Homework. Exactly what I did not need at this moment. The Simpson case was already threatening to bury me under an avalanche of paperwork. Every night I’d carry home a couple of satchels of documents. Then, after the usual bedtime routine, I’d spread my papers out on my bed and work into the early hours of the morning.
“I want you to get one of those little pocket recorders and document each article and how it affected you,” Mark continued. “It would be best if you could manage to do that every day. The more detail the better. Spare yourself nothing. This will describe the emotional distress and the damages we ask for.”
He told me to keep the tapes in a secure place. And if I didn’t have one, I should give them to him to put in his office safe.
“When am I going to do all that?” I asked him.
“You spend a lot of time in your car, don’t you?”
I did as Mark asked. I bought myself a microcassette recorder. It sat for a few days on the dashboard of my Maxima. Finally I picked it up and made my first faltering attempts.
“Well, Mark,” I began, “here goes. It is… what is today? September thirtieth, and I’m leaving the courthouse. It’s about ten after nine and I’m exhausted…
“The stress has been building and building and building… the stress of this trial… and, of course, going through a divorce and everything… I always feel like I’m being pounded. And it’s real hard to focus because when I’m at work during the week there’s always people coming in my door and calling on the phone, just one after another… I feel like I’ve been beaten to a pulp… The only time it really feels good to go to work is on a Saturday or Sunday when there’s no one there to bother me and I can focus on my job…
“There’s so much to organize. I just wish I could stop the clock for about three weeks and put everything together in a nice, neat, tidy order. Do all the things that I usually do to prepare for a trial. I am beginning to [be] very pessimistic about my ability to put it together the way I ordinarily would. And in this, of all cases, where I need to do more than I usually would-it’s frightening… Ah, God. I don’t know how I’m gonna survive this…”
When I replayed the tape, the distress in my own voice took me aback. I was also surprised by the relief it gave me to vent my frustrations. I continued to record, not every day, but every few days. I found that getting into my car was like entering a confessional. I talked, and talked, and kept on talking to that mute, whirring confidant. I reflected and I flamed.
A tape recorder is a patient listener. It passes no judgments.
Double Solitaire
CAR TAPE. October 2, 1994. Everything’s coming back to him. He’s got her blood on his socks in the bedroom. We’ve got her blood and Ron’s blood in his Bronco. We’ve got her blood and Ron’s on that glove at Rockingham, and maybe Simpson’s blood too. After we finish the testing we’ll know more. Now it seems we’ve even pinned down the shoe print to a style of Bruno Magli shoe… The same size as the defendant’s shoe! I mean, it’s just unbelievable!
The defense is gonna come up with their space invader theories. It’s gonna be like something out of the National Enquirer. You know, police bungled and fumbled and goofed everything up. And so, right, that’s how the evidence all came back to him. If it’s a frame-up, why frame him, of all people? Couldn’t you think of somebody less likable to frame? I mean, who wants to try a case against Yogi Bear?
You shoulda tried this case in Santa Monica.
Gimme a break.
Ever since the verdict in the criminal trial, TV and radio commentators, print pundits, old armchair warriors with a whole lot more ego than common sense have weighed in with their theories about what went wrong. First off, they would have you believe that we blew it by not taking this case to the suburbs. What they mean-but never have the guts to come right out and say-is this: “Why didn’t you go shopping around for a congenial, white jury who’d convict the son of a bitch?”
The grumblers are usually people who should know better-former prosecutors like Vincent Bugliosi, who actually faulted us for moving the trial from Santa Monica. Gil Garcetti filed this case exactly where he should have filed it: downtown L.A.
Regardless of where a crime occurs, long-cause cases, as they’re called, virtually always end up downtown. In June of 1994, when the Bundy murders took place, this was not even discretionary; it was policy. Set by the Superior Court. Several years earlier, a panel of assignment judges put their heads together to try to figure out how to clear the backlog in the branch courts. One of the tougher measures the judges took to rectify this problem was to require that any case that stood to go on for longer than four weeks be filed Downtown, where the D.A. has deputies, clerks, and support services to handle it.
(People have asked me why the civil trial was tried in Santa Monica. The answer is simple: Civil litigants get to pick their forum. They don’t get directed to a particular venue at the command of the bench the way criminal cases do.)
Only by a fluke does a long-cause criminal case ever end up in one of the branch courts. The trial judge in the Rodney King case, for instance, was downtown but transferred to Simi Valley and dragged the case along with him. The results were disastrous. An all-white jury acquitted four white LAPD officers of beating King even though the crime was immortalized on videotape. Los Angeles erupted into a race riot.
Every time I hear about Bugliosi or some other clown mouthing off to the press, I have to grit my teeth and count to ten. You shoulda tried this case in Santa Monica. Do they realize what they’re saying?
To suggest that the D.A.‘s office should have ignored standard procedure and filed this case elsewhere for purely tactical advantage is, in my opinion, a shameless and inexcusable display of racism. It presupposes that only a white, upscale, West Side jury can deliver justice. Wrong. Dead wrong. I’ve seen Downtown juries made up of poor blacks and Hispanics do justice time and time again.
By the time the Simpson case landed on my desk, I’d been trying cases Downtown for more than ten years. I’d had defendants and juries of all races. I’d tried twenty homicides and won nineteen of them. I’d tried scores of lesser felonies. Won most, lost some. None of the verdicts seemed completely off the wall to me. Whenever I’d gotten to talk to jurors who’d delivered unfavorable verdicts, I found they’d had their reasons, usually good ones.
To Vincent Bugliosi and those who share his worldview, a good prosecutor is apparently a slick operator who works the angles. And the prescribed angle in this case would have been to steer clear of dark skins, particularly those belonging to middle-aged black women. Sounds ugly-because it is ugly. As well as impractical, unethical, and unconscionable.
One of the proponents of this embarrassing thesis seems to have been none other than our own jury consultant, Don Vinson. After the trial, he apparently met Bugliosi for lunch at-where else-the California Club. Like Cassandra spurned, Vinson wailed that he’d warned the D.A.‘s office of the dangers of picking middle-aged black women as jurors. When word of this got back to me, I just shook my head. I would like to take this opportunity to ask Don Vinson, “Exactly what would you have had me do?”
It must have been apparent even to someone as stubbornly ignorant of the law as Vinson that you cannot mount a campaign to target black women. It’s illegal, for God’s sake. And assuming for the moment that it was not illegal, excluding them would be an impossibility. Blacks accounted for over half of our eventual jury pool. A full three quarters of those blacks were women. Like it or not, black women were going to be a powerful presence on this jury.