The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson (69 page)

In the courtroom that day, the first few examples from the tapes were fairly straightforward—brief sentence fragments of Fuhrman’s familiar voice: “You do what you’re told, understand, nigger?” Female officers, he said, “don’t do anything. They don’t go out there and initiate a contact with a six-foot-five nigger that’s been in prison for seven years pumping weights.” And: “These niggers, they run like rabbits.” Of course, these snippets were bad enough, but then, late in the morning session, Uelman began to play the tape of what appeared to be Fuhrman’s recounting of an incident that had happened to him in the field. It was, according to Fuhrman on the tape, “a real heavy investigation … sixty-six allegations of brutality … assault and battery under color of authority. Torture, all kinds of stuff.” Then Fuhrman’s disembodied voice described for the silent courtroom what had happened.

On the tape, McKinny interrupted to ask whether she could use this incident in the movie.

“It hasn’t been seven years, statute of limitations,” Fuhrman cautioned. “I have 300 and something pages of Internal Affairs investigation just on that one incident. I got several other ones. I must have about 3,000 or 4,000 pages Internal Affairs investigations out there.” Then Fuhrman resumed his narration of the event.

When this taped excerpt ended, Lance Ito’s courtroom was as quiet as it had ever been over the previous year. Then there was a sound: Kim Goldman started to cry.

At last Gerry Uelman asked McKinny, “Do you have a particularly vivid memory of that account?”

“Of course,” she said.

“Why is that?”

“It’s, um, it’s vividly described.”

Judge Ito broke for lunch.

Cochran’s colleagues had never seen him behave the way he did when Lance Ito’s ten-page ruling slipped out of the fax machine on August 31. Cochran was distraught, speechless, despairing. In what seemed to be a shocking blow to the defense, Ito ruled that he would allow only two brief excerpts of the Fuhrman tapes to be played: “We have no niggers where I grew up,” and “That’s where niggers live.” In lieu of playing the tapes, he would allow McKinny to tell the jury that Fuhrman had said “nigger” forty-one times on the tapes. Ito found that everything else on the tapes was either irrelevant to the Simpson case or unduly prejudicial to the prosecution.

Cochran proceeded to an impromptu news conference on the ground floor of his office building on Wilshire Boulevard. Wearing an electric-blue sports jacket over a black shirt buttoned at the neck with a jeweled clasp, Cochran denounced Ito in a most personal way. Surrounded by nearly a dozen colleagues on the defense team (but not Shapiro), Cochran called Ito’s ruling “perhaps one of the cruelest, unfairest decisions ever rendered in a criminal court.” He declared, “The cover-up continues.… This inexplicable, indefensible ruling lends credence to all those who say the criminal justice system is corrupt.” And in a lightly veiled reference to Bakewell’s incendiary threats of earlier in the week, Cochran said, “So all of the citizens in Los Angeles, they should remain calm.”

Having stung Cochran in print, Ito still could not stand up to him in person. The next day in court, Friday, September 1, Cochran essentially went on strike. The defense was supposed to continue to call witnesses, but Cochran simply refused to continue the trial, in protest against the judge’s ruling on the tapes. A tougher judge might simply have declared the defense case concluded and moved on to the prosecution rebuttal. But Cochran intimidated Ito too much for that. The judge simply and meekly informed the jury, which had heard scarcely any evidence in a week because of the tapes controversy, that the trial was breaking early for Labor Day weekend.

By this point, Fuhrman had retained a criminal defense lawyer, who wisely advised him to take the Fifth Amendment rather than answer any more questions in the case. The tapes had raised a real possibility that he might be prosecuted for perjury—or even for the crimes he had told McKinny he committed. When Fuhrman returned to the courthouse to take the witness stand once again, he answered each of Uelman’s queries with invocations of his right to remain silent. (As was customary, Ito did not allow the jury to see Fuhrman take the Fifth.) Darden and his student clerks, the only African-Americans on the prosecution team, were not present when Fuhrman returned to appear before Judge Ito.

At long last, on September 6, the jury heard McKinny and the two short excerpts from the tapes. Ironically, the highlight of the day for the defense was not the playing of the tapes—which the jurors absorbed impassively—but rather Darden’s inept cross-examination of McKinny. Darden belittled McKinny’s credentials, questioned her motives, and generally treated her as if it were she—and not prosecution witness Fuhrman—who had done something wrong. Stung by Darden’s hostility, McKinny blurted out at one point, “Why are we having this adversarial relationship?” Several jurors nodded, apparently wondering the same thing.

After the trial, most of the jurors said that the McKinny tapes had had little impact on their verdict. Even if one accepts this at face value, the tapes still had an enormous influence on the trial. The entire gestalt of the case was transformed. Because the tapes established definitively that Fuhrman had lied about using the word “nigger,” the prosecution had to abandon its categorical defense
of him. This was true even after Ito’s unduly restrictive ruling regarding playing the tapes in front of the jury. Fuhrman’s damaged credibility, in turn, made it that much harder for the prosecution to argue that all the other LAPD officers were telling the truth. In terms of the courtroom chess match, the damage to the prosecution from the tapes was probably as great as from Darden’s glove demonstration.

The tapes also loom as an important historical artifact beyond the give-and-take of this trial. It may never be possible to sort out how much of Fuhrman’s narrative was literally true. In the aftermath of the case, the LAPD and the United States attorney in Los Angeles launched investigations based on the tapes. Fuhrman’s extraordinary account of the beating of suspects following the shooting of two police officers did appear to be loosely based on a real event that occurred in 1978, but his version had fictional aspects as well. However, the tapes also pointed to larger truths. MAW existed. Mark Fuhrman—and others like him—thrived in the LAPD. Ultimately, it is not surprising that black jurors decide to punish the police for its sorry past and that, alas, O.J. Simpson turned out to be the undeserving beneficiary of this ignoble tale.

After McKinny’s brief turn on the stand, the defense closed its case with three more witnesses who testified that they had heard Fuhrman use the word “nigger.” As if this were not enough, the defense team decided to send one final nonverbal message. When Ito said he would not tell the jury that Fuhrman had refused to testify further, Cochran arranged for the entire defense team to wear ties made from African kente cloth in protest—in front of the jury, no less.

Ito could have stopped them. Very early in the trial, the judge had told the prosecutors that they could not wear angel pins in solidarity with the victims of the case, even though, unlike the kente-cloth ties, the pins bore no provocative message. But on the day the defense team wore the ties, Judge Ito had only this to say to the first defense lawyer to appear before him:

“Nice tie.”

23. “FREE O.J.!”

O
ne night toward the end of the Fuhrman-tapes controversy, many leading figures of the African-American community in Los Angeles filled the vast Santa Monica Civic Auditorium for the annual Soul Train Lady of Soul Awards. Gladys Knight hosted this annual salute to black women in show business, and at the climax of the nationally televised broadcast of the ceremony, she said she had a special announcement. “To present the Lena Horne Award for outstanding career achievements,” Knight said, “here is a man who has been a wonderful friend to all of us … a longtime supporter of everything good and positive that takes place in our community—Mr. Johnnie Cochran!”

Cochran appeared from behind a curtain, splendidly turned out in a perfect tuxedo and bright red cummerbund. The audience of three thousand burst into loud cheers when Cochran stepped forward, a greeting that quickly turned into a standing ovation, the warmest greeting any celebrity received at the event that evening. A handful of spectators started a chant, which spread in a few seconds to the entire crowd: