Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, October 9, 1995 TAG: 9510090110
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: WILLIAM RASPBERRY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
He must have. Every pundit in America says so, as do most of the lawyers I spotted on television in the aftermath of last week's startlingly quick not-guilty verdict.
Co-counsel Robert Shapiro was so outraged over Cochran's race-card gambit that he went public in his criticism, vowing never again to try a case with what must now be America's most famous lawyer.
So why do I, having spent too much time watching the televised ``trial of the century,'' sit here wondering just what ``the race card'' is, and whether Cochran unethically played it?
If I thought most of those lamenting Cochran's strategy had in mind his near-miss call for jury nullification, I wouldn't be writing this column. I was plenty upset when, for a brief moment, Simpson's lead attorney seemed to be asking the jury to forget the evidence and free his client in order to ``send a message'' to the Los Angeles police. That is dangerous and unethical business.
But my sense of what the race-card critics have in mind is Cochran's decision to hang his defense on the LAPD: Its amateurish investigation, its sloppy handling of crucial evidence and, above all, the propensity of at least one of its members to lie and to plant evidence against black suspects. Maybe subsequent interviews with jury members will yet disclose an element of nullification - a refusal to convict, not because of doubt but for reasons having nothing to do with the evidence; getting even for Simi Valley, for example. But until then, it seems plausible to me that the jury had doubts that Marcia Clark and Chris Darden, for all their closing-argument brilliance, couldn't overcome.
Let me say straight out, the prosecution convinced me. I found the circumstantial case against Simpson persuasive. But that, perhaps in part, is because I rival Carroll's White Queen in my ability to believe at least four impossible things before breakfast. For instance, I was willing (1) to accept at face value the testimony of most of the cops in the case, (2) to believe evidence I did not understand - the mind-numbing discussion of DNA, for instance, (3) to consider the possibility that Detective Philip Vannatter lied about not initially considering Simpson a suspect and that Detective Mark Fuhrman planted the bloody glove, and (4) still believe O.J. did it. I am not the first to accept the possibility that the cops tried to frame a guilty man.
The point, though, is that I would not be at all dismayed to discover that the evidentiary problems I was able to overcome in my own mind wound up as reasonable doubt in the minds of the jurors. After all, their not-guilty verdict is not a proclamation that they believe Simpson innocent of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.
Nor do I find it alarming that Cochran intensified the jurors' doubts by evoking their own familiarity with the highhandedness of some members of the LAPD. I take it as a given that it's the job of a defense attorney - even a public defender with no shot at the big bucks Cochran and crew will certainly make - to do all that the law allows to get his client off. Would anybody have found it so awful if O.J. himself had introduced the possibility of racial bias on the part of the detectives? Then why is it awful when his representative does it?
Before you point out that I as a TV watcher had information about Fuhrman that the jurors didn't have, Judge Lance Ito having bowdlerized the incriminating tape, let me say two words: conjugal visits. Have you considered how hard it must be, Ito's admonitions notwithstanding, to sleep with a spouse who is dying to tell you things he or she thinks you need to know in order to carry out the duty to which you've given nearly a year of your life and not listen? And if you listened to the evidence out of Fuhrman's own mouth that he had the habit of planting evidence, particularly against black folk, whom he despised, could you keep that information from influencing your judgment as to Fuhrman's credibility?
Suppose you then heard Cochran point out in court that a cop (Fuhrman) who would admit such things to people he only recently met would hardly have kept them secret from his fellow officers - urging the suspicion that the whole case might have been polluted. That's a race card? (As for Shapiro, it seems likely that what triggered his ire was not so much the ``race card'' that most critics have in mind as Cochran's likening Fuhrman to Adolf Hitler. It's no defense of a rogue and racist cop to say that the comparison trivializes the Holocaust.)
I'm guessing that at least a few of the jurors believed Simpson probably guilty as charged but, finding in Fuhrman's actions and attitudes, and in the sloppy police work, the grounds for reasonable doubt, did what the law says they are supposed to do. They acquitted.
- Washington Post Writers Group
by CNB