The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson (75 page)

In their comments after the trial, the jurors gamely tried to defend their verdict, insisting that it was based on the evidence, not mere racial solidarity. Brenda Moran and Yolanda Crawford believed that the glove demonstration doomed the government’s case. “In plain English, the glove didn’t fit,” Moran said. Gina Rosborough said, “I believed from the beginning that he was innocent,” and the course of the trial confirmed her view. Sheila Woods decried the sloppy lab procedures of the LAPD. Lon Cryer was concerned about evidence contamination and rejected Allan
Park’s testimony because he was mistaken about the number of cars in the driveway. As for why he gave Simpson a raised-fist salute at the end of the trial, Cryer said, “It was like a ‘Right on to you, Mr. Simpson. Get on with your life. Get your kids. Be happy. Get some closure in your life.’ ” The three jurors who wrote a joint book about the case—Armanda Cooley, Carrie Bess, and Marsha Rubin-Jackson—attributed the decision to a combination of these factors. Anise Aschenbach, the white juror who initially voted for a conviction, asserted with some sadness that she might have fought on if she had felt any possibility of support from her colleagues. In any event, Aschenbach was deeply troubled by the testimony of Mark Fuhrman and the evidence of his racial views.

All the black jurors denied that race played any role at all in their deliberations or their decision. To me, this is implausible. The perfunctory review of nine months’ worth of evidence; the focus on tangential, if not actually irrelevant, parts of that evidence; the simply incorrect view of other evidence; and the constant focus on racial issues both inside and outside the courtroom—all these factors lead me to conclude that race played a far larger role in the verdict than the jurors conceded. As Carrie Bess indicated in her unguarded words after the verdict, they were protecting their own. This is not especially unusual. For better or worse, American jurors have a long and still-flourishing tradition of both taking race into account in making their decisions and denying that they are doing any such thing. The ten whites, one Asian, and one Latino in Simi Valley who in 1992 acquitted the LAPD officers in the Rodney King case denied that race factored into their decisions; so did the ten black and two white jurors who in 1990 acquitted Washington mayor Marion Barry of all but one of the fourteen narcotics charges against him. In 1955, the two white men charged with murdering Emmett Till were acquitted by an all-white Mississippi jury after about an hour of deliberations. A spokesman for the jurors attributed their decision to “the belief that there had been no identification of the dead body as that of Emmett Till.” Nor is this phenomenon limited to celebrated cases. In the borough of the Bronx in New York City, where juries are more than 80 percent black and Hispanic, black defendants are acquitted in felony cases 47.6 percent of the time, which is about
three times the national acquittal rate of 17 percent for defendants of all races. In these cases, among these jurors, race mattered—and so it was with the Simpson jurors, too.

That race continues to count for so much with African-American jurors should come as no great surprise. Racism in law enforcement has persisted through many decades of American life, and black citizens, and thus black jurors, have stored too many insults for too long. The police in general, and the LAPD in particular, reap what they sow. But the genuine grievances that have led to a tradition of black hostility to officialdom have, in turn, fostered a mode of conspiratorial thinking that outstrips reality. An Emory University study of 1,000 black churchgoers in five major cities in 1990 found that more than a third believed that HIV was a form of genocide propagated by white scientists, a theory shared by 40 percent of African-American college students in Washington, D.C. Understanding the roots of these beliefs should not mean endorsing them. To do so is merely patronizing, a condescending pat on the head to those incapable of recognizing reality. Better, rather, to hold everyone to the same standards, and better, likewise, to speak the truth: Whites didn’t concoct HIV—and O.J. Simpson wasn’t innocent.

The backlash against both the jury and Simpson himself was accelerated by Robert Shapiro, who, as was his custom, put his interests ahead of his client’s in the immediate aftermath of the verdict. Shapiro left the courthouse on October 3 and traveled to an ABC studio, where he gave a long-promised interview to Barbara Walters. In their conversation, an obviously bitter and angry Shapiro said of the defense effort in the case, “Not only did we play the race card, we dealt it from the bottom of the deck.” He remarked further that henceforth, he would neither speak to Bailey nor work with Cochran. Shapiro’s remark about the race card was featured prominently in the following day’s news stories about the verdict.

Shapiro’s conduct was shameful on several levels. His disgust about the “race card” was, first, intellectually dishonest, because it was Shapiro himself who had constructed Simpson’s race-based
courtroom and media defense in the first place. Second, his statement helped cement the public impression that his client was acquitted because of the jurors’ racial sympathies, not because of his innocence, thus virtually guaranteeing that Simpson would have no chance to reestablish anything like his normal life. In my view, Shapiro’s analysis of the case was more or less correct, but Simpson had a right to expect that his own lawyer would not portray the case, in substance, as the story of a murderer who got away with it. Finally, Shapiro trivialized the work of his colleagues Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, who had constructed a serious forensic and nonracial defense in the case.

None of this mattered more to Shapiro than the opportunity to reingratiate himself with the West Los Angeles world that meant everything to him. After the Walters interview, Shapiro called his old friend Larry Feldman, the lawyer who had defended him in Mark Fuhrman’s libel suit. Shapiro boasted that he had just told Walters that the defense team had played the race card from the bottom of the deck. “You’re kidding,” an appalled Feldman told him. “No, really,” said Shapiro, who then broke into self-satisfied laughter.

Notwithstanding the fame and, in some instances, fortune that the case brought them, most of the major participants now regard their experience with considerable bitterness. The most bizarre postscript to the case concerns F. Lee Bailey. In 1994, Shapiro and Bailey shared another client besides O.J. Simpson: Claude Duboc, one of the biggest marijuana dealers in the world. As part of a plea bargain in northern Florida, arranged the month before the murders on Bundy Drive, Duboc agreed to turn over virtually all of his assets to the United States government. Among them were shares in a Canadian company called BioChem Pharma, worth about $6 million at the time of the plea bargain. Also at that time, Duboc believed those shares were likely to appreciate greatly in value, so the prosecutors agreed that Bailey would hold on to the stock for the months until Duboc was formally sentenced.

Two years later, after the verdict in the Simpson case, the value of Duboc’s stock had risen by more than $20 million, and Bailey told the prosecutors in Florida that he believed the appreciated
portion of the stock assets belonged to him, not the federal government. The deal was never put in writing, so the judge held a hearing in February 1996 to determine the terms of the stock arrangements. The lead witness for the government was Robert Shapiro. He testified that he understood the agreement to hold that the United States, not Bailey, was entitled to the appreciated portion of the stock assets. When Bailey did not produce the stock certificates or the equivalent in cash, the judge threw the sixty-two-year-old lawyer in jail.

Bailey served forty-four days in the federal detention center in Tallahassee. He was released on April 19, only after pledging virtually all of his assets in collateral. However, after a month of living with this nearly impossible financial bind, Bailey gave up his claim to the stock. This financial imbroglio, of course, only intensified the enmity between Shapiro and Bailey. Bailey rages with little prompting at what he regards as Shapiro’s betrayal. The cooler Shapiro merely notes that he plans never again to speak with Bailey. He has told friends with a smile, however, that he paid his own way to Florida to testify against Bailey.

Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld returned to New York after the Simpson trial. They found that their celebrity from the case had not translated into financial support for their Innocence Project, which uses DNA testing to free wrongfully convicted prisoners. When they mentioned to Shapiro the possibility of a Los Angeles fund-raiser for the project, he told them glumly, and probably accurately, “No Jew will give you a dime in this town.” The two New Yorkers have also developed the informal specialty of vetting the books on the case written by members of Simpson’s defense team. In early 1996, they reacted with shock to a draft of Shapiro’s volume,
The Search for Justice
, for it repeatedly violated the attorney-client privilege by quoting conversations with Simpson without his consent. When they passed along their concerns to the author, Shapiro didn’t change the substance of the book—but he did add Scheck and Neufeld to the list of former colleagues with whom he no longer speaks.

Alone among the defense lawyers, Johnnie Cochran thrives. The week after the verdict, Cochran appeared as a national spokesman on civil rights on
Meet the Press
, and in subsequent months he
traveled the nation and the world giving speeches. His legal practice is booming. He is completing a book that is more an autobiography than an account of the Simpson trial. The working title comes from a phrase he used in his summation to describe the Simpson trial:
Journey to Justice
.

Lance Ito conducted his next criminal trial the week after the Simpson case ended. He has never commented publicly on the verdict, but friends report that he knows the Simpson trial did not enhance his reputation. His second most noteworthy trial had a sour postscript as well. On April 4, 1996, a federal judge in Los Angeles overturned the state conviction of financier Charles Keating on the ground that Ito had erroneously instructed the jury.

After the verdict, Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden both took leaves of absence from the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office. Neither is expected to return. Darden wrote a successful book on the trial and will shortly begin a new job as a professor at the Southwestern University School of Law in Los Angeles. He will teach courtroom skills. His brother Michael died of AIDS on November 29, 1995.

Clark’s career plans are uncertain. Since the trial, she has given a series of speeches around the United States and Canada and has worked on her own book, for which she received an advance of more than $4 million. It is believed to be the third largest advance in the history of nonfiction publishing, surpassed only by those received by Colin Powell and H. Norman Schwarzkopf. On November 12, 1995, her father left a message on Marcia’s answering machine that her ninety-five-year-old grandfather, Pinchas Kleks, had died in Israel. She did not return the call.

O.J. Simpson still lives at 360 North Rockingham in Brentwood. Every other weekend, he sees his children Sydney and Justin, who reside with Nicole’s parents, but he has not sought primary custody of them. He spends much of his time preparing for the civil suit filed against him by Nicole’s and Goldman’s heirs, a case that is expected to go to trial in the fall of 1996. His principal commercial venture since the trial, a two-hour videotaped interview with him about the murders, was a commercial failure. At $19.95 each, it sold fewer than 40,000 copies, netting Simpson about $100,000. His contracts with Hertz and NBC were not renewed.
He plays golf occasionally, but never at his former home course, the Riviera Country Club. (Though he was never formally evicted from the club, members of its governing board informed Skip Taft that Simpson was no longer welcome there.) Simpson sees few of his friends from before the murders, but he does socialize with several of the sheriff’s deputies who guarded him in jail. Simpson tells them he remains confident that, in time, he will be able to resume his former career of being O.J.

To my favorite journalist
,

MARLENE SANDERS
,

my mother

My debts begin with my colleagues at
The New Yorker
. I owe my entire career in journalism to Tina Brown, who took a chance on me four years ago and never stopped encouraging me. I thank Pat Crow for editing my Simpson stories for the magazine, and Elizabeth Dobell for providing skillful and diligent editorial research. I benefited throughout the case from the wise counsel of Maurie Perl, Jill Bernstein, and Melissa Pranger. My thanks also to Pam McCarthy and Dorothy Wickenden. I am grateful to David Remnick for his friendship, for his sensitive reading of the manuscript, and most of all for the example of his own work as a writer. My Los Angeles colleagues, Caroline Graham and Charlotte Reynolds, made me feel like family. Over the long life of the case, it seemed that everyone involved had a lawyer. I, however, had the best: Devereux Chatillon at
The New Yorker
, and Bradley Phillips, Michael Doyen, and Steven Weisburd of Munger, Tolles and Olson.