The Search for Justice (32 page)

Having taken Brent and Grant to the Coliseum two years before for a Rolling Stones concert—and having enjoyed it—I ’d long
since purchased tickets to the Stones ’ October concert in Pasadena. Linell and I sat in the third row with the boys and were
surprised during the opening when the lead singer for the Red Hot Chili Peppers (the group my kids
really
wanted to hear) not only announced that Robert Shapiro was in the audience but that later on, “Judge Lance Ito is going to
be doing a guest set on the drums!”

Later, when Mick Jagger tore into “Honky Tonk Woman,” we were completely astonished when my picture flashed up on the huge
Rose Bowl video screen, right next to Jagger ’s, and there was a thunderous cheer from seventy-five thousand people.

It was a great night—noisy, energetic. It had been too long since the four of us had done something fun together. I was becoming
increasingly concerned for my boys. With their school and ice-hockey plus my schedule, I was only seeing them on weekends.
The case, and my total absorption in it, was weighing very heavily, especially on Linell. “I ’m proud of you,” she said, “but
for me, there ’s no upside to this.”

She had lived in Los Angeles all her life; there were restaurants and charity events and department stores she had gone to
since she was a teenager. Dinners at Drai ’s and parties at Spago were part of her routine. Now, she never knew quite what
would be waiting for her in these places, especially if I was with her. One anonymous source was quoted in the paper as saying
“Robert Shapiro will come to the opening of a fucking door.”

I didn ’t care what people said about me, about my politics or my style or my choice of clients. As former district attorney
Ira Reiner said to me, “You get high-profile, and you simply have to learn to eat shit.” But my family and my private life
should ’ve been strictly off-limits to anyone with integrity.

A day or so after the Stones concert, I received a care package from Joel Siegel in New York, with lots of newspaper articles
and magazine clippings, including one magazine from Europe with the cover line “Robert Shapiro—The Most Famous and Smartest
Lawyer in America.”

The note from Joel read, “Don ’t let this go to your head. They also think Jerry Lewis is the funniest man in America.”

T
he last week of October, the prosecution claimed that their data-base research turned up O.J. ’s name in 15,310 articles.
On October 25, Marcia Clark asked Ito to dismiss the entire jury panel, claiming that they had been infected by all the recent
publicity, including the furor over the Resnick book. Johnnie countered with, “You ’ll never get a better pool than this one.
This pool has been more admonished than any other; they ’ve been ordered not to see or read
anything.”
I fervently hoped they ’d missed that weekend ’s egregiously tasteless
Saturday Night Live
“Week in Review,” touting the Pope ’s new book,
O.J. Did It, God Told Me.

Bill Hodgman came up with the idea of planting our jury on a college campus somewhere, where people could go to the movies,
the theater, listen to lectures, and so on, yet not be contaminated by outside information. I responded that it was too little
too late. The only reason Clark wanted a new panel now, I said, was her jurors-needing-polygraphs remark, which seemed to
suggest that they were all liars.

At which point the first juror in the box, a sixty-year-old woman, said, “Everybody talks about this case, everybody wants
to get on the jury, and they all lie.”

“See, Your Honor, I told you!” said Clark.

On the way to court, Dean Uelmen told me that he ’d been informed by the prosecution that a blood sample in the Bronco tested
positive for Nicole and that a mixture of O.J. ’s and Ron Goldman ’s blood was on the console. This evidence would be the
most challenging to overcome. I discussed it with Cochran, and he said, “Well, we ’ll just have to deal with it.”

The question in my mind was not whose blood was where, but when and how it got in each location. I had begun thinking of our
tactic as a formula: CPA and DNA. CPA stood for collection, preservation, and analysis. The third had no meaning whatsoever
unless the first two were done properly. Contamination, cross-contamination, degree of degradation—these were the issues that
Scheck, Neufeld, and Henry Lee would be working with.

Gerry Spence had made a comment on television to the effect that if O.J. did do it, he didn ’t know he did it. In the lock
up, O.J. was furious. “I know what I do and what I don ’t do,” he said angrily, “and I didn ’t do this.”

He was depressed and frustrated, worried that perhaps now even his own lawyer might not believe him. There was no way to make
things easy or comfortable for him. Being his lawyer didn ’t mean being soft on him. It meant putting hard questions to him,
challenging him on evidence. “Best friend” wasn ’t in my job description.

It ’s unfortunate that something as vital as finding a jury should be so tedious and time-consuming, and yet it is a by-the-numbers
process. With Ito ’s restrictions, one juror was eliminated for watching a cartoon with her children, one for turning on a
Spanish soap opera, one for waking up to a clock radio, and one for walking into a bar that had a television on.

I began to see a pattern of black jurors being treated differently than white jurors by both the judge and the prosecution.
In all fairness, I ’m not sure they were aware of it. I didn ’t believe it was intentional, and I ’m sure that both Clark
and
Hodgman would say that they absolutely didn ’t do it. And Ito would agree with them. And indeed, the behavior was subtle.
For example, one thing that gave reason to excuse for cause was if the panelist had violated the judge ’s order simply by
turning on a television or radio. Ito would ask white jurors, “Have you watched television or listened to a radio?” For black
jurors, he ’d say, “Have you listened to music?” Invariably they ’d say yes, and his next question would be, “Was that done
on a radio?”

I saw Marcia Clark go after a forty-two-year-old black female postal worker whose job was to track lost and stolen mail. She
appeared to be of above-average intelligence, bright, nice, but not particularly adept with her communication skills. When
I questioned her, she had, like almost everyone, formed some opinions of the case. She had always viewed O.J. as a hero, had
liked him, and didn ’t want to believe he was guilty. She thought the officers, in jumping over the fence “to save lives,”
weren ’t quite credible. But, she said, this was twenty-twenty hindsight; she wasn ’t on the scene at the time, and the officers
might ’ve believed their reasons were good ones. She believed she could set her feelings aside and listen to the judge and
the evidence. Marcia cross-examined her in a very sweet, low-key, methodical way, leading her down the primrose path before
demolishing her. Ito excused the juror for cause, because she had “preconceived conceptions of the case.”

I argued that
all
jurors had preconceived conceptions, and this woman was no different, she just expressed them from a different point of view.
Clearly this was a juror the People didn ’t want, and I could understand that, but I did not believe the reason for her excusal
rose to the level of cause.

One seventy-one-year-old black man was questioned by Bill Hodgman, whose voice and articulation became very slow and level,
different somehow than when he was questioning white panelists, almost as though he expected the man not to understand him.
“Do you know what a polygraph is?” Hodgman
asked. The juror shot back at him, as though insulted, “Yes, it ’s a lie detector!”

One black woman undergoing a voir dire by Hodgman finally blurted out, “You make me feel like I ’m on trial!” Another began
to cry when Hodgman probed deeper and deeper into why she didn ’t have faith in blood tests. It turned out that her sister
was misdiagnosed after a series of blood tests, and died a month later of leukemia. “At least I ’ve never made a juror cry,”
said Cochran later.

“There ’s something happening that I don ’t like,” I said, when he and Carl Douglas were reviewing the sessions with me. “Race
shouldn ’t be an issue here.”

“It ’s always an issue, Bob,” Johnnie said. “It ’s an issue in everything in life.”

I just looked at him. “But I hoped it wouldn ’t be. I
believed
it wouldn ’t be.”

He smiled. “That ’s because you ’re not black.”

Often after these voir dire sessions I left the courthouse with my blood boiling. We haven ’t gotten anywhere in fifty years,
I thought. We have the appearance of equality, and blacks serve on juries right beside whites, but in looking at the polls,
it was clear that the tide in October had gone against us, splitting right down the racial line.

According to one CNN poll, 70 percent of those polled believed O.J. guilty; 20 percent believed he wasn ’t. The majority of
those who believed him guilty were white; those who believed him innocent were black. The majority of black jurors had black
heroes, and O.J. Simpson had been among them, for many good reasons. Should these citizens be penalized, or be assumed to
be incapable of making thoughtful, considered decisions because of this fact? In our voir dire process, if blacks were excused
for cause because their initial opinion was that O.J. was innocent, then all the whites should ’ve been excused for cause
if they believed him guilty.

On Halloween, I arrived at court to see a half-dozen TV camera operators wearing “Shapiro masks.” It gave us all a good laugh.
Later I thought that it was pretty ironic. If I wore one of those masks, I could probably move through my life with some of
my old autonomy.

For five weeks we ’d been working with our jury panel, narrowing it down bit by bit, and we were now down to the last twenty-seven
jurors. Jo-Ellan Dimitrius had coordinated all the massive material and data on each of them, the answers on their questionnaires,
their responses to voir dire, and we ’d ranked our possibilities on the computer. The final round was a war of nerves, like
an ultimate chess game. It would result in what I believe to be the most important aspect of any case: who will judge the
evidence.

This panel of possible jurors had received the most thorough indoctrination and explanation of its mission of any jury I had
seen in twenty-five years. Day after day, Judge Ito had emphasized to them that “Mr. Simpson can sleep through this if he
wants. In our justice system, the burden of proof is solely on the prosecution.” And yet, when I asked jurors what they expected
Mr. Simpson to do in this case, one prospective juror looked me straight in the eye and said, “Prove his innocence.”

We had planned our strategies for peremptory challenges very carefully. Several times early on we accepted the jury knowing
full well that the People would exercise their challenges. Thus we were able to hang on to our own challenges to use later.
We had no intention of being easy on the prosecution if they continued to exclude blacks. Each time a black juror was excluded
by the prosecution, Cochran asked to approach the bench, to build a record of a systematic challenge based on race.