JANUARY 30 - Judge Lance Ito reprimanded the defense for mentioning previously undisclosed potential witnesses during its opening statements. The judge said the defense had intentionally withheld from the prosecution the names of 14 new witnesses it mentioned in its statement. He said he would instruct the jury to ignore comments made about six of the witnesses. He denied a prosecution request for a 30-day delay in the trial but ruled the state could re-open its opening statement.
Following the ruling, defense attorney Johnnie Cochran resumed his opening statement. Cochran told jurors that the evidence collected in the case was "contaminated, compromised and ultimately corrupted."
He also told jurors that Simpson was practicing his golf swing in his front yard around the time that prosecutors said the murders took place.
During his opening statement, Cochran repeated the theme that Simpson was the victim of a frame-up in the "'rush to judgment" of his guilt.
For instance, he detailed a time line he said made it impossible for Simpson to have been the killer. He said evidence would show Simpson was practicing golf -- specifically, "chipping" -- in his front yard at 10:10 p.m., five minutes before the prosecution has argued the victims were killed.
He also countered the trail of blood that prosecutors said implicates Simpson. He argued that police carried a vial of Simpson's blood around with them for several hours rather than immediately bringing it to a police lab. As a result, he said, some of the blood sample was missing. He strongly suggested it had been used to contaminate a pair of socks found at the foot of Simpson's bed.
JANUARY 31 - The prosecution called its first witnesses after taking advantage of a rare opportunity to re-open its opening statement.
Deputy District Attorney Marcia Clark told the jury that Mary Anne Gerghas, a key defense witness, is "a known liar and a Simpson-case groupie." During its opening statements, the defense said Gerghas saw four men running from the area of the murders. Clark said Gerghas was "obsessed" with the murders and made up her story.
The first witness in the case was Sharyn Gilbert, an emergency 911 dispatcher for the Los Angeles Police Department. Gilbert testified that she was on duty the night of Jan. 1, 1989, when Nicole Brown Simpson called police pleading for protection from Simpson.
Under cross-examination by defense attorney Johnnie Cochran, Gilbert acknowledged that she never spoke to anyone at the Brentwood estate but drew her conclusions from listening in for three to four minutes on an open line after receiving the call.
The second witness was police detective John Edwards who responded to the 911 call. He testified that a severely beaten Nicole Brown Simpson ran from the bushes screaming, "He's going to kill me, he's going to kill me," referring to O.J. Simpson.
FEBRUARY 1 - A self-described friend of O.J. Simpson testified that the football legend discussed dreaming about killing his former wife a day after she was slain. During often emotional testimony, Ronald Shipp testified that he was driven by guilt to reveal Simpson's statement.
"That's not why I'm doing this Mr. Douglas. I'm doing this for my conscience... I will not have the blood of Nicole on Ron Shipp. I can sleep at night, unlike a lot of others," he said, during a heated exchange with defense attorney Carl Douglas. Shipp said he felt personal guilt over Nicole Simpson's death, "because perhaps I didn't do as much as I could have."
In addition to being a friend of both the Simpsons, Shipp said he counseled them after a Jan. 1, 1989, incident in which Simpson pleaded no contest to a charge of beating his wife.
Shipp, a Los Angeles police officer from 1978-1989, first made reference to the dreams in a book, "Raging Heart" by author Sheila Weller, which was released last week. Shipp says in the book that during a conversation at Simpson's home the night after the murders, Simpson told him: "I was interviewed by detectives and they asked me to take a lie detector test."
Shipp then asked Simpson, "Well, what did you say?"
According to the book, Simpson chuckled and replied, "Hey, to be truthful Ron, man, I've had a lot of dreams about killing her. I really don't know about taking that thing." Shipp testified the statement was an accurate reflection of the conversation. Shipp admitted that he initially lied to police and prosecutors by failing to tell them about the statement and instead told Weller about it because she promised him anonymity.
During a fierce cross-examination, Shipp acknowledged that he withheld the information from police, that he had a drinking problem at one time and was not really a close friend of Simpson's. But he denied trying to boost his acting career by turning himself into a so-called star witness in the case.
FEBRUARY 2 - In a wide-ranging cross-examination , defense attorney Carl Douglas tried to make Ronald Shipp look like a liar with an alcohol problem. Shipp, who testified that O.J. Simpson told him he dreamed about killing his former wife, admitted he had a drinking problem and had been disciplined as a police officer for alcohol abuse.
Shipp said his drinking problem got out of hand in 1983 and led to a 15-day suspension from the police department after he didn't show up for work. Shipp said he left the department in 1989 because of the stress of the job. He said he was not drinking on the night that Simpson allegedly told him about the dreams.
Jurors also listened to a 1993 recording of Nicole Brown Simpson pleading for help from an emergency operator while in the background Simpson yelled and cursed at her.
Deputy District Attorney Christopher Darden told jurors that Nicole Simpson feared for her life and left a trail for investigators in a bank safe deposit box. The jury was shown several items found locked away at a Los Angeles bank including her will, three letters from Simpson, Polaroid pictures of her bruised and battered face and newspaper clippings about the Jan. 1, 1989 incident.
FEBRUARY 3 - Denise Brown took the witness stand and tearfully told jurors how O.J. Simpson publicly humiliated and physically brutalized his wife.
In the most compelling testimony to date, Brown told of how a drunken Simpson once grabbed Nicole Brown Simpson's crotch in a crowded bar, bragging "his belongs to me," and how on another occasion he smashed her against a wall and literally tossed her out of his house.
Meanwhile, a new witness told prosecutors that he saw four men near Nicole Brown Simpson's home on the night of the murders. Defense attorney Johnnie Cochran complained to Judge Lance Ito that the state had failed to turn over their interview with Leif Tilden. Tilden saw four men near Bundy Drive between 10 pm and 10:30 pm on June 12, according to Cochran. Deputy District Attorney Christopher Darden said authorities had just interviewed Tilden and that the report would be turned over to the defense.
