Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, September 29, 1995 TAG: 9509290085
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES LENGTH: Long
In the fevered style of a revival preacher, Cochran invoked biblical texts, referred to two key detectives as ``the twin devils of deception'' and told the spellbound jurors that fate had given them a chance to change history.
``Maybe there is a reason why we're here,'' he said. ``Maybe you're the right people at the right time at the right place to say: `No more!'''
``Stop this cover-up! Stop this cover-up!'' Cochran bellowed in the second day of his summation. ``You are the consciences of this community.''
Far from Los Angeles, President Clinton said he was uneasy about the racial implications of the trial.
``I'm concerned about it and I hope the American people will not let this become some symbol of the larger racial issue in our country,'' the president told NBC-TV in Washington.
Cochran's impassioned appeal, which enraged the father of one murder victim, was followed by the cooler, scientific analysis of defense attorney Barry Scheck, who told jurors: ``There is a cancer at the heart of this case.''
Scheck insisted they could not trust any of the DNA analysis of blood because the samples were contaminated and tampered with in the ``black hole'' of the Los Angeles Police Department crime lab.
``Somebody played with this evidence,'' he said. ``There's no doubt about it.''
Using an analogy posed by forensic expert Henry Lee, Scheck compared the defense discovery of flawed evidence to finding a cockroach in a bowl of spaghetti - enough of a sign that the whole bowl is infested.
``How many cockroaches do you have to find in the bowl of spaghetti?'' he asked. ``This is reasonable doubt.''
Cochran's emotion-packed discourse - often focused on Detective Mark Fuhrman - clearly was designed to rouse feelings of racial solidarity among the nine black members of the 12-person jury.
The jury, which includes two whites and a Hispanic, sat mesmerized through Cochran's arguments. He was interrupted only once when a woman juror asked to go to the restroom.
``A racist is someone who has power over you,'' he told them. ``This man would lie and set you up because of the hatred he has in his heart.''
He played for jurors the sound of Fuhrman's voice speaking the infamous racial epithet that he swore to them he had not spoken in 10 years. He read to jurors every word of a letter from witness Kathleen Bell, who said she heard Fuhrman advocate burning all blacks.
Comparing Fuhrman to Adolf Hitler and stressing the images of genocide, Cochran said the former detective targeted Simpson after learning in the 1980s that the black football star was married to a white woman.
When Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were found slain, he said, it presented Fuhrman with the opportunity to plant a bloody glove and other evidence to frame Simpson for the murders.
During Cochran's summation, Goldman's father, Fred, sat tapping his foot in agitation. At the break, he went before TV cameras and lashed out at Cochran.
``This man is sick,'' he said. ``This man is a horror walking around amongst us.''
``We have seen a man who perhaps is the worst kind of racist himself,'' Goldman told reporters, ``someone who shoves racism in front of everything, someone who compares someone who speaks racist comments to Hitler, a person who murdered millions of people. This man is the worst kind of human being imaginable.''
Those comments spurred the normally silent Simpson family to respond on camera with their own news conference.
``We have waited all this time, and now ... the attorneys are telling my brother's story. And it's very shocking that once Johnnie gets up and starts telling what we feel happened that this has rocked somebody's world,'' Simpson's sister Carmelita Durio said.
She was joined by her sister Shirley Baker, Simpson's two grown children and his mother.
``It's wrong, even when you're hurting, for someone to get up and personally attack our lawyers and say that they're liars,'' Baker said.
Jurors, sequestered since Jan. 11, were shielded from the families' comments.
In court, the panelists began to take notes during Scheck's methodical recounting of the flaws in physical evidence. He said it was clear that a pair of socks found in Simpson's bedroom had been soaked in blood after they were found - not before. And he showed evidence pointing to the planting of blood on a back gate of Nicole Brown Simpson's condominium.
Citing Lee again, he said repeatedly that the signs of contamination were clear and ``Something is terribly wrong.''
Scheck suggested that Nicole Brown Simpson's dog, Kato, may have played a larger role in the investigation than suspected. The dog's wail has been credited by the prosecution as sounding the alert that led to the bodies.
But Scheck said the dog probably carried hairs from Simpson and other family members as well as fibers from Simpson's Bronco. Thus, any hairs and fibers taken as evidence could have been deposited by the dog instead of a killer. Scheck also noted that the bloody glove found at Simpson's home had a dog hair on it.
by CNB