Without a Doubt - [43]

“It’s a motion we see a lot,” I explained. “The defense claims the police got evidence illegally, and they’ve asked the judge to throw it out. We’re prepared for that and I don’t think there’s any chance that the judge will grant it.”

We talked a little more about the sorts of things that the defense was likely to do. No matter how hurtful it might seem, I told them, they shouldn’t take it personally.

Easy for me to say.

At 9:10 A.M. on June 30, 1994, Judge Kathleen Kennedy-Powell bade us good morning and looked over her courtroom. It was packed-the hottest ticket in Hollywood. Only ten seats were available to the general public, and the media folk had to scramble to secure one of the twenty-five seats set aside for them. But no one had to miss a thing: the best seat in the house was reserved for the cameras.

I’d never appeared before Judge Kennedy-Powell before, but I’d actually worked with her in the eighties when she was deputy D.A. I knew her as a hardworking, conscientious prosecutor who took her job very seriously. She looked at ease on the bench. But we couldn’t get down to business. Someone was missing.

“Well, I guess the defendant is not out yet,” Judge Kennedy-Powell observed.

“This is the quietest courtroom I’ve ever been in, Your Honor,” Shapiro quipped, trying to fill the dead time.

“I don’t know how long that will remain, but we’ll see,” Kennedy-Powell smiled.

At last, the door opened. The courtroom went silent. O. J. Simpson strode in, impeccably dressed, looking surprisingly fit. What an impressive transformation from the bedraggled, confused defendant who had appeared for his arraignment. His new role was the O.J. You Know and Love, Falsely Accused. And no Shakespearean actor would play this one better.

Judge Kennedy-Powell asked the record to reflect the defendant’s presence and asked counsel to present themselves.

“Marcia Clark for the People,” I began.

It’s hard to believe that my first act that day was arguing about the hairs on O. J. Simpson’s head. But it’s true.

we’d requested hair samples from Simpson, so we could determine whether his matched several found at the crime scene. Shapiro had offered us a ludicrously insufficient number: three. It was up to me to argue first.

Oblivious to the hype and cameras, I launched right into my reasoning. This was my job; I had been doing it for years. Carefully, I explained how we needed samples from various parts of the head; the usual quantity is a hundred hairs. But only the criminalist taking the samples could determine how many were needed.

“Mr. Shapiro?” asked Judge Kennedy-Powell.

“Your Honor,” he said soberly, “according to Dr. Henry Lee, our chief criminalist, who is the head of the Department of Criminology in Connecticut, he tells us one to three hairs are sufficient.”

Judge Kennedy-Powell mused aloud that she had never seen a case where the prosecution was limited to a sample of three hairs. But then she faltered. She would not let us take more than ten hairs unless we could present expert witnesses who could establish how many hairs were required for a valid sample.

I was ready. Our expert was Michele Kestler, director of the SID crime lab. She backed me up in saying that a case like this commonly required seventy-five to one hundred strands.

On cross-examination, Shapiro immediately assumed the glacial pace that would become his trademark. He insisted upon a detailed recitation of Kestler’s credentials, her résumé, her experience-everything but what she ate for breakfast. He had her recite all sorts of minutiae about her profession and the specific samples of blood and hair she had received from our searches. Shapiro again cited the source for his contention that only a single hair was required.

“Are you familiar with a gentleman by the name of Dr. Henry Lee?” he asked her.

She was.

“Have you seen his fifty-page curriculum vitae lately?” he asked. Give me a break. And then Shapiro asked Kestler what sources she had relied upon for her opinion that seventy-five to one hundred hairs were required.

Michele produced a book co-authored and edited by none other than Dr. Henry Lee.

Judge Kennedy-Powell gave us our hundred hairs.

I savored that small victory even as I realized what this skirmish meant: nothing in this case would be conceded without interminable bickering.

Bill, bless his heart, had agreed to put on the knife salesman, Jose Camacho. It was predictably painful. Bill walked Camacho through a straightforward account of selling the stiletto to Simpson the morning of May 9. Then Bill fronted the Enquirer business. The clerk seemed like a harmless little man. I don’t think he was a liar, just a sellout. How he would have looked in the eyes of a jury, I don’t know. That question was rendered academic by the advent of a mysterious manila envelope.

It seemingly materialized from thin air. One minute, in the middle of Camacho’s testimony, Judge Kennedy-Powell left the courtroom, and the next minute she was back, producing with a flourish a yellow manila envelope containing some sort of solid object. She’d received, she said, an envelope containing evidence collected by a special court master at the defense’s request. She intended to open it. Shapiro shot out of his seat with an objection. I chimed in with one of my own. You didn’t have to be Hercule Poirot to guess what was sealed inside: a knife. But I couldn’t be sure. And for months down the road I wouldn’t be sure. Periodically, we would file motions to compel the defense to reveal the contents. The defense would object and our motion would be tabled. This happened time and again.