Rov_Scam
21hr ago
I heard a young person describe the Depp–Heard trial as the Simpson Trial of their generation and, no. Not even close. Those who weren't around for it don't understand how big OJ was, because it's unlikely anything will again be as big for at least another few decades. I got about 50 channels at the time and the trial was always on 3 or 4 of the channels, and sometimes it was on most of the channels. Minor figures like Kato and Rosa Lopez were household names. I found a book about the murders in a garbage can within a month of them, seemingly not enough time for a book to be written let alone published, read, and discarded.
The only other crime in American history that generated a comparable level of interest was the Lindbergh kidnapping, and that was in the 30s. I think that after a media circus to that degree the media and public as a whole take a step back,.and it can only happen again once anyone old enough to have any real memory of such an event is too old to have had any involvement with the coverage. Maybe once everyone who covered the OJ trial is retired and the zoomers are running the media machine, we'll get a case of similar interest, but I think this is the kind of thing that can only happen once every 50 years or so.
Rov_Scam
21hr ago
The question was about Cochran, not the jury. And I left out the bloody socks because they come with their own problems, but suffice it to say that one would expect to find more in a house with a white tile floor and white carpeting than a sock with a single drop of blood on it. This only played into the defense theory that evidence had been planted.
Rov_Scam
23hr ago
Johnny Cochran was primarily a civil lawyer who focused on civil rights cases, and his approach to the Simpson case was as a civil rights case rather than as a typical criminal case. In any criminal investigation, particularly one as complicated as a murder investigation, there are going to be mistakes, and it's par for the course for the defense to highlight these mistakes as a means to sow doubt in the minds of the jury. Rather than presenting these as unfortunate errors, however, Cochran was able to craft a narrative that these all flowed from the racism inherent in the Los Angeles Police Department, at a time when such racism was fresh in the minds of the black community.
Consider the behavior of the police from the very beginning of the investigation: Within hours of the crime scene being discovered, the police found it necessary, in the middle of the night, to send four detectives to Simpson's home to personally inform him that his former wife had been murdered. While there, after it is evident that Simpson is not home, the find a reason to enter the property anyway and, surprise surprise, find incriminating evidence. There's an explanation for this that makes sense, and that the prosecution explained, but to someone predisposed to distrust the police it certainly looks like the police zeroed in on Simpson as a suspect well before there was any reason to believe he was involved, and they never seriously pursued any other line of investigation. Then you add all the other mistakes and irregularities and it can certainly look like the police, at best, were so dead set on Simpson's guilt that they didn't bother to conduct a competent investigation, or, at worst, actively manufactured evidence against him. It also didn't help that the detective who discovered key evidence, including the evidence that gave the police justification to enter Simpson's property in the first place, had his own checkered past with regard to racial issues, a past that he actively concealed in court.
The prosecution may have been able to counter this somewhat had they recognized the problem and sought to counteract it, but they were so convinced that the evidence was too overwhelming to ignore that they didn't consider that Cochran could easily give the jury reason to ignore it. They presented the LAPD like choirboys who wouldn't possibly do anything like Cochran was suggesting and couldn't possibly be driven by any motives other than a dispassionate analysis of the facts (though for their own part, the police were less than forthcoming when it came to providing potentially damaging information to the prosecution, as if the problem would go away if they ignored it). When this information came out during the trial, the damage had been done, and the prosecution's half-baked attempts to cover for it were too little, too late. In any event, the suggestion that the LAPD was totally not racist ran contrary to the experience of every black person and Los Angeles, and wasn't going to play well with a mostly minority jury.
In the aftermath of the verdict, a narrative developed among the prosecution team and others that Cochran was trying to convince the jury that acquitting Simpson would somehow be tit for tat payback for the acquittal of the Rodney King defendants. Much criticism of Cochran in the years since stems from this theory. The problem with it is that it presupposes that the jurors aren't just wrong, but are also bad people, that even if they had a videotape of Simpson murdering Brown and Goldman that they would have acquitted anyway. I don't believe this is true, and I don't believe that's what Cochran was going for. If you want to get an idea at what Cochran was going for, read the actual closing argument. He goes through the holes in the prosecution's case and only then discusses how they may have been the result of racism or apathetic bungling. He never suggests what his worst critics do.
Part of the mythology of the OJ Simpson trial is based on the idea that the prosecution had an absolute slam dunk of a case. They didn't. The biggest problem I saw with the case was the timing combined with a lack of blood. The prosecution presented a tight, but plausible, timeline between the murders and OJ getting into the limo. But when you consider the amount of blood that would result from stabbing two people to death, including one who was nearly decapitated, it makes it implausible that the perpetrator would be able to avoid getting blood on themself. In all, police were able to extract less than a drop of blood from the Bronco and no blood from the inside of the house. That someone who wasn't a professional hit man was able to stab two people to death, one of whom was younger and stronger than him, and make it back in a tight window without getting much blood anywhere seems highly unlikely. I'm not an OJ truther or anything suggesting that he's innocent, just that there was good reason for a jury to be skeptical of the story the prosecution was telling them. When you add in the race stuff it cast doubt onto what little blood evidence there was, and a that point it's hard for me to see how he gets convicted.
The jury never knew about any of that. After the tapes came out, the defense wanted to admit them to demonstrate that Fuhrman lied about his use of racial epithets and wanted to call additional witnesses who would testify to his use of them. This is an interesting story in and of itself, but the upshot is that the defense wanted to recall Fuhrman so they could cross-examine him about the newly discovered evidence. Given that the goal of such a cross-examination would be to show that Fuhrman had committed perjury, there was a strong likelihood that he would take the fifth upon being questioned about it. When the fifth is invoked in a criminal trial, the judge will instruct the jury that they can't make any negative inference from it. Courts aren't stupid, though, so if they anticipate that a witness will take the fifth, they will insist that the witness be questioned outside the presence of the jury, and if the witness indeed takes the fifth, then they won't testify in open court.
So when Fuhrman took the fifth, it wasn't during the trial proper, but during a hearing to determine whether he could be recalled. Now, if a witness intends to take the fifth, they can't answer any questions, period. If they take the fifth as to one question then start answering others, they are said to have waived the privilege. So the standard format is that the attorney will ask a few questions, the witness will assert the privilege, the attorney will then ask the witness if he intends to assert the privilege for all the questions, the witness says yes, and the questioning ends. When Gerald Uelman asked Fuhrman if he had planted evidence, Fuhrman couldn't have said no regardless of the situation.
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