Shortly after the prelims, however, Shapiro announced that his client intended to invoke his right to a speedy trial.
When the news reached me, I just put my head on my arms and moaned. “Speedy trial,” by law, means no more than sixty days after an arraignment. It was a good strategy. In fact, I’m surprised that more defense attorneys don’t use it. What it meant was that we had to be ready in eight weeks. It was an absolutely impossible deadline.
I knew that Shapiro was no more ready than we were, but he didn’t have to prepare a case to prove his client’s innocence. All he had to do was stand by and be ready to kick us in the shins. He wouldn’t have to present any evidence until we finished our case. We were at a bigger disadvantage than he was.
The clock started running on July 22, the morning of the defendant’s second arraignment. (A second arraignment is standard. A prosecutor may have acquired more information that would change the charges. In this case, however, they remained the same.)
Simpson arrived at court that morning sporting an expensive dark suit and an irritating swagger. This was new. I remember thinking that his handlers must have adjusted his medication because he was clear-eyed and alert. He appeared confident, which gave me odd comfort. My guess was that Simpson’s confidence often led him to do stupid things. He seemed in the mood to bluster. I wondered if he was being coached to display that swagger in hopes that press and public would remember that the guy in the dock here was the ostentatiously confident O. J. Simpson.
“Do you understand the charges against you, sir?” asked the supervising criminal court judge, Cecil Mills.
Simpson stood up straight and answered as if breaking from a huddle. “Yes, Your Honor.”
“How do you plead?”
Simpson snapped to full attention and boomed, “Absolutely, one hundred percent not guilty.”
You asshole, I thought. You unregenerate, scum-sucking creep.
I watched Simpson as the deputies led him out of the courtroom. He gave the crowd a thumbs-up. Beneath that three-thousand-dollar suit he’s just one more sadistic punk, I told myself. You’ve put a lot of those away. He’s no different.
But, of course, he was.
By my estimate, O. J. Simpson had already sunk more than a million dollars into his defense, and the case was barely six weeks old. Shapiro alone must be pulling down a retainer well into six figures. Possibly seven. With each passing week, the defense team seemed to be doubling in size. There were at least three private investigators we knew of working for the team, with scores more P.I.s on the freelance pad. Their names kept turning up in the press-as did those of defense attorneys around town looking to get some ink.
One of those was Johnnie Cochran.
Johnnie’s name began circulating through the rumor mill almost immediately after Howard Weitzman dropped out of the picture. At first, Cochran demurred: he was too close to O. J. Simpson to take the case. “He’s a friend,” he would later be quoted as saying. “And that’s a mess, when you start trying to represent a friend.”
I was not surprised to hear that Johnnie knew Simpson. Johnnie knew just about everybody worth knowing in L.A. Smooth, affable, urbane, he was one of those guys who seemed welcome wherever he went, whether it was a political fund-raiser, a film screening, or the courthouse corridors. Johnnie joked and glad-handed like a pol. “Howyadoin? Howyadoin? Howyadoin?”
Everybody wanted to be his friend. He’d done a short stint in the D.A.‘s office as an assistant to John Van de Kamp. That was a political plum; his duties were largely ceremonial and administrative. As for private practice, no one in our office could recall his trying a single, big murder case, save one. During the early seventies he’d defended Geronimo Pratt, a Black Panther who’d been accused of murdering a white schoolteacher. He lost; Pratt was sentenced to life in prison.
Rather, Johnnie had made his reputation as a litigator in civil suits-ones brought against the city by blacks and other minorities who claimed they’d been roughed up by the LAPD. On the wall of his office hung larger-than-life blowups of the seven-figure settlement checks he’d won for his clients. Bill Hodgman had, in fact, tried an attempted-murder case against Johnnie and lost. To Bill’s way of thinking, Cochran was no legal scholar, nor was he a particularly clever tactician. But he was smooth and charismatic and judges seemed to love him. Bill warned me early on that Johnnie would play the race card. Johnnie always played the race card.
I doubted that Cochran would risk his reputation as a pillar of the community for the likes of O. J. Simpson. The defendant was not some brother who’d been shaken down by cops for driving in a white neighborhood. O. J. Simpson could have jogged nude through Bel Air without being arrested. He hobnobbed with white golfing buddies, married a white woman, lived in a mansion, and had effectively turned his back on the black community. He had, moreover, committed two murders of horrific savagery.
Johnnie certainly realized this. At age fifty-six, Johnnie was one of the best-known and best-respected black men in the county. He was in a position to be one of those conciliators to whom both blacks and whites could turn in times of racial distress. A word from him could help calm the waters. Why risk a citywide race riot to promote O. J. Simpson as a cause célèbre?
Shows you what I know. On the morning of O. J. Simpson’s arraignment, I walked into court to find Johnnie Cochran sitting at the defense table.
Johnnie, with his dark good looks and strange iridescent suits, was hard to miss. He was one of the most animated men in public life, and yet the thing that struck me that morning in late July was how quiet he seemed. He was hunched in an upholstered armchair, his chin resting on the tips of his index fingers, in a posture of deep thought. He appeared almost withdrawn. Shapiro was clearly running the show, and Johnnie wasn’t used to being anyone’s second chair.
From the moment he logged on as attorney of record, Johnnie was causing mischief. Word filtered back to me that he was telling reporters that Fuhrman should be grilled on his racial attitudes. “Give me one black on that jury,” he was reported to have said. He didn’t need to finish the thought. Clearly, Johnnie figured that even one African American would be enough to hang a jury.
Not long afterward, Johnnie announced-in open court-that there was a witness who purportedly would clear Simpson and provide an “important lead” on the “real killers.” Johnnie said this evidence was totally inconsistent with the theory of a lone assailant. And is entirely inconsistent with the fact that Mr. Simpson is that assailant.” He suggested that the LAPD had given this witness short shrift. As it happened, the “witness” to whom he was referring had already been checked out by the police. Frank Chiuchiolo, a self-described prowler who had called in shortly after the murders, said that he’d seen a pair of heavyset white men running from the rear alley at Bundy. Before the police could even dispatch detectives to the guy’s house, up north in a town called-I just loved this-Happy Camp, the media had sniffed him out and exposed him as a chronic liar and publicity seeker. This goon-the Happy Camper, we called him-had also surfaced in the Polly Klaas abduction-murder case, where he’d also tried to give the cops phony information. And yet here was Johnnie using this shaky lead, proclaiming that the cops and the D.A.‘s office had overlooked crucial evidence in their “rush to judgment”!
You might think that pulling a stunt like this would erode a lawyer’s credibility. But Johnnie Cochran would make these far-fetched or unsupported allegations time and time again, and the media never really held him accountable. Johnnie realized that journalists, by and large, have the attention span of gnats; the important thing was grabbing the headline. In the mad rush of events, he wagered that no one would follow up. And he won the bet, nearly every time.