The People V. . . . Episode Four

The opening exchange between Johnny Cochran and OJ gave Jeffrey Toobin the title of his book, THE RUN OF HIS LIFE.  Cochran found OJ to be desperately depressed and did what he could to boost his morale.  Cochran had already told him he believed in his innocence.  Cochran then told of his own experience with depression.  Some years before, his work was going badly.  He was in divorce.  And he only had a football game against the Packers to watch.  The Packers were in steep decline at the time.  But they played a great game that day, winning and keeping OJ to only one touchdown.  Cochran said that what helped him overcome his own depression was that despite how that game was going, OJ had gotten up after every tackle and went back at it again the next play.  Thanking OJ, he described this trial as the run of his life and challenged him to get up and get after it every time he was knocked down.

This episode offered some information about Ron and Nicole.  The Goldmans described to Marcia Clark what a good guy Ron was and how he had been stabbed so terribly.  (More on the stabbing another time.)  I waited to see if the series writers would include Ron’s excellent athleticism.  But instead of saying Ron was helping coach his brother’s high school tennis team, they only touched on Ron’s volunteering for some children’s program.  That implied that Ron was a weak and helpless victim, a very inaccurate impression to give.

Nicole’s character got no specific information from the writers but they brought up how Black women tended to perceive her as a gold-digger.  And they had the Reznick character talk about cocaine parties and fights with OJ as signs of Nicole’s strength.  But Reznick herself was portrayed as a flake hooked on cocaine.

From my reading on the case, I learned that Faye Reznick indeed was a coke-head.  She stayed at Bundy in Nicole’s condo until a few days before the murders.  The only reason Reznick was not at the condo was that she finally took her friends’ advice and went into residential rehab treatment.   There was a possibility that Reznick had a stash of cocaine for which she had not paid the cartel and it may have been at Bundy the night of the murders.

Nicole and Ron Goldman were considering opening a restaurant together with Reznick.  Many Brentwood area restaurants were financially viable because they were selling cocaine on the side.  But Reznick had to clean up her act or there could have been no deal.  I hope the writers show that it was pure coincidence that Ron showed up when he did and did what he could to save Nicole.

This episode portrays the conflict within the dream team.  Egos were involved.  Shapiro was sometimes condescending as was shown in the scene with F. Lee Bailey.  But probably the telling moment in the conflict was when Shapiro made up a scenario that OJ would admit guilt and plea bargain.  When Cochran and Bailey pushed back, Shapiro asked who believed OJ was guilty.  No one raised a hand, not even Alan Derschowitz.

By this time, the defense had a pretty good idea about the quality of the evidence against OJ and what they could do to show its inadequacy.  They also had something else, a timeline which they felt proved OJ could not have done the murders.  The series writers did not either want to share that information or they did not know of it.  But that the dream team showed unanimous disagreement with Shapiro said a lot.

In a recent article in the papers, family members of the victims complained that no one talked with them before the series was televised.  But no one from the series consulted with anyone but the writer of the book on which the series is based.  OJ was not consulted.  I doubt Shapiro was either!

The writers of the series are writing for drama and not a documentary.  They are taking some license with the story and there seems to be a bias toward the side of the victims’ families and the LAPD.  The closing moments of this episode point to a conflict between Cochran and Chris Darden.  That particular drama will be one subplot to watch for sure but let us not lose sight of the evidence that slips in around the edge of the drama.  That is why I am here.

The People V. . . . Episode Three

This episode of "American Crime Story" opens with the touching scene of Robert Kardashian talking about OJ's arrest with the kids who would later become the subject of the contemporary reality show about them.  They asked if OJ did it.   That's the question this episode addresses.

Who actually believed OJ was innocent?  Robert Kardashian, his close friend who asked him to be godfather of his children, believed it.  So did a lot of the fans who cheered OJ on during the slow Bronco/police chase.

It was clear the police did not think he was, even those who had accepted his hospitality.  It was clear no one in the DA’s office did.  In fact, they released anything they could ahead of the trial to the public in a serious effort to taint public opinion against OJ.  The media was a mixed bag, leaning toward guilty.  They published what the DA leaked.  But the media also noted TIME MAGAZINE’s intentional darkening of OJ’s mugshot.  

What of his lawyer, Robert Shapiro?  His expertise was plea bargaining.  It made no difference whether OJ was guilty or innocent.  Shapiro wanted the best deal he could get.  The only problem was that OJ would not deal   He asserted his innocence from the beginning.  

If OJ had been poor, especially a poor Black, the court would have appointed a public defender to be his counsel.  There would have been no outside experts because there was no money.  There would have been no outside investigators or extra lawyers.  There would have been no “Dream Team.”

Imagine being in that position, poor, under-represented, with the DA’s office releasing evidence against you, and threatening the death penalty.  

Criminal jurisprudence in America values a competent defense for any accused person.  That’s why some cases get re-tried when it can be shown the defendant had incompetent counsel.  

Fortunately for OJ, he had wealth and could hire good lawyers.  So when OJ refused to let Shapiro do a plea bargain which would have meant OJ admitting to some measure of guilt, a defense attorney with court smarts was needed.  Nearing the end of his illustrious career, F. Lee Bailey was asked to help.  When Alan Dershowitz, a nationally famous Harvard law professor was on TV pontificating that OJ was probably guilty, Shapiro hired him in anticipation of having an appeal.  That took him off TV and into the dream team.  When it was clear to Shapiro that there were no African Americans on the team, he had to add Johnny Cochran.  While the episode brought up how the team would deal with the DNA evidence the police were so proud of gathering and which carried much of the DA’s case, we were not told that other lawyers were working on two things, child custody, and the potential of future civil law suits against OJ, protecting as much of his wealth as possible for the future support of his children and himself.

Shapiro shrewdly invited in a reporter from NEW YORKER MAGAZINE, Jeffrey Toobin, to counter the DA’s publicity.  The thrust of the defense would be that OJ was the subject of racial prejudice, of which Detective Mark Fuhrman was the foremost example.

The DA’s office beefed up its team by adding Chris Darden, a Black staff member.  Darden trusted Marcia Clark and the police evidence.  Despite what he was hearing in the Black community, he stepped up to the task as an honor.  Did he believe OJ was guilty?  He was a lawyer and did not have to believe it.  His job was to help present the evidence, counter the defense’s arguments to the best of his ability, and let the jury decide.  Those he was working with, however, were convinced the murders had been solved by the arrest of OJ.  And they did not encourage the police to investigate any other possibility.

Did Shapiro, Bailey, Dershowitz, et al, believe OJ was innocent?  Johnny Cochran did.  The others?  It seems, according to the episode, that they may have been in it for the money and the fame.  That’s the common misconception of the part of the public that believed OJ was guilty.  After reading all I could, I concluded that there was not complete agreement on the guilt/innocence matter.  But, like Darden, they had a job to do, present all the facts that raised doubt or proved innocence, argue against what was presented by the prosecution to the best of their ability, and let the jury decide.  The money and fame were nothing new to them.  They already had that.

OJ was fortunate.  Not only was his wealth enough to afford a skilled defense, he had the good fortune of having people on his team that could argue both sides and then settle on what to do in court.  The DA’s office was so invested in believing OJ was guilty that they could not deal with anything that did not support their narrative.  As a consequence, they were unwilling and unable to counter the "Dream Team."  

This third episode showed that the Simpson case occurred when Marcia Clark was in the process of divorce.  It is no wonder she made public an incident between OJ and Nicole from some years earlier where one of their domestic fights was called in on 9-1-1.  

In my experience as an advocate, I saw many times the anger of women, earned from bitter experience, which presumed a woman’s accusation was always true.  In some cases, a woman used a situation by misrepresenting it and destroying a minister’s career.  But I found practically no one willing to look closely enough to see the evidence I found.

There is so little about Nicole shown in the episodes so far that it becomes easy to see her as a helpless female victim.  It will be interesting if the writers for "American Crime Story" series fill out her character to show what it was that drew her and OJ together to the point where the series shows him every time he is asked saying how much he loved her and was devastated by her death.

The episode concludes with Johnny Cochran telling OJ that all he needs is one Black juror and he can get a hung jury.  

Spoiler alert: Cochran got his Black juror but not a jury that could not persuade one recalcitrant to join the majority for a guilty verdict.  The jury was not only unanimous that OJ was not guilty, but reported it out within four hours of deliberation!  Watch all future episodes to see if the series shares enough of the evidence that makes such a scenario possible.

If it does not, I’ll try to provide an adequate basis for their decision.  Or better yet, get Armanda Cooley’s MADAM FOREMAN from the library and read for yourself how and why they decided as they did.

The People V. . . . Episode Two

The writers of the series for "American Crime Story" showed several important elements about the trial of OJ Simpson.  At the beginning of this episode, they showed how OJ thought he transcended race.  He was not Black or White.  He was OJ!  That was not just arrogance on his part.  Other athletes like Labron James seem to have achieved non-racial status.  But suddenly, knowing he was on the verge of being arrested, having been in the sites of snipers as he arrived home from Chicago, OJ knew he was just another Black man, subject to the unwritten rules of the LAPD.

The second episode included reference to police officers being his guests to use his pool and tennis court for exercise.  OJ had made it a point to have great relations with the precinct nearest Rockingham.  Other sources add that he was also generous with the things his sponsors gave him.  Slacks, shoes and socks, shirts, underwear, gloves, jackets, whatever, all were sent by the dozen to him by sponsors and there was no way he could use them all.  Many found their way to police guests, not as direct bribes, but as gifts to anyone who happened to be around.  Other guests received the same treatment whenever OJ wanted to pass along all the extras.

With the murders, OJ’s world collapsed.  This episode showed just how upsetting that was.  Cuba Gooding Jr. has observed that OJ may have been showing symptoms of head trauma from football, something he had not considered while making the series.  Either way, the OJ portrayed was what I saw in the combined readings about him as he left with his friend Al Cowling before his lawyers could turn him in.

The letters he wrote to his family and friends before he slipped away from his lawyers with Cowling sought forgiveness for what he had done.  The episode left it up to us to decide if he was referring to the murders or if he was sure before he got into the white Bronco, that he would kill himself rather than be gunned down by the SWAT team.

And why would he be quoted as saying he felt like an abused husband?  Is there a possibility that one of Nicole’s qualities that he really loved was that she had the strength of mind and body to compete with him?  Was she really terrified of him, as the Faye Reznick character says at the funeral?  Was there something else Nicole may have been worried about, such as having OJ stop alimony because of her friendship with Reznick who had a major drug problem?

I liked the second episode very much.  It was accurate as far as it went and showed vividly the way things were that day, snipers, police cars, fans cheering him on, the embarrassment for both prosecution and defense lawyers, the pain of his friend Al Cowling trying to keep OJ alive as long as possible considering how fragile OJ’s state of mind was.  

Watchers might have understood that the sincerity of OJ’s apology, as he arrived at home to be arrested, was for causing the officers all this trouble, officers who he thought of as friends that had been to his house and received gifts because of his sponsors’ over-enthusiastic generosity.  

The People V. . . . Episode One

Rather than begin with the trial or even the crime scene, the first episode begins with scenes of conflict between the Los Angeles Police and Africa American young men.  Scenes from the riots surrounding the exoneration of the police in the beating of Rodney King show the depth of the racial tension at the time of the murders.  The conversations shown between Johnny Cochran, whose law practice was built on representing some of those young people, and Chris Darden, a young member of the prosecutor’s office in Los Angeles, showed the stress that was going on within the African American community.

The Toobin book on which the series is based does not start there.  Few of the other books about the Simpson case did.  They were all written to discuss the case without taking into account the social context of the case.  Each writer had other purposes.  Another social movement, however, was to take front and center, spousal abuse.  

For the crime itself, what we are shown is the dog getting attention of someone who then sees the blood and the bodies and calls the police.  

For the investigation, we see the police spotting blood drops from OJ's Bronco to the house in Brentwood, and Mark Fuhrman leading detectives Lange and Vannatter along the fence on OJ’s property and finding a glove.  OJ cooperates and talks to the detectives without a lawyer present.  They find a cut on his finger and OJ can’t explain it.  The acting DA, Marcia Clark, is shown interviewing two people, one of whom found the victims and the other who claims to have seen OJ driving away from the scene of the crime and nearly running into her car.  That scene was then dramatized with the actor portraying OJ, Cuba Gooding Jr., shouting at the witness.

The defense also is shown in the first episode to be investigating their client.  They have him physically examined.  The doctors find no sign of any physical nature, not even a bruise.  The sore finger is not mentioned in the scene.   OJ is shown to go through a lie detector test.  It shows that OJ tests out by that particular expert to have a bad score, showing the machine picked up physiological signs as he answered questions which were considered to be signs of being untruthful.

I am not sure how the series will handle any of these scenes when it comes to the trial.  I presume that in those later episodes, the evidence of some of these matters will be argued.  If not, I will try to shed light on each whenever I think it will help.

For now, let me touch on eight things I am sure are not going to be dealt with. 

One, when OJ was interviewed by the police, he allowed them to take a substantial blood sample, only part of which was turned in as possible evidence for the case by the police.

Two, while OJ was with the police, they also gave him a physical.  All they found was the injured finger.  No bruises, bumps, or scrapes.  

Three, the episode would have been more adequate if it had not shown the alleged scene where a witness said OJ nearly ran into her car with his Bronco the night of the crime.  That there was such a witness I do not deny but whether she actually saw OJ was not used by Marcia Clark.  Dramatizing that scene makes the viewer feel as though it must be true.  If I had artistic control, I would have added a couple other witnesses describing what they thought they saw or heard, demonstrating the conflicting nature of testimony with so many witnesses, and leaving in just the verbal statement of the woman driver.  I’m sure that a future episode will go into why that witness was never called.  Update: Episode Three shows the driver sold her story for $5,000 to a TV program so she immediately lost her credibility and was dropped by the DA’s office.  

Four, the lie detector test scene from the first episode will be understood according to the individual viewer’s prejudice about the case.  Lie detector tests are not admissible in a court of law for very good reasons.  One is that false scores occurred far too frequently.  There are several techniques used by various experts and differing results can occur depending on the technique.  The state of mind of the client and the approach of the tester can lead to very different results.  I am asking viewers to take that scene with a grain of salt in terms of helping solve the murders.

Five, the scene where Fuhrman took Vannatter and Lange back to find the glove was inaccurate.  It occurred after sunrise, not before.  Toobin took Fuhrman’s word that it occurred in the dark.  Fuhrman writes fiction since he left the LAPD.  But his police reports show signs he was already doing it before he left.  He included the time of day along with the dramatic moment in the dark in Brentwood when the glove was shown to the detectives, as he described it.  The national observatory sunrise time for that place occurred almost an hour before the time he gave.

Sixth, anyone who watches crime shows knows about the integrity of a crime scene.  According to Fuhrman, he found the glove earlier and led the detectives back to it.  How did the glove get there?  If OJ had come that way and accidentally dropped it, any foot impressions he’d have left were messed up by Fuhrman and, a little later, by the three officers.

Seventh, the glove shown in the scene was the actual glove.  It matched the other glove found at the murder scene on Bundy.  They look like oak leaves that have fallen from the tree, crinkled and mostly flat.  The picture was on a poster screen set up for showing evidence to the jury.  Imagine sitting for eight months staring at such things as the lawyers on both sides went over and over things, especially the DNA arguments.  I’ll leave that to your imagination for now.

Eighth, regarding the location of the white Bronco the night the driver came to pick up OJ (the night of the killings), as the camera panned away from the driver outside OJ’s mansion, there was no Bronco there.  That was the testimony of the driver.  However, other witnesses indicated the Bronco was near the other gate during the whole time and the driver somehow did not see it.  The series showed the Bronco was not there and that biases the telling of the story.

Before I conclude, let me clarify the situation a bit.  For at least two months, OJ was scheduled by one of his sponsors to attend a golf outing in Chicago on June 13.  He scheduled a limo to take him to the airport at 11 am on the 12th.  The murders took place sometime around then.  The prosecution felt that OJ had time between 10 pm and 11 pm to kill his wife and her friend, dispose of the weapon and bloody clothes, and still meet the limo.  The Chicago trip was not a last minute attempt to escape.  In fact, it set a limit on the time during which OJ could have done the crime and led the prosecution to have great difficulty establishing their own narrative of how OJ could have done it. 

It was hard to be accurate but the first episode gave it a good try.  But was it adequate?  Did it put critical things in proper perspective?  Did it misrepresent something of importance?  Did it leave out critical information?  I will try to keep sorting that out as we go along during the series.

The Run of His Life, the People V. OJ Simpson

OJ didn’t do it.

Ten years ago, I undertook a careful study of the OJ Simpson case.  It became the backdrop of a novel I wrote at the time in which I solved the murders of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman.

Hardly anyone believed me.

Now “American Crime Stories,” a fairly popular television show is presenting a series about OJ's case.  Blurbs about the series say it does not attempt to give full evidence but seeks more to dramatize the dynamics surrounding the case such as police-on-Black violence, spousal abuse, and privilege of the wealthy.  Even so, it still must offer evidence or it could not accurately portray the story.  I will be looking to see if the evidence is adequately provided or if it is left out or inaccurately offered.

You know I believe he was innocent. You must also know that the book on which the TV series is based, THE RUN OF HIS LIFE, is written by someone who believes OJ is guilty.  Jeffery Toobin says as much in the book.  Update: He reaffirmed his belief again on March 5 in a NewYorker Magazine essay.

There are three other books that I found to be very helpful in terms of the real facts presented as objectively as possible and one that really unintentionally pointed out how the police went after OJ.

In addition to the Toobin book, Lawrence Schiller’s AMERICAN TRAGEDY, which is told from the perspective of Robert Kardashian, is a must read.  The next book that deserves serious regard is KILLING TIME by Donald Freed and Raymond Briggs.  The fourth book is MADAM FOREMAN by Amanda Cooley who chaired the jury for their trial deliberations.  While Toobin and Schiller started out objective, they both turned against OJ in their updated editions.  Freed and Briggs do not commit to a solution to the murders but add new information, give critical data like the autopsies, and raise major questions about the prosecution's timeline of the murders.  The Cooley book provides grounds for their “not guilty” verdict as well as an articulate statement about the jury members themselves.

Every other book I read was mostly self-serving.  On OJ’s side, the books by Cochran, Shapiro, and Derschowitz were more about their own great careers and less about OJ’s innocence.  Marcia Clark, Chris Darden, Fred Goldman, and all the others on the prosecution side did what they could to minimize anything that would have exonerated OJ and chose only to include what would convict him.  

The worst was MURDER IN BRENTWOOD by Mark Fuhrman.  Yet his book showed some of how the framing of OJ occurred.  And Fuhrman didn’t even realize he was doing it!

I need to tell you that my work since 1980 as an advocate for ministers in trouble gave me a perspective.  I helped with many cases of pastors accused of some nasty stuff and had to sort through everything to come up with a reasonable reconstruction of the actual events, if they even occurred.  In those cases, people lied, sometimes the accuser, sometimes the accused, sometimes both, and sometimes the church leaders handling the case.  

There are several techniques that I learned to help me identify what were facts and what were misrepresentations in nearly all those cases.  One is the development of timelines based on what was said by each person involved or witnessing or handling the matter for the church.  That gave me “what they knew and when they knew it.”  Comparing timelines opened up each case to where gaps and inconsistencies existed and usually led to lines of investigation that found the crucial facts resolving the case.  The book that took that approach was KILLING TIME.  As you watch the series, you may want to take notes and put them into chronological order for yourself.  

Finally, did the series leave out important information?  Did it include things that were not in evidence or proved?  As I have the chance over the ten weeks of the series, I will critique each episode and hopefully give you good reason to look again at your opinion about the crime, whether you agree with me or not.