Without a Doubt - [79]

The grumblers are usually people who should know better-former prosecutors like Vincent Bugliosi, who actually faulted us for moving the trial from Santa Monica. Gil Garcetti filed this case exactly where he should have filed it: downtown L.A.

Regardless of where a crime occurs, long-cause cases, as they’re called, virtually always end up downtown. In June of 1994, when the Bundy murders took place, this was not even discretionary; it was policy. Set by the Superior Court. Several years earlier, a panel of assignment judges put their heads together to try to figure out how to clear the backlog in the branch courts. One of the tougher measures the judges took to rectify this problem was to require that any case that stood to go on for longer than four weeks be filed Downtown, where the D.A. has deputies, clerks, and support services to handle it.

(People have asked me why the civil trial was tried in Santa Monica. The answer is simple: Civil litigants get to pick their forum. They don’t get directed to a particular venue at the command of the bench the way criminal cases do.)

Only by a fluke does a long-cause criminal case ever end up in one of the branch courts. The trial judge in the Rodney King case, for instance, was downtown but transferred to Simi Valley and dragged the case along with him. The results were disastrous. An all-white jury acquitted four white LAPD officers of beating King even though the crime was immortalized on videotape. Los Angeles erupted into a race riot.

Every time I hear about Bugliosi or some other clown mouthing off to the press, I have to grit my teeth and count to ten. You shoulda tried this case in Santa Monica. Do they realize what they’re saying?

To suggest that the D.A.‘s office should have ignored standard procedure and filed this case elsewhere for purely tactical advantage is, in my opinion, a shameless and inexcusable display of racism. It presupposes that only a white, upscale, West Side jury can deliver justice. Wrong. Dead wrong. I’ve seen Downtown juries made up of poor blacks and Hispanics do justice time and time again.

By the time the Simpson case landed on my desk, I’d been trying cases Downtown for more than ten years. I’d had defendants and juries of all races. I’d tried twenty homicides and won nineteen of them. I’d tried scores of lesser felonies. Won most, lost some. None of the verdicts seemed completely off the wall to me. Whenever I’d gotten to talk to jurors who’d delivered unfavorable verdicts, I found they’d had their reasons, usually good ones.

To Vincent Bugliosi and those who share his worldview, a good prosecutor is apparently a slick operator who works the angles. And the prescribed angle in this case would have been to steer clear of dark skins, particularly those belonging to middle-aged black women. Sounds ugly-because it is ugly. As well as impractical, unethical, and unconscionable.

One of the proponents of this embarrassing thesis seems to have been none other than our own jury consultant, Don Vinson. After the trial, he apparently met Bugliosi for lunch at-where else-the California Club. Like Cassandra spurned, Vinson wailed that he’d warned the D.A.‘s office of the dangers of picking middle-aged black women as jurors. When word of this got back to me, I just shook my head. I would like to take this opportunity to ask Don Vinson, “Exactly what would you have had me do?”

It must have been apparent even to someone as stubbornly ignorant of the law as Vinson that you cannot mount a campaign to target black women. It’s illegal, for God’s sake. And assuming for the moment that it was not illegal, excluding them would be an impossibility. Blacks accounted for over half of our eventual jury pool. A full three quarters of those blacks were women. Like it or not, black women were going to be a powerful presence on this jury.

I didn’t need Vinson to tell me that black women-or at least certain black woman-would be a tough sell. As I mentioned earlier, our grand jury adviser, Terry White, had let me know that a couple of middle-aged women among the grand jurors had seemed maternally inclined toward Simpson. Terry is a black man and had been one of the prosecutors on the Rodney King trial. He is infinitely better informed on issues of race and the law than Don Vinson. The fact is, Terry thought we could bring them around. We’d both seen many juries of black women who were more than willing to convict black men.

For my part, I was perfectly confident that if O. J. Simpson had been some black sanitation worker who had killed his white wife in a fit of rage, a jury of twelve middle-aged black women would have convicted the jerk in a heartbeat. The bedrock issue here was not race-but race coupled with celebrity. It was not so much that Simpson was a black man; he was a famous black man. And a well-loved famous black man. Black jurors of either sex were going to feel reluctant to knock an African-American icon off his pedestal. And in combination with race, celebrity complicated this case in ways that none of us had ever before had to consider.