AUGUST 21 - Judge Lance Ito temporarily rejected the defense's bid to introduce the taped interviews of police detective Mark Fuhrman as "incoherent" and chided their mistakes.
"Given the fact there are more than a dozen attorneys working for the defense, it is not too much to ask that there be some basic correlation between the quoted proffer, the purported transcript and the audio tapes," Judge Ito wrote in his ruling. "The proffer is incoherent and will not be considered in its current form."
The defense promised a corrected version would be filed by Tuesday morning and blamed errors in page citation on the difficulty of reconciling different transcriptions of the tapes.
In his ruling, Judge Ito listed several examples of attempts he made to cross- reference reported incidents of racial epithets and police misconduct on the tapes with quotes in the transcripts. He said he gave up after several hours of hard work and frustration over the weekend.
There were ten incidents of Fuhrman using racial epithets and discussing police misconduct from the defense's motion listed in Judge Ito's ruling. These include:
Prosecutor Marcia Clark said that none of the ten items were on the audio tapes. Apparently author Laura Hart McKinney, who conducted the interviews and made some transcriptions, recorded over some of the tapes.
Defense lawyer Johnnie Cochran Jr. called this a "non-issue," because 20 of the 30 times Fuhrman calls blacks "niggers" and many references to police misconduct are still on tape.
In the afternoon, Larry Ragle, the former director of the Orange County Sheriff Department's crime lab, pointed out weaknesses in the investigation of the Simpson case, calling it "below minimum standard."
Ragle criticized the Los Angeles Police Department for how they collected, handled and secured evidence. He said it was a mistake to cover Nicole Brown's body with a blanket from inside her home and then not to collect the blanket to examine it for evidence.
Critical evidence may have been lost because the coroner's office didn't show up at the crime scene for ten hours and the police erred by moving the bodies improperly, he said.
Prosecutor Hank Goldberg brought out in cross-examination that Ragle is not a detective and has never been a primary criminalist. Ragle admitted that he has not read many of the leading books on forensic criminology that would be on most criminalists' bookshelves.
While Ragle criticized the LAPD handling of evidence, Goldberg pointed out that Ragle himself had not worn gloves when he examined the inside of Simpson's Ford Bronco.
AUGUST 22 - Dr. Henry Lee, a crime reconstruction expert, said he discovered shoe imprints on a piece of paper and an envelope near the murder scene and found they could not have come from the designer Italian shoes the prosecution claims O.J. Simpson wore the night he killed his ex-wife and Ronald Goldman.
Reinforcing the defense's theory that the Los Angeles Police Department botched the investigation, Dr. Lee testified that he visited Nicole Brown Simpson's home 13 days after she was murdered and recovered the piece of paper and envelope that police neglected to find.
Defense lawyer Barry Scheck led Dr. Lee through testimony that suggested the possibility of a second attacker at the crime scene or that police traipsed through the crime scene.
Dr. Lee, the chief criminalist in Connecticut, manages a lab consisting of 36 forensic scientists who work in 14 different forensic areas. He has helped investigate the suicide of White House deputy counsel Vincent Foster and has worked on the William Kennedy Smith rape trial along with other famous cases, testifying for the prosecution 95% of the time.
While Dr. Lee examined the crime scene, photos and key evidence, he did not review any of the DNA tests.
In earlier testimony Tuesday, Christian Reichardt testified that Simpson seemed upset and depressed at times over his breakup with Nicole Brown Simpson in the weeks before her murder, but appeared relaxed and happy in a telephone call the night she was killed.
Reichardt, a chiropractor and former boyfriend of Faye Resnick, said Simpson and his ex-wife had a rocky, on-again-off-again relationship in the 18 months Reichardt knew them.
Reichardt testified that Simpson called him around 9pm on June 12, 1994, and they spoke for about 15 minutes.
Reichardt said Simpson was packing his bag for Chicago while they were on the phone, and they made plans to have dinner later that week after Simpson returned to Los Angeles.
The judge had barred Reichardt from testifying about what the defense originally wanted to elicit from him: that Resnick had a terrible drug problem and stayed for a time with Ms. Simpson before the murders. The defense has suggested drug hitmen committed the killings, possibly to send a message to Resnick for failing to pay her drug bills.
In the morning, Judge Lance Ito accused lawyers of pandering to the courtroom cameras and threatened "to pull the plug" on TV coverage.
He made the statements after hearing arguments between defense lawyer Robert Blasier and prosecutor Marcia Clark. The incident began when Blasier asked permission to recall Orange County criminalist Larry Ragle back to the stand to describe an incident with police detective Philip Vannatter Monday.
Blasier said that after Ragle finished testifying, Ragle approached Vannatter to shake hands. Blasier said Vannatter refused and called him a "traitor."
Blasier said Vannatter's statement is evidence of a "habit or custom" of police officers not testifying against each other.
Clark called the defense request "ridiculous" and "absurd," arguing that Vannatter is entitled to an opinion and can say whatever he pleases to a witness who is finished testifying.
After admonishing both lawyers, Judge Ito held that the testimony has "minimal" value and would unnecessarily lengthen the trial.
AUGUST 23 - The defense raised questions about a fundamental premise of the state's case -- that one killer was responsible for the deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.
Dr. Henry Lee testified that he saw "partial parallel line imprint patterns," in Goldman's blood-soaked jeans and in the soil. He quickly admitted that he could not say for sure that the patterns were footprints, but said they were consistent with imprints he identified Tuesday as shoe prints.
Although Lee could not positively identify the prints on Goldman's jeans as shoe prints, he said they were not consistent with the Bruno Magli shoe prints found at the murder scene -- prints the prosecution says belong to Simpson. In addition, Lee said the prints were not consistent with Goldman's tennis shoes.
Seemingly, the prints could only be shoe prints like the one Lee said he saw on the Bundy walkway. But, prosecutors are expected to attack Lee on the fact that he can't say for sure and to paint his observations as speculative.
Lee's testimony also buttressed defense claims that someone planted blood on the socks found in Simpson's bedroom. Lee testified that when he held the socks up to the light, he could see blood stains. Police officers previously testified that they did not initially see blood when they collected the socks.
Lee also said he agreed with blood spatter expert Herbert MacDonell's claim that on the inner surface of one side of the sock he saw evidence indicated that the blood soaked through from the outer surface of the opposite side. This suggests that the blood soaked through while no one was wearing the sock.
Defense attorney Barry Scheck also used Lee's testimony to cast some doubt on the time of the murders. The prosecution has held fast to a timeframe that the murders were committed between 10:15 pm and 10:20 pm. But Lee suggested evidence that will allow the defense to argue that a struggle between Goldman and his assailant would push the time of the murders closer to 11 pm, when Simpson has an alibi..
Lee pointed out a gash in the heel of Goldman's shoe and concluded that the position of the cut suggests the shoe was in the air -- perhaps in a kicking motion -- when it was slashed. He said Goldman's beeper and keys were found in two different locations, suggesting he was in one place and then another. And Lee noted there were multiple blood patterns -- smears, drips, squirts and spatters, on the fence near where Goldman's body was found. The defense will likely argue that Goldman tried to fend off his attacker for an extended period of time. The prosecution has argued the killings took just minutes.
AUGUST 24 - The court was in recess.
AUGUST 25 - Forensics expert Dr. Henry Lee testified there was "something wrong" in the handling of incriminating blood evidence collected at the crime scene.
Lee said he found transfer stains inside paper packaging holding what were supposed to be dry blood samples.
"Something, somebody . . . put the swatch in the (package to) cause such a transfer. Who did it? What happened? I don't know," said Lee, the defense's key forensics expert. "Only opinion I can give you under these circumstances: Something's wrong."
The defense is expected to argue that the evidence was tampered with, possibly in the Los Angeles Police Department's crime lab. Prosecutors have suggested the possibility that the freezing and unfreezing of swatches could have created the moisture leading to the transfers.
Lee's testimony focused on his observations to the bindle of swatches made from the Bundy walkway blood stain. The swatches had been placed into a test tube the night of June 13, 1994 while in the police department crime lab. The next morning they were removed and placed onto paper to make up a "bindle." Lee testified that he saw four blood transfer stains on the paper, leading him to be confused on two points. Lee believed that all swatches would have been dry, thereby leaving no stains. In the alternative, if they had been wet, there should have been seven stains.
In completing his fourth day on the witness stand, Lee was guided through questions that pressed defense theories.
In one instance, the 57-year-old director of the Connecticut State Forensics Science Laboratory testified that bloodstains on the console of Simpson's Ford Bronco were consistent with a smearing motion. Defense attorneys have suggested that those stains were planted.
Lee also found smearing on the inside and outside of a bag that contained Ronald Goldman's shoes. Defense attorney Barry Scheck suggested it indicated the type of sloppy handling that could cause cross-contamination and unreliable blood analysis.
Lee also testified that he found three additional bloodstains on the foyer of Simpson's Rockingham home. He agreed that the size and pattern of the stains are consistent with blood cast off from a superficial cut on the inside of a finger.
