The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson - [4]
“Well, again,” Cochran told Gumbel, “I think there are lawyers and there are lawyers. He is a fine lawyer, but if the matter is to be tried, I think one needs one who is very well experienced and skilled in trying cases-a litigator, if you will. And I would not be surprised if you didn’t see a lawyer-another lawyer, trial lawyer-come in and do that.” Cochran, of course, did not let on that he was in fact at that very moment weighing whether to step in and take that trial lawyer role.
After the preliminary hearing ended on July 8 and Simpson was ordered to stand trial in sixty days, Cochran knew he had to make up his mind. He had a large circle of friends, and often liked to talk himself into (or out of) ideas by bouncing them off others. Cochran worked the phones.
One afternoon in mid-July, the phone rang in the office of a lawyer who also knew the stresses of high-profile cases. “You should do it,” Cochran teased the lawyer, but he was really turning his own possible role over in his mind. The upside wasn’t difficult to recognize. Any trial lawyer would relish the chance to perform in front of the biggest audience in American legal history. The downside, as Cochran explained it, was more complex. Simpson was a peer. “He’s a friend,” Cochran said, “and that’s a mess when you start trying to represent a friend.” Cochran wondered whether their relationship might hinder his ability to conduct the case the way he wanted. The last problem was in many ways the simplest, but also the most profound. Cochran’s relationship with this friend was such that he could speak in a shorthand they would both understand. He hesitated for a while before he came out and said what was on his mind. If Johnnie Cochran’s career had established anything at that point, it was that he liked to win. But he had talked to his prospective client and sized up the evidence against him. Ultimately, Cochran’s problem with the Simpson case was a simple one.
“The case,” said Cochran, “is a loser.”
Of course they knew.
Of course Robert Shapiro and Johnnie Cochran knew from the start what any reasonably attentive student of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman could see: that O.J. Simpson was guilty of killing them. Their dilemma, then, was the oldest, as well as the most common, quandary of the criminal defense attorney: what to do about a guilty client.
The answer, they decided, was race. Because of the overwhelming evidence of Simpson’s guilt, his lawyers could not undertake a defense aimed at proving his innocence-one that sought to establish, say, that some other person had committed the murders. Instead, in an astonishing act of legal bravado, they sought to create for the client-a man they believed to be a killer-the mantle of victimhood. Almost from the day of Simpson’s arrest, his lawyers sought to invent a separate narrative, an alternative reality, for the events of June 12, 1994. This fictional version was both elegant and dramatic. It posited that Simpson was the victim of a wide-ranging conspiracy of racist law enforcement officials who had fabricated and planted evidence in order to frame him for a crime he did not commit. It was also, of course, an obscene parody of an authentic civil rights struggle, for this one pitted a guilty “victim” against innocent “perpetrators.”
These conclusions are the result of more than two years of reporting on the Simpson case. The week after the murders, I was assigned to cover the story for The New Yorker magazine. In addition to attending Simpson’s trial in Los Angeles Superior Court, I interviewed more than two hundred people, many of them repeatedly. I have had access to the full documentary record of the case-including internal memoranda of both the prosecution and the defense teams; advice provided by jury consultants to both the prosecution and the defense; the police “murder book,” with its summaries of all LAPD interviews with witnesses; the written summaries of all witness interviews by members of the defense team; heretofore secret grand-jury testimony; and depositions from the pending civil case against Simpson. I have also reviewed the enormous coverage of the case in the news media, an especially important task in the context of this case. The participants in the Simpson case worked obsessively to influence press coverage. These efforts to shape the news-some successful, some not-had important and lasting consequences from the night of the murders to the morning of the verdict.
