Tom and I got through direct in about one day. I used the opportunity to put on some real evidence, like the glove and the knit cap. It was the first time the jury had really gotten a good look at this stuff.
Johnnie’s cross was scattershot. He accused Lange and his colleagues of the routine imperfections of any investigation: for instance, why was it, he asked, that a key drop of blood evidence-found on the Bundy rear gate-wasn’t discovered until July 3? That was a reasonable question. Others were totally bogus. Like demanding to know why Lange hadn’t insisted that a rape test be performed on Nicole.
“Sex was the last thing on the mind of this attacker,” said Lange. “It was an overkill… there’s no evidence of rape.”
Come on, Johnnie, how many rapists put their victim’s panties back on?
Then Johnnie lit into him for the blanket. He took Lange to task for not picking up a piece of bloody paper that lay between the victims. Tom had felt it had no evidentiary value. Which it didn’t-it was obviously just a scrap of trash that happened to be lying there.
And then Johnnie flipped a race card into the mix. At one point, he rolled Lange back to the moment he first got called to the murder scene, at three A.M. on June 13.
“And then you drove from your home in Simi Valley down to the location, is that right?”
“Yes.”
“And how long did it take you to get from Simi Valley to the location in Brentwood?”
Simi Valley, of course, is Whitetown, the suburb where the Rodney King jurors acquitted the cops caught beating a black man on videotape. It’s code for “racist frame-up.”
But Johnnie couldn’t leave it at that. He opened a line of questions concerning a pair of Reeboks Tom took from Simpson’s closet and stowed in his trunk overnight. It was inappropriate for Tom to do this, and would have led to trouble if the shoes had turned out to be importance evidence. But those shoes led to nothing; they were a total red herring. To Johnnie, it was another opportunity for a jab at the detective’s race.
“You took those shoes home to Simi Valley with you?”
Underhanded son of a bitch!
But Johnnie had still another item on his agenda. He was itching for the jury to hear about Faye Resnick’s drug habit, and what the defense would imply was her hypnotic influence over Nicole. Johnnie wanted to plant the notion that the real killer lay somewhere in Faye’s circle of associates-a drug dealer to whom she owed money, perhaps. He surmised correctly, however-that Chris and I were not going to call Faye to testify. Johnnie could have called her himself, but she was a double-edged blade. If the defense got her up on the stand, she would doubtless end up telling the jury about O.J.‘s brutality to Nicole.
So he decided to use Lange to introduce the totally unsupported idea that this was a drug killing. Johnnie asked Tom if he’d ever heard of something called a “Colombian necklace.”
“I believe so,” Tom replied.
“And it’s true, is it not, that a Colombian necklace is a situation where drug dealers will slice the neck of a victim, including the carotid artery, in order to… instill fear and send a message to others who have not paid for their drugs or been informing to the police…”
Tom said he’d heard that.
Tom was driving me up a wall. He just wouldn’t stand up for himself. Every time Johnnie threw out some preposterous theory, he’d answer with, “Yes, that’s possible.” He was hoping to come across as cool and unbiased, but he ended up conceding things that could not possibly have been true: that the murders could have been a drug hit or a Mafia contract killing. What he should have been saying was, “No, Counsel. I disagree with you. This didn’t look anything like a drug hit to me. And here’s why. Drug dealers, Mafia hit men, will off their victims with a bullet to the brain. They don’t leave behind physical evidence smeared from pole to pole. This was a rage killing.”
During the break I pulled him aside and said, “Tom, what are you doing, man?”
“Well”-he shrugged-“you can clean up on redirect.”
“Baby,” I told him, “by the time I get back to you on redirect, that jury’s gonna be off thinking about Colombian cartels. You gotta take your shot now!”
Redirect is never as impressive as cross. On cross, jurors are listening carefully to see whether the witness is backing down from the assertions made on direct. By the time we do redirect, the jury tunes out because they expect the witness to clean up his testimony under friendly questioning. You’ve got to hold your own on cross! But Tom didn’t seem to get that.
During the break, however, someone slipped Tom the word that Johnnie had bungled his drug-lord argot. The “necklace” was actually a “necktie.” So when Tom got back on the stand, he triumphantly gave the actual definition of “necklace”-a South African political killing, in which assassins place a burning tire around the victim’s neck, a modus operandi that had absolutely nothing to do with our case. I was glad to see Tom finally showing some spunk. But I’ll tell you, it was a rare moment.
I have since seen him stick up for himself admirably. During the civil trial, when Simpson’s attorney, Robert Baker, showed him the photo of some smudge he claimed was an unidentified footprint, Baker tried to trap him by asking, “There had to have been a second assailant… isn’t that true?”
“No,” Tom shot back. “I don’t know that that is a shoe print… If there were a shoe print, you’d expect to find others around it, and there weren’t.”
During the criminal trial, however, Cochran danced Lange all over the lot. He held Tom to account for all the deficiencies of the coroner: why there weren’t plastic bags over the victims’ hands, why the contents of the stomachs were discarded, and so on. Question after question went beyond the scope of the witness’s expertise. I objected until I was hoarse. The witness is not a medical examiner! But Ito allowed all of it.
Even now, when I read the transcript of Tom Lange’s testimony my stomach twists into knots. That cross-examination should have been handled in the space of an afternoon. It took four days.
Ito’s timidity played havoc with our trial strategy. Normally you can prepare your direct testimony with an eye to limiting what can be brought out in cross-examination. (The rules of evidence state that cross is limited to the subjects raised on direct.) But since Ito let the defense go anywhere during cross, that tack was useless. Instead, we had to fix things afterward, which meant we were having to spend hours and hours of preparation on lengthy redirect.
After the verdict, when pundits started using Chris and me as their personal punching bags, they would point to the expeditious pace of O. J. Simpson’s civil trial and ask, “Why is it that in the civil trial, these people can go straight from A to B? Why did you guys wander all over the map?” The answer is very simple. Judge Hiroshi Fujisaki routinely cut off Simpson’s attorneys with the message, “If you want to grill these witnesses, you’ll have to call them on your own, and not waste our time in cross.”
Lance Ito didn’t have the strength to do that.
I’ve thought a lot, since, about how I would have handled that courtroom if it had been me sitting on the bench. I know for sure I would have limited the scope of cross-examination. If direct went “1, 2, 3,” I wouldn’t let cross go “1, 2, 3… 3½.” I would have allowed no speaking objections. You know, the kind where the attorneys try to elaborate their objections with rhetoric. “Objection, Your Honor. Ms. Clark is trying to mislead the court…” It’s “Objection”-period. I would have ruled from the bench and taken no sidebars on the matter. “You stay there, Mr. Bailey. I’ve ruled!” If a lawyer repeatedly asks improper questions, I’d object on my own: “Don’t do it again, Mr. Cochran. If you do, we’re gonna talk contempt here.” Flout my orders and you get reamed in front of the jury. I’m going to make it hurt, and hurt bad. Pretty soon lawyers get it through their head that it’s not worth their while to pull a fast one. I’d be one of those judges everyone might hate, but I’d treat everyone the same.