Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, September 30, 1995 TAG: 9510020039
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES LENGTH: Long
Three-hundred-sixty-eight days after jury selection began, Judge Lance Ito ordered the panel to decide the case based on the evidence.
Moments earlier, prosecutor Marcia Clark completed her presentation by playing an audio tape of 911 calls Nicole Brown Simpson made over the years. As the tape played, Clark flashed on a giant courtroom screen pictures of Simpson's bruised face after various beatings and a final, bloody portrait of the slaying victim in death.
``I don't have to say anything else,'' Clark intoned solemnly after the tape was played.
``Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of the people of California ... we ask you to find the defendant, Orenthal James Simpson, guilty of murder in the first degree.''
Then, Ito addressed the panel with final instructions.
``You are not partisans or advocates, but impartial judges of the fact,'' he told the 12 jurors and two alternates who have been sequestered since Jan. 11.
He reminded them that both prosecutors and defense attorneys had argued that ``the world is watching,'' he but told them that should have no influence on their verdict.
The jurors were expressionless as they filed into the jury room. They are due back Monday morning for their first full day of deliberations. Ito said he would provide four hours' notice of a verdict.
Three minutes after the case was submitted, a jury room buzzer sounded three times. Ito had told the jury to use the buzzer after a foreman was selected. However, it wasn't announced whether one had been picked.
``Maybe they've got a verdict and we can all go home,'' defense attorney Johnnie Cochran Jr. quipped.
Laughter erupted, breaking a palpable tension that had built during the final moments of Clark's rebuttal. In pleading for a conviction, Clark summoned up the beaten face and desperate voice of Simpson, who was slain along with friend Ronald Goldman on June 12, 1994.
``Usually, I feel I'm the only one left to speak for the victims,'' she said. ``But Nicole and Ron are speaking to you.''
Clark urged jurors to listen to the resignation in Nicole Simpson's voice in one 911 call and consider the words she spoke to a detective who responded to a domestic violence call at her home six years before the killings: ``He's going to kill me.''
Clark suggested that Goldman was a hero in the effort to convict his killer because, ``Ron, struggling so valiantly, forced the killer to leave evidence.''
``They told you with their blood, with their hair ... that he did it - Orenthal Simpson,'' she said.
The final session Friday was as contentious as any, with Cochran and Barry Scheck peppering Clark with a fusillade of objections - more than 60 in all - that fragmented portions of her argument.
Normally, final arguments proceed uninterrupted. But during her final rebuttal, Clark elicited admonitions from the judge in addition to the defense's repeated objections.
Ito at first barked, ``Sit down!'' at protesting defense lawyers but eventually dismissed jurors from the courtroom to address attorneys.
He told Clark, ``You're close to the line'' and warned her to stop expressing her opinions rather than argue the evidence.
She shot back that she was entitled to respond to the fiery oratory of Cochran, who, she said, had appealed to jurors' emotions outside the evidence.
Ito said Cochran stayed within the law: ``It was very artfully phrased.''
Clark complained that Cochran had attacked the prosecutors and that they should be able to respond.
``When counsel takes off the gloves and makes personal attacks and says basically we're criminals, we have ethical obligations,'' she said.
In anticipation of the impending climax, the street outside the courthouse was barricaded by police early Friday. The crowds that gathered were bigger than usual, and many people were kept across the street.
Supporters on both sides played on a theme of Cochran's closing argument: There were shirts that read, ``If it doesn't fit then you must acquit,'' and a sign that said, ``If they acquit, they're full of [expletive].''
The task of answering Cochran's most incendiary demand - that jurors acquit Simpson because a racist detective may have framed him - fell to Christopher Darden, a black prosecutor who addressed jurors first.
``It's time to stand up. It is time to stand up,'' he said in his quietly intense rebuttal. ``The Constitution says a man has no right to kill and get away with it just because one of the investigating officers is a racist.''
Darden reminded jurors of Cochran's exhortation to return a verdict they could live with the day after.
``If you were to acquit him, what explanation would you give?'' Darden asked. ``Would you say it's because of racism in the LAPD?''
Darden cast his low-key presentation as a calm, reasoned antidote to Cochran's fevered defense of Simpson.
The prosecutor implied that defense lawyers were using Simpson's status as a football legend to place him in a category that would not allow conviction.
``No one is above the law - not the police, not the rich,'' Darden said. ``O.J. Simpson is not above the law.''
Darden drew furious objections when he said of Simpson, ``Everybody knows he killed.''
Ignoring defense interruptions, Darden declared: ``The evidence is there. You just have to find your way through the smoke. ... It all points to him as the killer.''
by CNB