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.