment and he was like—I thought it was really humiliating, if you ask me.”

It was obvious that Denise was trying her best to bury O.J.—volunteering the additional (and inadmissible) details that Nicole was “used to” this treatment and that Denise found it “humiliating.” Cochran understood what was going on. Back at the sidebar, Cochran implored Ito, “Now, we may look back on this and smile when the jury verdict comes in May or June [
sic
]. But for right now, we can’t allow this to take place. I just don’t think it’s right.”

Ito invited Darden’s response.

“Your Honor,” said the prosecutor, “I don’t know what Mr. Cochran means by ‘we can’t allow.’ Is he wearing the robe in this courtroom today?” Cochran so flummoxed Darden that the prosecutor thought he could use personal attack in lieu of legal argument.

Cochran responded as if he were speaking to a child: “I said we can’t allow this without objection. That’s all I said, Counsel.”

Again, Ito directed Darden to take better control of his witness. Once more, with barely any introduction, Darden moved to another domestic-violence incident, a fight between O.J. and Nicole at the Rockingham house sometime in the mid-1980s. It started, Denise said, when she told O.J. he took Nicole for granted.

“Why did you tell him that?”

Shapiro objected, and Ito sustained it for the obvious reason: “Why this witness thinks that Miss Brown Simpson was taken for granted is not relevant.”

Darden asked what happened next.

“He started yelling at me, ‘I don’t take her for granted. I do everything for her. I give her everything.’ And he continued, and
then a whole fight broke out, and pictures started flying off the walls, clothes started flying.” Denise seemed on the verge of tears at this point. “He ran upstairs, got clothes, started flying down the stairs, and grabbed Nicole, told her to get out of his house, wanted us all out of his house, picked her up, threw her against the wall, picked her up, threw her out of the house. She ended up on her—she ended up falling. She ended up on her elbows and on her butt.… We were all sitting there screaming and crying, and then he grabbed me and threw me out of the house.”

“Are you okay, Miss Brown?” Darden asked.

“Yeah,” said Denise, pausing between tears. “It’s just so hard. I’ll be fine.”

Darden turned to the judge. “Your Honor, if it pleases the Court, can we adjourn and continue this Monday morning?”

It is classic courtroom strategy to end with a dramatic moment on Friday afternoon—something for the jury to think about all weekend—and Darden had chosen this closing with care. As usual, however, Cochran was about three steps in front of him. In a heated sidebar conference before they broke for the weekend, Cochran lectured Darden for staging Denise’s crying stunt at the end of a Friday. “They’re not fooling anybody with this stuff,” Cochran said. “I mean, I’m telling them it’s going to backfire on them. They keep doing it, and it’s not right.”

Darden protested his innocence. “Mr. Cochran,” he lectured his counterpart, “how else do you expect her to react, especially given these circumstances, given her relationship to the defendant, given how long she’s known him? She is grieving, Mr. Cochran. It happens when people lose their loved ones. And I can’t control that. I can’t stop that. I didn’t wield the knife. I didn’t kill her.… Frankly, I’m touched by it. I feel bad about it. Maybe I’m a little slow to stop her, but I will attempt to do better. I will say, however, that Mr. Cochran has been my mentor for years, and I’ve learned—”

His “mentor” cut him off.

“Well, he’s going to see what effect it has on the jury,” Cochran said. “I don’t think it’s going to have the effect you think you are having.” Cochran was going with the focus groups—and his gut. “Watch them,” the defense lawyer urged. “See if they’re manipulated or not. You guys keep trying this and see how it ends up.…
I’ll remind you about it.” (Cochran was right. Several jurors said after the trial that they were offended by Denise’s obvious bias and had discounted much of what she had to say.)

Monday morning started with another Darden fiasco. Shortly after he started examining Denise Brown again, Darden placed a photograph of a battered Nicole on the courtroom overhead projector, which was known throughout the trial by its brand name: the Elmo. The prosecution had already shown the photographs taken by the police following the incident on January 1, 1989. This one showed similar, but not identical, bruises.

Denise said she had seen this photograph in Nicole’s bathroom drawer. “Did you and she discuss the photograph?” Darden asked.

“Yes, we did.”

“What did she tell you about the photograph?”

“Objection,” said Shapiro. “Hearsay, Your Honor.”

Ito called the parties to the sidebar. Darden’s question, quite obviously, did call for hearsay evidence in response. But that was not the worst of it. The judge asked Darden which incident of domestic violence this photograph involved.

“I don’t know what the incident is that relates directly to this photograph,” Darden said.

Ito sighed, asked the jury to return to the jury room, and demanded that Darden explain how this photograph might be admissible. Darden said only that it had been found in Nicole’s safe-deposit box after her death, with the photographs from the 1989 beating.

“Counsel,” Ito said with mounting impatience, “you can’t just show horrible photographs without tying it to something relevant to this case.”

For once, the defense histrionics that followed were justified. “I have been practicing for a long time,” said Shapiro, “and I have never seen anything quite this extraordinary where a photograph that is clearly inadmissible is just thrown up on a giant-screen television for the jury to see …”

In legal terms, Darden had failed to establish the photograph’s “foundation”—this is, the time and place it was taken, along with
the relevant surrounding circumstances. By showing the photograph to the jurors, Darden obviously intended for them to draw the inference that O.J. had caused the wounds. But he had no way of proving it. In shorter, less-publicized cases, this is the kind of error that results in convictions being overturned on appeal. As Ito put it, with characteristic restraint, “What concerns me is the rather inflammatory nature of that photograph, and to show it to the jury, without any foundation for it, is more than inappropriate.”

Ito levied less of a sanction than some judges might have. He simply instructed the jury to disregard the photograph and asked Darden to move on. From there, Darden wrapped it up with Denise pretty quickly. He brought out that O.J. had called Nicole a “fat pig” when she was pregnant—loathsome behavior, to be sure, but not exactly wife beating, either. She concluded her testimony with a description of O.J.’s behavior at Sydney’s dance recital in the early evening of June 12, 1994.

Darden asked about O.J.’s demeanor that night.

“Um,” said Denise, “he had a very bizarre look in his eyes. It was a very faraway look.… It wasn’t like O.J., just walking into a place and being, you know—‘Hey, here I am’—you know, kind of sure of himself type of attitude. It was more of a—of a—like a glazed over, kind of frightening, dark eyes. It just didn’t look like the O.J. that we knew.”

Perhaps Denise really did see O.J. this way. But Cochran had these jurors pegged; unmoved by her tears, they regarded Denise with cold, hard stares.

Denise Brown’s testimony essentially closed the domestic-violence part of the prosecution’s case. To a jury predisposed to believe such evidence—or one inclined toward hostility for the defendant—the presentation might have had considerable impact. After all, O.J. had been convicted of beating his wife, and there had been a handful more of incidents of violence, at least according to her sister. The 911 tape from 1993 suggested that O.J. was certainly capable at least of violent anger toward his wife, and the stalking evidence, even if ambiguous, suggested a continuing obsession on his part. Overall, however, the domestic-violence evidence was just short
enough of overwhelming that the defense could continue to ignore it. Shapiro, for example, barely cross-examined Denise Brown. Cochran’s mantra from his opening—this is a murder case, not a domestic-violence case—remained the core of the defense strategy.

So the prosecution, at this point, set out to prove its murder case. Marcia Clark called a series of witnesses who had testified at the preliminary hearing: the waiters at Mezzaluna who had served Nicole and her family on June 12; the bartender who took the call from Juditha Brown at about 9:40
P.M.
and then ran out to the sidewalk to locate her dropped glasses; the dog walkers who tended to Nicole’s bereaved Akita and then located the bodies. The defense lawyers mostly gave these early witnesses a pass—until the police officers started taking the stand.

Cochran’s entire demeanor changed when he rose to cross-examine Robert Riske. A uniformed patrol officer, Riske had been the first member of the LAPD on the crime scene at Bundy, arriving at 12:13
A.M.
on June 13. Under Clark’s questioning, Riske had testified about being directed to the bodies by Sukru Boztepe and his wife, Bettina Rasmussen. Riske had actually done very little. After briefly inspecting the bodies, he had walked through the house, collected Justin and Sydney from their upstairs bedrooms, and called for reinforcements. (Racial antennae were high even during this innocuous testimony. Riske mentioned that a sergeant named Coon arrived on the scene, prompting Clark to ask, “That Sergeant Coon, is he any relation to another one?” As this jury surely knew, Stacy Koon was one of the officers who had beaten Rodney King. There was no relation.)