Jeffrey Toobin - The Run of His Life - The People v. O. J. Simpson

Her fellow jurors responded to these comments with total silence.

Armanda Cooley decided to distribute the exhibit binders. Jurors began leafing through them and offering comments about the evidence. It wasn’t so much a conversation as a series of random observations.

Why wasn’t there more blood around the glove Fuhrman said he found at Rockingham?

Goldman had bruises on his knuckles. If they were from fighting back, why didn’t O.J. have any bruises on his body? (The prosecution had argued that Goldman had injured his hand flailing against the fence behind him.) The jurors knew that Dave Aldana, the Hispanic man in seat four, was a martial arts expert. He got up and demonstrated how to defend in tae kwon do. He thought Goldman had put up a good fight.

If the glove came off Simpson’s hand during the fight, why wasn’t it inside out?

Aschenbach volunteered that she was one of the two votes for conviction. (The other never came forward.) Hearing this, Sheila Woods flashed an angry look at her. Woods was the last surviving member of the Jeanette Harris clique. Since Harris had been thrown off the jury, Woods had had little contact with her fellow jurors. “Why did they go after him as a suspect from the beginning?” Woods said to Aschenbach. “They insulted us with their testimony. They went after that man.”

Someone mentioned the glove demonstration. Brenda Moran, Gina Rosborough, and Lon Cryer all said they thought it didn’t fit on Simpson’s hand.

There was only one reference to DNA tests. Both Dave Aldana and Sheila Woods said they didn’t think it was reliable when all of the DNA came from the back gate at Bundy. This was important to them. (It was, of course, completely wrong, too. While the molecular weight of the DNA on the back gate was higher than that of the other samples, several other tests of blood at the murder scene tied it to Simpson.)

After about an hour of discussion, the topic turned to the testimony of Allan Park, the limousine driver. Carrie Bess said Park didn’t know how many cars had been in Simpson’s driveway. A couple of other jurors disagreed about whether Park had seen a black man at the doorway to the house or walking across the driveway. Others were confused by the time that Park said various events occurred. The group decided by consensus that they would like another look at Park’s testimony.

Shortly before noon, Cooley sent out a note requesting Park’s testimony. She thought the judge would simply send back a transcript the jury could examine, but the judge relayed word that he would have the testimony read in the courtroom starting at 1:00 P.M. The jurors then broke for lunch.

As a former prosecutor, I have always hated read-backs. Even when I was trying my own cases, I used to have trouble staying awake when court reporters did their monotone recitals. This day was no different. I took my usual seat and tried to focus on the words as they were spoken. As he had from the beginning, Park struck me as the most powerful government witness in the case. It was absolutely clear that the Bronco was not parked on Rockingham when he arrived to pick up Simpson. Its absence, in my view, doomed O.J. Even worse, from Simpson’s perspective, was that Park was fairly certain that the Bronco had returned by the time they left for the airport-an even more incriminating fact.

Still, when Ito called a break after seventy-five minutes of the read-back to give the court reporter’s voice a rest, I knew I had to escape. I was sure there were going to be lots of read-backs to come, and I didn’t want to embarrass myself by falling asleep in court.

I wandered up to the eighteenth floor and paid a visit to Scott Gordon, the good-natured former Santa Monica cop who was the leading domestic-violence expert in the D.A.’s office. We had been chatting for about ten minutes when his phone rang. I heard only his side of the conversation: “You’re shitting me… Don’t shit me like this… I know you’re shitting me… Really?… Really? ” Finally, he hung up.

“Looks like we have a verdict,” he told me.

Back in the jury room, Cooley had taken advantage of the break to ask if all the questions about Park’s testimony had been answered. By consensus, the answer was yes. Suddenly, it seemed, no one had anything more to say. In lieu of returning to the courtroom for the remainder of Park’s testimony, Cooley sent a request to Ito for the verdict forms. Before they arrived Cooley conducted another secret ballot, and this time the vote was unanimous. Just to make sure, Cooley asked each juror to repeat their verdict, and they all said, “Not guilty.” Cooley filled out the forms and pushed the buzzer to the courtroom three times-the signal for a verdict.

It was shortly before 3:00 P.M. The jurors had discussed the merits of the case against O.J. Simpson for about two hours-less time than most other adults in America.

Cochran was giving a speech in San Francisco. Bailey was appearing at a snack food distributors’ convention in Laguna Beach. Clark was in her office. Though Simpson had eleven lawyers representing him in this case, only Carl Douglas was by his side when Armanda Cooley presented the envelope containing the completed verdict forms to Judge Ito.

“We will accept the verdict from you tomorrow morning at ten,” Ito said. “See you tomorrow morning at ten o’clock.”

No one-on either side or in the news media-had predicted so swift a verdict. The entire building seemed afflicted with vertigo. After all these months and all the debates over evidence, strategy, rulings, and rumors, only one question remained: What had the jurors done?

I had spent most of the trial believing that it would end in an acquittal or a hung jury. Then the Park testimony threw me. If that’s all they needed to hear, I thought, they had voted to convict.

The jurors returned to the Inter-Continental for their 266th, and final, night in residence. The hotel threw the jurors a champagne reception in the presidential suite on the nineteenth floor, then turned their last supper into a steak barbecue. Everyone had a few drinks, which loosened tongues. Reyko Butler, one of the two alternates, couldn’t resist asking one of the deliberating jurors how it had all come out. The juror couldn’t resist answering: “N,” the juror said. Not guilty.

This curiosity extended to the sheriff’s deputies as well, who had the same question and received the same answer.

Back at the county jail, Simpson’s lawyers gathered in a final vigil with him. Cochran arrived too late to make it to the jail, but Bailey, Kardashian, and Skip Taft sat on the other side of the glass wall for a last chat. As it turned out, Simpson was in good spirits. “All the deputies here are asking for my autograph,” Simpson told his lawyers. “They hear from their boys over with the jury that it’s going to be the last chance for them to get one.”

It was the last leak in the case-from the sheriff’s deputies guarding the jury to their colleagues guarding Simpson: O.J. was going to walk.

The scene at the courthouse on the morning of Tuesday, October 3, resembled some sinister carnival. Over the course of the trial, the LAPD had made the Criminal Courts Building ever more isolated. First, they banned all parked cars from the adjacent streets to prevent a car bombing. Then they kept all cars off the main artery of Temple Street, right in front of the building. On this last day, the police shut off all traffic in the immediate vicinity of the courthouse. Crowds of people milled about in the empty streets. Except for the trial, all business in downtown Los Angeles seemed to come to a halt.