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As I mentioned the other week, my girlfriend and I recently watched the miniseries American Crime Story: The People vs. OJ Simpson. On Friday night we sat down to watch episode 7, and found it so absorbing that we wound up staying up til 4 a.m. to finish it.
I was particularly intrigued by how the series presents one of Simpson's defense attorneys, the (in)famous Johnnie Cochran. The portrayal is nuanced: the series doesn't shy away from acknowledging his philandering and accusations of domestic abuse, nor depicting the various underhanded techniques he employed in trying to secure an acquittal for Simpson (redecorating Simpson's house to mislead the jury into thinking Simpson is a pillar of the black community; during cross-examination, speculating on the basis of nothing at all that Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman may have been murdered by cartel members); but also depicts him as a tireless advocate for black civil rights, who takes on OJ's case specifically to call attention to police racism and misconduct within the LAPD and within American society more broadly. It doesn't hurt that Courtney B. Vance gives probably the best performance in the show, effortlessly capturing Cochran's black-preacher charm and flair for the theatrical.
All the same, I couldn't help but think this portrayal was sort of - white-washed? From what I've read of the real Cochran, he strikes me as every negative stereotype about cynical, dishonest lawyers rolled into one, who took on OJ's case first and foremost to enrich himself (both directly in his fees from OJ, and indirectly in the trial's publicity making him into a household name) and secondly owing to what we now euphemistically call "in-group preference" i.e. racism. I don't think (as the show seems to imply) that the real Johnnie Cochran thinks that black men who have actually commited heinous crimes ought to be punished, but that the American justice system is so riddled with racism and white supremacy that it is impossible for us to have any real confidence that the evidence mounted in their prosecution was not compromised, planted or coerced. That, at least, is a defensible position, and arguably more defensible in 1995 than today. But I don't think that's what the real Johnnie Cochran thinks, or thought at the time: I think he thinks that OJ is black, therefore he should not be sent to prison (certainly not for murdering two white people; maybe he'd think otherwise if OJ had murdered someone close to Cochran) and any methods are justified in trying to accomplish that goal, no matter how dishonest or underhanded. I think the show was essentially sanewashing the real Cochran .
Am I being unfair to Cochran? People who know more about the real man than I do, do you think that's a reasonably accurate characterisation of his worldview?
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.
Including members of the jury themselves: "In the documentary O.J.: Made in America, juror Carrie Bess said she believed '90% of the jury actually decided to acquit Simpson as payback for Rodney King'." One of the jurors gave OJ a black power salute after the verdict had been rendered.
They found Nicole and Ron's blood on one of OJ's socks in his bedroom.
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.
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