Without a Doubt - [60]

In a private dining room within that very private club, we found Vinson, a heavy, florid man with huge jowls. Thin wisps of white hair had been combed into submission across his pate.

“Ms. Clark,” he greeted me, in a drawl that suggested an haut bourgeois pedigree. When he rose to shake my hand, I caught the flash of gold cuff links. Bill noticed them, too. They became our private joke. After that, any time we ran into something pretentious, we’d refer to it as “very cuff link.”

Vinson was full of grand plans. He urged us to let him try out our case in front of a mock jury. It would work this way: He’d recruit a demographically diverse group of people to serve as jurors. He’d make a videotape of me giving a final argument for the prosecution, and Bill giving one for the defense. The jurors would deliberate and vote to convict or acquit. We would be allowed to watch them through a one-way mirror.

Bill frowned. I knew that he, like me, favored doing things simply, without all the flash. But I just sipped my Chardonnay and tried to sort out my thoughts before speaking. It was absolutely imperative that the results be kept confidential. Bill and I would have to lay our evidence on the line. We certainly didn’t want that leaked to the press.

“Oh, don’t worry,” Vinson told us confidently. “We’ve never had a problem before.”

So, against my better judgment, and in deference to my boss, I gave my okay to this plan.

This would require some work. After all, pulling together a closing argument was not easy to do. At that point we did not have the DNA evidence back, so I would have to cobble something together from the prelims. It took time we didn’t have, but Bill and I completed our respective arguments, and taped our presentations one evening down in the conference room. Then we sent them off to Vinson.

Several days later, Vinson called me to say that he could not use my tape. It was important that the mock jurors not know which side, prosecution or defense, was sponsoring the testing. I had become “too famous,” he said. If he showed my tape, we’d give ourselves away. He now wanted to redo my argument, with one of his male associates presenting it.

On Saturday, July 23, 1994, Gil, Bill, and I met Vinson at an office building near the airport. The consultant ushered the three of us into a darkened room, where we got the first peek at our “jurors” through a one-way glass. There were ten. Four black, two Hispanic, two Asian, two white. They’d been warned to base their decision solely on the evidence, but they quickly tossed that admonishment to the wind and began kicking around the question of whether Mark Fuhrman could have planted the glove. The battle lines were drawn. Blacks were convinced he had; the others professed neutrality or disbelief. Then they moved on to the juicier, yet totally tangential issue of whether Kato and Nicole had been lovers.

“They were supposed to be talking about our videos, not gossip from the six o’clock news,” I complained to Vinson.

He stepped into the room to remind the group to confine its comments to the evidence.

“Well, yeah,” they argued. “But everyone knows about all this stuff anyway.”

Reluctantly, they agreed to try again. Within two minutes they were off and gossiping on another subject not mentioned on the tape-the Bronco chase. Black jurors believed Simpson had only wanted to visit Nicole’s grave. When one of the more neutral jurors suggested that it might-just might-have been the escape attempt of a guilty man, one of the female blacks shot back with a defense of Simpson, referring to him as “my man O.J.”

“My man?” I thought to myself. The only way he’d be your man is if you were white, twenty-five, and built like a centerfold.

The racial divide did not come as any great shock to us. As early as the second week of the investigation our grand jury adviser, Terry White, had come to us warning that a couple of black female jurors seemed protective of Simpson. They’d gone so far as to say that Nicole “got what she’d deserved.” What was disturbing to me was how the popular media had permeated the thinking of the mock jury. Not a soul among them seemed capable of critical thinking. If it was on TV, it must be true. Of course, many of the reports they’d seen were based upon nothing more substantial than a loose comment dropped in the hallway outside of court, but they had entered the canon as God’s own truth.

The jury hung, five to five.

Naturally, we were deflated. For my part, I was content to take what lessons we could from the session-specifically, the reaffirmation that black females would be a hard sell-and cut our losses. Not so, Don Vinson. He insisted we try again. This time, he wanted to go with a full-blown facsimile of a trial. We’d present more of the scientific evidence and maybe get an idea of how to simplify it. It was likely, he said, that a more detailed presentation would elicit more specific opinions than the knee-jerk loyalties we’d gotten in the first go-round.

I was uneasy about this. It was August now, nearly two months since the murders. If this case had had the normal life cycle of a major criminal trial, the media frenzy would have been slackening. But the madness was actually intensifying. It was a miracle that the results of the first mock jury had not gotten out. How would we keep the details of an even more elaborate dress rehearsal from leaking to the press?