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SUPERIOR COURT OF THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA
FOR THE COUNTY OF LOS ANGELES
DEPARTMENT NO. WEQ HON. HIROSHI FUJISAKI, JUDGE
SHARON RUFO, ET AL., )
)
PLAINTIFFS, )
)
VS. )NO. SC031947
)
ORENTHAL JAMES SIMPSON, ET AL., )
)
DEFENDANTS. )
_________________________________________)
REPORTER'S DAILY TRANSCRIPT
JANUARY 23, 1997
VOLUME 48
REGINA D. CHAVEZ, CSR #8446
OFFICIAL REPORTER
APPEARANCES:
FOR THE PLAINTIFFS: DANIEL M. PETROCELLI ESQ.,
THOMAS LAMBERT, ESQ.,
PETER GELBLUM, ESQ., and
EDWARD MEDVENE, ESQ.
Firm: MITCHELL SILBERBERG & KNUPP
11377 West Olympic Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90064-1663
For: Plaintiff Goldman
JOHN QUINLAN KELLY, ESQ.
330 Madison Ave.
New York, NY 10017-5090.
For: Plaintiff the Estate of
Nicole Brown Simpson
MICHAEL A. BREWER, ESQ.
Firm: HORNBERGER & CRISWELL
444 South Flower St.
Los Angeles, CA 90071.
For: Plaintiff Rufo
PAUL F. CALLAN, ESQ.
Firm: CALLAN, REGENSTREICH,
KOSTER & BRADY
One Whitehall St.
New York, NY 10004
For: Plaintiff Estate of
Ronald L. Goldman
FOR THE DEFENDANTS: ROBERT C. BAKER, ESQ.,
MELISSA BLUESTEIN, ESQ., and
PHILIP BAKER, ESQ.
Firm: BAKER, SILBERBERG & KEENER
2650 Ocean Park Blvd., #300
Santa Monica, CA 90405-2936.
-and-
DANIEL LEONARD, ESQ. and
ROBERT D. BLASIER, ESQ.
Firm: BAILEY, FISHMAN & LEONARD.
6355 Riverside Blvd.
Suite 2-F
Sacramento, CA 95831
SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA; WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 23, 1997
8:04 AM
DEPARTMENT NO. WEQ HON. HIROSHI FUJISAKI, JUDGE
APPEARANCES:
(REGINA D. CHAVEZ, OFFICIAL REPORTER)
(The following proceedings were
held in open court outside the
presence of the jury.)
THE COURT: Okay. I understand, Mr. Baker, you
informed my clerk that you have a change of plans.
MR. BAKER: Well, Your Honor, I wanted to make
the Court aware that we probably will go all day
today. I know we sat down and tried to consolidate
this, but as this Court is aware, the plaintiffs went
a day and a half, and that would be a day and a half
for us.
I apologize for not being able to do it
quicker, but after 4 months, I think, in my client's
defense, the time that we need to put that level of
time in.
Believe me, sir, we are not trying to
filibuster, we're just trying to get through the
points.
As you know, a lot of evidence, an awful
lot of witnesses, and serious allegations, and so we
would request the Court's indulgence in that regard.
THE COURT: Well, based upon our discussion
yesterday evening that you would go half a day today,
and plaintiff would conclude in the afternoon, and we
would instruct this evening, the plans for tomorrow's
conferences were not changed by me. So that being the
case, we will allow you to argue all day, and then
we'll resume Monday and we'll be adjourned tomorrow.
Bring in the jury.
MR. BAKER: Your Honor, I --
THE COURT: That was our understanding.
MR. BAKER: Well, I know -- I told you I'd do
the best I could. I didn't say I could confirm that I
could do it. You know, I don't think it's fair --
THE COURT: I'm satisfied that you informed me
that you would, and so I did nothing, and I don't
think it's appropriate under those circumstances to
put the Court in that position.
MR. BAKER: Well, on the flip side of that
coin, Your Honor, plaintiffs get up for a day and a
half, and I have to get up and do my final, and my
rebuttal concurrently after a 20-minute break.
Now, what you're saying is that they can
have three days to do their rebuttal and to plan their
rebuttal. I don't think that's fair to my client.
What you said at the sidebar is that it
wasn't obligatory. You didn't say you would cancel
it. You didn't say it was obligatory.
THE COURT: Mr. Baker, when Mr. Petrocelli
started his argument, he wanted to stop at 4 o'clock.
At your insistence I made him go to 4:30, disrupting
his argument and his time line.
I think that you're not in the position
to be too complaining under those circumstances.
Okay. Bring the jury.
THE BAILIFF: Jury walking.
(The following proceedings were
held in open court in the presence
of the jury.)
(Jurors resume their respective
seats.)
THE COURT: Morning, ladies and gentlemen.
JURORS: Morning, Your Honor.
THE COURT: Yesterday I told you that we were
going to hear all of the argument today, and I would
instruct you later, possibly in the evening, and give
you the case.
I also informed the attorneys that this
Court was going to be dark tomorrow.
THE COURT: Well, the Court made that
representation to you about finishing up the case and
giving the case over to you today, this evening, based
upon what the attorneys had informed me about their
plans to complete the case today.
I'm now informed that there have been a
change in plans and the case is not going to complete.
So based upon their representations yesterday the
Court made no changes in the Court's plan for
tomorrow.
So originally, the plan was to instruct
you on the case and then have you deliberating
tomorrow, but in as much as they're not going to
finish today, and the Court did not change the plans
for tomorrow's conference, we're going to just go to
the end of today hearing what portion of the argument
that the attorneys complete, and then instead of
resuming tomorrow, we will resume Monday and hear the
rest of the argument Monday, and instruct you on the
law, and give you the case over on Monday, instead of
tomorrow.
So tomorrow we will be dark. All right.
I'm sorry if you are inconvenienced by
this. I hope you aren't.
Okay. Thank you.
Mr. Baker, you may resume.
MR. BAKER: Mr. Blasier will start this
morning, with the Court's permission.
CLOSING ARGUMENT
MR. BLASIER: Good morning, folks.
JURORS: Good morning.
MR. BLASIER: The last thing Mr. Baker intended
to say before his voice left him and now you're going
to hear from Mr. Blasier about some of the physical
evidence.
I first want to just make a couple of
personal comments.
Let me be, hopefully, one of the last
lawyers to thank you for your attention. It's been a
long trial. It's been a lot of detailed testimony,
and very difficult testimony to absorb. But we've all
noticed how many notes you've been taking, and that's
always a good sign that you're paying attention.
Just so you kind of know where I'm coming
from here, I, back in May of last year, had back
surgery after the criminal trial ended, and had to
have another surgery at Christmas time. That's why
I'm in this chair.
I can walk. This is not a gimmick or
anything. But I'm just recovering from some fairly
serious surgery, so I'm going to be sitting down
during most of the time.
I've been a trial lawyer for 27 years.
I'm kind of used to my cohorts here rambling around
and engaged warriors and trapped in exhibits and doing
all that sort of thing. I possibly won't be doing a
whole lot of that. My colleagues are going to be
helping me in the back here.
I had lots of screws and plates put in my
back. I've been told that the good news is I have
$20.30 more scrap value than I did before Christmas,
so. . .
(Laughter)
I also -- as you know, I missed a couple
of weeks of testimony after Christmas, and I've
reviewed that testimony to the best of my ability, and
I will not intentionally misstate anything.
As you know, we have Gina, who's been
here during the entire trial, and she's the one --
she's the rule-keeper. She's the one who will tell
you what the witnesses really said.
If you have any question about anything
that I say or any of the other attorneys say about a
piece of evidence, and you're not sure what the
witness said, you ask the Court Reporter, it's all
down there on paper, and on computer, actually, much
easier to find it on computer.
Let me tell you what I view your role to
be in this case. You are -- and the Judge will tell
you all this when he instructs you. You're the judges
of the facts; the sole judges of the facts.
And there are certain burdens, and I'm
going to talk about some of the instructions, briefly,
that apply to you. They all apply to you, of course.
But there are some that I think are a little more
significant than others.
The plaintiffs have the burden of proof
in this case. What that really means from your
standpoint, I submit to you, is that you're supposed
to be like 12 people from Missouri; and by that I mean
you're supposed to be sitting there with your arms
crossed, figuratively, saying, show me, show me,
before they're entitled to your verdict. You have to
be convinced to the burden of proof that the Judge
will tell you.
I am also not going to -- well, let me
not get ahead of myself here.
Now, you have heard a lot of witnesses.
You already have a sense of the credibility of some of
these witnesses, particularly the law enforcement
witnesses. And I'm not going to sit up here all day
and talk about every piece of evidence that came in
and talk about every witness. You've heard all of
that.
So I'm not going to sit here and repeat
that. Hopefully, I'll be relatively short.
Comparatively. That's lawyer time now, so I apologize
in advance if I don't keep with that.
Now, I want to do a brief -- make a
couple comments about Mr. Petrocelli's argument.
We've all been doing this for a long
time. There are things that come out in argument that
may not be accurate; techniques that are used that may
mislead, or may appeal to passion, or whatever, and I
want -- and I just want to talk about some of those
things.
I'm not suggesting anything volitional on
Mr. Petrocelli's part at all.
This is a very intense case, as you know,
and, you know, we're in the heat of battle, and this
is what we do, so -- but I think there are some
important things because this is -- you have a very
difficult job because you have to work your way
through all of this. There's a lot of stuff you've
heard that is not something that you're supposed to
consider. All of the appeals to a motion, that's
not -- you're not to consider that.
MR. PETROCELLI: This is cumulative, Your
Honor. I object. We heard this yesterday.
THE COURT: I'll give certain latitude.
You may proceed.
MR. BLASIER: Thank you.
We have an adversarial system; that's us
against them. And I want to show you first, and I'm
going to try when I talk to you, to -- to refer to
transcript, page and line, because I think that's only
fair, because that's what the evidence is, not what --
what I or someone says is a conclusory statement.
The first quote I would put up from
Mr. Petrocelli's argument is he argued the impossible
one.
(Displayed on Elmo.)
MR. BLASIER: Mr. Petrocelli yesterday or --
I'm sorry, day before yesterday, I think it was, made
a comment at page 49, line 20:
(Mr. Blasier read a portion of
Mr. Petrocelli's closing argument
from the civil trial transcript.)
Well, they never proved that the
blankets had any head hairs of Mr. Simpson,
or any fibers, or anything regarding
Mr. Simpson.
MR. BLASIER: Well, what we know is -- if you
go to the bottom of that slide, Phil -- is the blanket
was left by the police on the ground to be picked up.
I think you saw pictures of the crime
scene with the tape down and the blanket just lying
there, so it's -- obviously, we don't have that
blanket. We don't have the ability to prove something
like that, even if that were a requirement of proof,
we don't. So there are a lot of times when the
attorney might say, they didn't prove this, they
didn't prove that, or it's completely impossible
matters of proof to begin with.
The next slide I put up is argument not
supported by evidence. Again, the heat of battle
statements are made that -- that may not really
reflect the evidence.
And Mr. Petrocelli stated, in his closing
argument, on page 37:
(Mr. Blasier read a portion of Mr.
Petrocelli's closing argument from
the civil trial transcript.)
These blood drops (indicating),
of course, are on the left side of the shoe
prints. They're on the left side of the
shoe prints indicating that the person who
dropped this blood was injured on his left
side, such as a left finger or left hand.
MR. BLASIER: Now, this is the myth of this
case that got started way back at the very beginning
of the criminal case, that all of these drops are to
the left of the shoe prints.
They aren't.
Phil, you want to put the bottom of the
slide up.
And we'll look at some of the boards.
(Document displayed.)
MR. BLASIER: That simply is not a true fact.
One or two of them could be.
But there aren't -- this is not a trail
of blood that is right to the left of the shoe prints,
even though if you read virtually every book about
this case, that seems to be the myth.
So it's your job to work through all of
that and look at the actual evidence, and you make up
your mind; are these blood drops to the left of shoe
prints or aren't they.
Look at the diagrams and you make up your
own mind.
Mr. Petrocelli also made some statements
during his closing that simply were inaccurate. He
made conclusions or told you what some of the evidence
was that simply was not accurate.
Now, Phil, you want to put the cable
misstatements up there.
(Document displayed on Elmo.)
MR. BLASIER: He said on page 81 of the
transcript, line 6, and this is one of their big
points, and we're going to talk about this more:
(Mr. Blasier read a portion of Mr.
Petrocelli's closing argument from
the civil trial transcript.)
We have blood on the cable from the
back wall behind Kato Kaelin's room.
Now, you remember this is Item No. 11
that Andrea Mazzola talked about doing a presumptive
test and getting a positive result on an area back
near the back -- in the back walkway area where the
Rockingham glove was found on another piece of
evidence other than the glove that was in that area.
And this is just a flat misstatement of
the evidence.
Put on the next slide, please.
(Document displayed on Elmo.)
MR. BLASIER: The actual evidence on that was
read to you. It's a stipulation.
That was read on the last day that we
took testimony, on January 16th.
Reading from page 183, Mr. Baker -- Phil
Baker read the stipulation:
(Mr. Blasier read a stipulation
from the civil trial transcript.)
All parties stipulate that
criminalist Gary Simms of the California
Department of Justice, were he to return to
testify in this trial, would testify under
oath that at the request of the prosecutors
in the criminal case, he performed a
presumptive blood test on Item No. 11, a
stain collected on the southern walkway of
360 North Rockingham, and that test was
negative for the presence of blood.
MR. BLASIER: There is no blood back there.
That's a false statement.
You need to work through these things and
figure out what are the accurate statements.
And one last before I move on to another
topic. And this one kind of irks me a little bit;
admissions misstatement on page 40.
During his argument, and with much
emotion and flare, and doing things that lawyers do,
told you the defense in this case, and it's important
you understand this, they don't contest these results,
they don't contest that these DNA test results matched
Mr. Simpson's blood.
Do you remember when Mr. Lambert read to
you something called defendant's responses to requests
for admissions?
I don't know if it was very exciting, but
he sat here and read to you -- those were the
defense's admission to those blood tests results and
they're conclusive on this issue.
Then he says and they establish that
those blood drops are Mr. Simpson's blood, and you
have to accept that they don't contest that.
Folks, that's what this whole trial is
about.
That's what this whole trial is about.
Now, these requests for admissions were a
bunch of -- I think there were a total of 1500 of
them, or something.
The purpose of this is to say, look, can
both sides agree that maybe there is something we can
agree on, and not disagree on everything, and save a
little bit of time.
So we worked on these all summer to try
and see if we could reach some agreement on some of
this evidence, and what we agreed to do, and I want
you to go to the --
MR. PETROCELLI: I object. This is completely
outside the record, misstates -- they were ordered --
there was no voluntary agreement.
MR. BLASIER: I'm going to read part of the
request for admission, which is part of record.
MR. PETROCELLI: They were ordered, Your Honor.
THE COURT: They were --
MR. PETROCELLI: I'd have the jury admonished
there was -- he told them there was an agreement.
They were court ordered --
MR. BLASIER: Let me tell you, part of the
request for admissions that was read to you, and these
are all kind of form questions, and they all say the
same -- I mean they have the same basic format.
Here's what was actually admitted. For
instance, Request No. 208, admit that the item
identified at the criminal trial as LAPD Evidence Item
508 contained human blood that had an ABO blood
type A.
Defendant's response. Our response; we
admitted that.
This is what we didn't admit.
Admitting this request for admission, the
defense will adopt the plaintiffs' definition as
communicated to the defendant as that point in time
whether an item was tested by an outside laboratory as
opposed to the time of the collection or any other
point in time.
Now, that's kind of confusing. I'll
grant you that. A bunch of lawyers get together, work
out a compromise. Maybe it's not too clear.
But what that tells you, you can't deny
this, is that we have maintained from the very
beginning of this case that you cannot rely on this
physical evidence, that what was picked up off the
ground is not necessarily the same thing that went to
a lab, that went to a third lab.
What we were willing to admit was that
when a piece of evidence, whatever it was, whatever
had happened to it, got to a particular lab such as
DOJ or Cellmark, and they did their tests on it, they
got a particular result. That's what we did admit.
Not that it was what was actually picked up off the
ground, or that it was in the same condition.
That's what this whole case is about.
Mr. Petrocelli's argument, much of it,
was conclusory statements of we proved everything.
They proved nothing.
We proved everything to a certainty.
Much of the argument was a clear request
for your emotional verdict, not a factual verdict.
Now, let me tell you what I'm going to
do.
Actually, let me tell you what I'm not
going to do. I'm not going to talk all day. Maybe
I'll even finish before lunch, if I'm lucky. I'm not
going to talk about every single piece of evidence.
You've already had a sense of the police
conduct, as I mentioned before.
You've seen that almost every police
witness in this case, almost every plaintiffs'
witness, has changed their testimony over time, over
the years, over the two and a half years since this
crime occurred. That it always gets better.
Criminal cases are not like fine wine.
It doesn't get better over time. It's not supposed
to.
When people come in here and change their
testimony, and say, oh, gosh, I was wrong, you know,
really was worse for Mr. Simpson than I originally
said, you're allowed to take those inconsistencies and
tell whether the witness was incorrect,
misrecollected.
And you understand there's an
instruction -- lots of people suffer, or anybody --
all of us can suffer from innocent misrecollection.
For instance, as Mr. Baker mentioned
yesterday with Allan Park and some of his
observations, it's not our contention that he was
lying, it's our contention that his recollection is
simply wrong.
There's always going to be conflicts in a
case. It doesn't mean one party is lying to you.
Sometimes, it doesn't always mean that at all.
We're human beings we; see things
differently. You can have a room full of people and
have something happen right in front of them, and if
you all write down a statement of what you saw, it's
not going to be the same.
I'm not going to prove anything to you to
an absolute certainty.
Mr. Petrocelli said he proved his case to
an absolute certainty.
I'm not going to promise you that.
Nobody can do that.
Nobody can do that.
Of course the Judge is going to tell you
that the burden is on them to prove before they're
entitled to any recovery of money in this case.
That's about money.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to go
over some of the facts with you, some of them in some
detail.
Mr. Petrocelli did not go over many of
the facts and much of the physical evidence in a lot
of detail.
I'm going to do that with a number of
items to give you now.
My suggestion is that you should look at
some of this evidence and what you can infer, and
conclude from what you've heard and what you've seen
in the last several months.
And again, I will try to give you
transcript references where I have those.
Our defense in this case on the physical
evidence is very, very simple.
You can't trust it.
You can't trust it because it's been
compromised, it's been corrupted by the Los Angeles
Police Department, evidence has been tampered with,
it's been planted.
Now, am I going to produce an eyewitness
to you to show that Mark Fuhrman picked up a glove at
Bundy and took it over and swiped it on the console of
the Bronco and then put it in the back walkway so he
could get a search warrant? No. No.
MR. PETROCELLI: Objection, zero evidence of
that in the record. Zero evidence of that.
THE COURT: It's argument.
Overruled.
MR. BLASIER: You don't have eyewitnesses to
those kinds of things, folks.
I'm going to explain to you when I go
over some of the instructions in a minute, how those
kinds of things can be proved and what you're allowed
to consider and what you should consider in deciding,
hey, is that likely what happened, could that have
happened, should I accept that or should I reject
that?
What I am going to point out to you is
the many facts that we have in this case that show
that this evidence is -- this physical evidence cannot
be trusted.
I'm going to go through the DNA materials
in some detail to show you just how questionable this
DNA evidence is.
I mean, this is supposedly the central
part of their case.
We talked about DNA in some detail. I'm
going to do it again. It's very complicated stuff. I
want you to understand it. I want you to understand
the important parts of it.
That's very important.
If all you have is an expert coming in
who knows more about DNA than you do and tells you
this is what it says, that's not good enough. That's
not good enough.
It is our position that the way in which
this evidence was collected and kept at LAPD for, in
some cases several months, makes it not worthy of
trust, that it should not be used as proof in a case
of this seriousness.
Now, let me tell you a little bit about
how our system works and how a defense works and how
we try to convince you of things. Maybe this will
give you a little better idea of how our evidence
comes out.
Most of our evidence comes out through
cross-examination of their witnesses.
So, in essence, you're hearing really
both sides of the case at the same time to a certain
extent.
When the crime occurs, the police are
called. Okay. That's natural. The police get there
first.
The police generally close off a crime
scene like they did here. They immediately put up
yellow tape or do what they have to do to surround the
scene so that nobody else but the police can be there.
Policemen are human. Many of them are
honest. Many of them are great policemen. Some of
them are dishonest. Maybe many of them are
incompetent. They make mistakes.
They're the ones who talk to the
witnesses initially. They take the first statements
and then they write down at some later time what they
recall the witness telling them, which is not a
particularly good way of memorializing what a witness
says that very first time, which is possibly the most
important time, before they've had a chance to have
other things influence their mind to change their
perception of what they thought they saw.
The best thing to do would be to
tape-record witnesses. And that's usually not done by
LAPD out in the field.
You'd have too accurate a statement.
They decide at some point who's our
suspect, who we think did it, and in this case it's
obvious, I submit to you, that they decided that
Mr. Simpson was guilty before they even went to
Rockingham for the first time. I think that's clear
from the evidence.
Then what do they do?
If they get a lead that looks like it
might point -- help their case, they'll go around the
world.
And they did in this case. They went to
Italy to make shoes. They went to Scotland Yard.
They have access to police agencies all over the
world.
If there's any lead that comes in that's
inconsistent with their theory, what do they do? A
lot of times they don't do anything. Sometimes
they'll check it out, try and neutralize it.
That's just the way the system works.
Now, they have access to the crime scene,
for instance, at Bundy here, any time they want. They
just go there. They come back whenever they want.
This was -- as you know, this was a very
emotional case and the tremendous amount of publicity
was just -- still is, it's just unreal, and it put
some -- it's made your job a lot harder, quite
frankly, because there's a lot of what I'll call
"schmaltz" out there, stuff that just is not true and
doesn't make sense, that you probably have been
exposed to in the last two and a half years, and you
have a tough job putting all that out of your mind.
Anyway, when they're done with the crime
scene, they close it down and it's washed down, like
this scene was, and LAPD, as you've noticed, didn't
even take a videotape of this crime scene to
preserve -- to help better preserve --
MR. PETROCELLI: It's all excluded by the
Court's order. No evidence about videotaping -- not
videotaping.
THE COURT: Sustained.
MR. PETROCELLI: I don't know what we're doing.
MR. BLASIER: I'll talk about the videotape
that they did do.
They took a videotape, a Willie Ford
tape, that we're going to look at later. The reason
they do that, and the only reason we did that, was in
case someone said they broke a dish when they did
break a dish. That's for insurance purposes. That's
what they did a video of, and that's all.
Now, when we get involved, they don't let
us go over and -- and be at the crime scene with them.
Mechanically, it wouldn't work well. I mean I'm not
suggesting that that's a negative thing. That's just
the way it works.
By the time the defense gets involved,
it's like the ballgame's over, the stadium's closed,
the people have gone home, and now you come in and see
what you can find out, and that's what we do, and we
review whatever material is available.
Eventually we'll get reports from the
police.
We dig and we try to gather information.
That may involve going through thousands and thousands
of documents, like this case. This case involved a
huge amount of paper.
We are subjected to such things as
when -- Dr. Baden told you that he went to the crime
lab to look at certain physical evidence, he wasn't
allowed to touch it, he wasn't allowed to take it out
of the bag, he wasn't allowed to take a picture of it.
That was because of Detective Vannatter.
Detective Vannatter is the one who told him that.
That is not a very satisfactory way of
gathering information.
What you're going to see, and the facts
that I'm going to bring up to you, the evidence that
we have put on through cross-examination and through
direct examination, when we had to call back most of
their witnesses, you will be able to draw certain
inferences from as to the value of this evidence.
And we submit to you that you will reject
it.
An analogy I can think of is that we're
trying to do one of those paint by the numbers
pictures, and the picture that we have that's our
defense is that we have a picture of corruption, of
contamination, of planting, of tampering. And we
don't have all the paint. We're not going to be able
to paint you a complete picture of all of that. We're
going to be able to paint some of it, from which
you're going to be able to infer, we submit, that we
can't trust this evidence.
We can't go to the FBI and go up to
Bodziak and say, Bill, let's go have lunch and talk
about these shoes. We don't have access to that kind
of information.
The picture that they're required to
paint is different.
They have the burden of proof in the
case, as I told you. It's up to them to paint their
picture.
We will present our evidence to show that
this evidence cannot be trusted.
There's a -- Dr. Henry Lee likes to make
the statement or used the statement, I don't know if
he used it here, but if you have a plate of spaghetti
and you find a cockroach in it, you don't have to
really go and look for a second one to know that you
can discard the plate of spaghetti. All you need to
do is find the first one, and discard the rest of it.
Now, let me tell you a little bit about
some of the instructions that are very important here.
You've all heard on television the term
circumstantial evidence.
This is primarily a circumstantial
evidence case.
No eyewitnesses.
And you're going to be given an
instruction that tells you what circumstantial
evidence is, and I'm going to read you a little part
of it here.
"Evidence is either direct or
circumstantial. Direct evidence proves a fact without
an inference, and if true" -- and by the way, you
don't need to write this down because the Judge will
give you this and you'll have access to this.
"Direct evidence proves a fact without an
inference, and if true, conclusively establishes that
fact.
"Circumstantial evidence proves a fact
from which an inference of the existence of another
fact may be drawn. The law makes no distinction
between direct and circumstantial evidence as to the
degree of proof required. Each one is a reasonable
method of proof. Each is respected for such
convincing force as it may carry."
That's a lot of legalese.
And I'll give you a real easy example.
If you're walking down the street in the
fall, and you're on the East Coast and it's a fall
day, and you see smoke coming from your neighbor's
backyard, that's circumstantial evidence that
something's going on in the backyard. You can make
some inferences that maybe they're barbecuing
something, maybe they're burning some leaves. There
are several things that could explain that. Those are
all reasonable inferences from the circumstantial
evidence.
And what the law allows you to do is make
those inferences and say, okay, that's logical, I know
this fact is logical that I know this second fact.
On the other hand, with circumstantial
evidence you can oftentimes jump to the wrong
conclusion.
I don't -- I think it was mentioned
during voir dire, and some of you may be aware, that
I'm the only attorney from the defense team that was
in the criminal case as well, and because of -- and
you probably noticed when I was here before Christmas,
and now I have (indicating to chest) a brace on. You
can see it when I bend over.
Several of the media outlets put 2 and 2
together and got 4, and said, why is it that
Mr. Blasier, who is the only attorney from the
criminal case, has to wear a bulletproof vest.
That's what they thought they saw.
That's what they thought they saw.
So that's an example of how you can come
to the wrong conclusion based on circumstantial
evidence.
Weighing -- oh, here's a good one.
"Failure to produce available stronger evidence. If
weaker and less satisfactory evidence is offered by a
party when it was within such party's ability to
produce stronger and more satisfactory evidence, the
evidence offered should be viewed with distrust."
Now, we're going to talk about EDTA and
we're going to talk about items that were tested and
items that were not tested, and we're going to suggest
to you that the police department in this case had
plenty of opportunity to disprove any planting theory
by testing a lot of this evidence for EDTA, and they
tested two pieces and they found EDTA, and they
stopped looking.
We'll talk about that more.
If you find that a party willfully
suppressed evidence in order to prevent its being
presented in this trial, you may consider that fact in
determining what inferences to draw from the evidence.
It's up to you. It's up to you.
That's my cockroach instruction. If you
find a cockroach in your spaghetti, you're entitled to
reject it all if you want to. You don't have to.
You're entitled to. We submit that you should.
"Failure to deny or explain adverse
evidence in determining what inferences to draw from
the evidence. You may consider, among other things, a
party's failure to explain or deny such evidence."
We put on evidence about the
Rokahr-Fuhrman pointing picture. And we'll talk about
that some more. That was not rebutted.
We put on evidence that --
MR. PETROCELLI: False, Your Honor.
THE COURT: It's argument.
MR. PETROCELLI: It's just misstating things.
MR. BLASIER: We put on evidence that some of
the evidence at the Bundy scene was tampered with, and
when I say tampered with, I'm referring to the
envelope and the glove. And we'll look at that. They
have been changed. Their positions have been changed
a lot of times.
You say, well, they were moved. We don't
know if -- when you have two pictures and it's in one
position in one place, different position in the
second place, we don't know that it was just moved.
It could have been picked up, could have been taken
somewhere, something could have been done with it and
replaced, so that -- no one came in to tell you that,
oh, this is how that happened. No one came in to
explain that.
Now, how you decide who's telling you the
truth, there's a long instruction the Judge will give
you. I'm not going to read all of it. It's just a
little bit about believability of witnesses.
And this says, in part, "In determining
the believability of a witness, you may consider any
matter that has a tendency and reason to prove or
disprove the truthfulness of the testimony of the
witness, including, but not limited to."
Then there's a list of things that you'll
get.
The one that I want to highlight to you
is, "A statement previously made by the witness that
is consistent or inconsistent with the testimony of
the witness."
And again, we heard that from witness
after witness after witness.
And this instruction tells you that
you're allowed to say -- you're allowed to conclude, I
don't believe that person, I'm sorry, I don't believe
that person, I've heard too many versions of this.
"Witness willfully false in one part" --
Mr. Petrocelli read that to you. I'm not going to
read it to you again. You're entitled to reject the
entirety of a witness's testimony if you think that
the person's lied to you.
Makes sense.
That's what the Judge will tell you.
Now, experts. We heard a lot of
testimony from experts, and there are a couple of
instructions that tell you -- that give you some
guidance on how do we sift through all this stuff.
The experts are just human beings who
have certain special knowledge.
I'm sure some of you have technical-type
jobs that you know more about than other people do,
and that makes you an expert in that particular area.
And what the -- what the instruction
says, in part, "In determining what weight to give
each and any such opinion, you should consider the
qualifications and believability of the witness, the
facts or materials upon which each opinion is based,
and the reasons for each opinion.
"You are not bound by an opinion if you
give such opinion" -- I'm sorry -- "the weight to
which you find it deserves."
Now, nothing in that instruction about
money. Nothing in there that says that if one expert
gets $150 an hour and another one gets $3,000 a day,
that you're supposed to believe one of them more.
Nothing in there about that.
Nothing in there about that.
We saw Dr. Popovich come in here and
admit that the taxpayers of Los Angeles County paid
him $30,000 in the criminal case and he never said a
word in court.
I'm not suggesting to you that that's
bad. I'm not suggesting to you at all that you make
up your mind about an expert based on money. In fact,
it's just the opposite. I don't really think that's
that significant.
Mr. Petrocelli made what I consider very
insulting comments about Dr. Baden in his comment,
well, the defense pays him $100,00 so he'll say
something in their favor.
Dr. Baden told you that he, in the
criminal case, was out here 70 times -- or 70 days I
think it was, and worked hundreds of hours on this
case and was paid around 100,000, as I recall.
Well, I want Mr. Petrocelli to tell you
what one of their senior partners would cost for 70
days and hundreds of hours. I can tell you it would
be a heck of a lot more than $100,000.
I don't think that's how you should judge
the testimony.
That's up to you.
All right. Couple more concepts before
we get into some of the details here.
There's a term that I think came up in
the computer industry called GIGO, G-I-G-O.
Can you put that slide up, Phil.
(Document displayed on the Elmo
screen.)
What it means is, garbage in, garbage
out. Very simple. Means you can't -- when you put
something into a system, what you get out of it is
only as good as what went into it.
And that's what our position is on the
physical evidence in this case: No better than the
way it was collected and preserved and kept.
A lot of times -- there are a lot of
comments from some of the experts about concordance;
and that is the idea that, geez, these things were
tested by several different labs, and they got the
same results. Boy, that must means they must be
right.
That's not really, necessarily, the
meaning of concordance. The idea of concordance is,
you start fresh; you've got a piece of evidence on the
ground. And from that point, it is split up and sent
to different places, without being processed at one
place first. Then you truly have two separate tests
on the same piece of evidence that you can place much
more reliance on.
In this case, we have --
Put on the next slide, would you Phil,
please.
(Mr. P. Baker complies.)
MR. BLASIER: We have basically three crime
scenes: We have Rockingham, Bundy, and the Bronco.
And when the LAPD or the D.A.'s office
decided they needed outside help, and they went to the
Department of Justice, the FBI, and Cellmark.
But what you need to understand, and
what's critical here, and was not talked about by
Mr. Petrocelli, is --
Put on the next slide, please.
(Mr. P. Baker complies.)
MR.BLASIER: Everything went through LAPD.
Everything. There was not a single FBI expert called
to the scene, as I recall, to pick up anything off the
ground. It was all collected and went through LAPD.
And it ain't gonna get any better than it
was when it was at LAPD.
Okay. Let's talk briefly about -- about
the crime lab.
You heard some things about the LAPD
crime lab -- and this is a big county, big county.
They don't even have a manual that tells them how to
do things. They've -- they've got a draft manual for
years. Years. They've had it. They don't even have
a manual that tells their people how to collect
things.
And you know enough about DNA now to know
how sensitive it is and how important it is to have
controls and to do things right. If you want to have
any faith at all in anything that you get out at the
end, you got to do it right.
No uniform way to do things. They have
terrible documentation in terms of trying to
reconstruct what they did, when.
We've heard about them preserving blood
in a trash bag on the counter overnight. And we'll
talk more about that.
We've seen them alter documents in
respect to the blood vial changing from 17 to 18,
because it looked like it might have been tampered
with, because it was given a number after the tennis
shoes.
We'll talk a little more about that
later.
The lab is not accredited; they are not
accountable to anyone. They are not required to be
monitored by anyone.
We know that, in this case -- you know,
it's funny, in the context of blood, they -- a number
of people were asked, do you keep track of how much
blood you collect when you collect blood as part of a
case?
Of course not.
Of course not.
Good heavens. You realize -- you realize
the importance of -- of the victim's blood and the
suspect's blood in this case now.
They don't even consider that something
that they should even think about. We don't keep
track of that. There's no accountability here.
There's no accountability here.
We cannot trust it.
Okay. I want to go to the Rockingham --
Can we get the Rockingham board with the
blood drops in the driveway?
Would you like to take a break, Judge?
THE COURT: It's only been 45 minutes.
MR. BLASIER: Okay.
THE COURT: If you need a break. . .
MR. BLASIER: I don't. We're just going to
start getting some exhibits, so . . .
MR. BAKER: Doesn't look like Rockingham.
MR. BLASIER: Doesn't look like Rockingham to
me.
(Laughter.)
MR. BLASIER: I'm trying to keep kind of
chronological order here a little bit.
This is where criminalists were first
sent. We'll talk about why that happened, while
they're bringing that board out.
Let me preface my remarks by saying, you
know, you remember we started out in this case, the
LAPD did, with Andrea Mazzola as the officer in
charge.
Andrea Mazzola had only been to two crime
scenes previously. It is absolutely ludicrous, in a
crime this serious, that their procedure would allow
for a criminalist of so little experience to be the
officer in charge.
Now, they claim they changed that
designation, I believe, on the way to Rockingham, even
though the paperwork still shows her as the officer in
charge. And at Rockingham, they still made her
basically do all of the work.
(Counsel displays board entitled
Blood Drops at 360 North
Rockingham Avenue, June 13, 1994.)
MR. BLASIER: The least experienced person
there, doing all the work.
Now, Mr. Baker's going to talk more about
the police going over the wall and those aspects, so
I'm not going to go into that in any detail at all.
But think about this: They've got a
crime scene at Bundy, with two people who are -- who
have bled to death. I mean, that's what they think is
the cause of death, the manner of death.
There's about six pints of blood in a
body. Twelve pints of blood, total, in this case.
And the victims, in a very gory, very
bloody scene. And what do they call the criminalist
for? They call the criminalist to Rockingham because
of a speck of something that may be blood that's
smaller than your fingernail.
You tell me: Have they made up their
minds yet who's guilty? Have they made up their minds
yet?
Of course they have. Of course they
have. And they've got to get into the house, so they
call Fung and Mazzola to Rockingham first, and they
let everything sit at Bundy.
Already been sitting all night, where
things at the crime scene change: Bodies change over
time. You lose evidence. It doesn't get better.
You try to get there fast. You try to
get there and do your job first.
Not what happened here. We have Mazzola
and Fung going to Rockingham first.
Now, we've had testimony about police
officer after police officer going back and forth from
Bundy to Rockingham, Gonzalez playing with the dog,
goes back to Rockingham.
I mean, come on, folks.
MR. PETROCELLI: Misstates the evidence.
There's no evidence of anyone playing with a dog.
THE COURT: Mr. Petrocelli, you're going to
have ample time to make your rebuttal. This is
argument.
MR. BLASIER: My recollection is, that comes
from a report from Ron Phillips, who they're asking
you to believe.
In any event, you got him going back and
forth -- you got the detectives going back and forth;
you got people going from one scene to the other.
What are these folks thinking about?
They're not thinking about trying to
preserve the integrity of each individual scene.
They're police officers out there, trying to catch the
bad guy. They're not thinking.
We have a dog that's wandering around
Rockingham.
And I -- when I asked that question, I
didn't -- I thought it was -- I thought it was the dog
Kato. And I apologize to you. I found out it was --
I was wrong; it wasn't the dog Kato. Doesn't matter
it was another dog. I think it might have been
Chachi. You don't let a dog run around your crime
scene while you're trying to collect evidence.
Come on, folks. This is common sense.
This is common sense. It's absolutely silly.
This is a disaster. These crime scenes,
these are disasters in the way these were processed.
Now, Mr. Petrocelli gave his theory
yesterday of how this happened -- the day before
yesterday. I keep forgetting.
Page 116. Do you have that?
MR. P. BAKER: Yep.
(Document displayed on the Elmo
screen.)
MR. BLASIER: This, I believe, was his -- if I
recall, what was his only explanation for how
Mr. Simpson supposedly got into the house -- that
Mr. Park and Kato Kaelin -- O.J. Simpson gets on his
property at 10:51, bumps into or crashes into, or runs
into this wall, where it's extremely dark and no
light, drops a glove, comes back up the alley to where
his car is parked in the driveway, puts a bag there --
a bag never again seen to this day, presumably because
it's got murder weapon and murder clothes -- I assume
that's what he was trying to get you to infer -- and
he makes a bee-line inside his front door.
And that's when Allan Park sees him for
the first time. And that's 10:55. And so we know
he's home around 10:51, and he's actually seen at
10:55.
Trying to get my arms around that last
night. Trying to figure out could this work, I mean,
could this really work this way? And I started
thinking about, okay, here's the theory: We've got
blood; we've got -- we've got five drops of blood at
Bundy. Somebody, presumably walking out the back,
dropped five drops of blood.
At Rockingham, there are one, two, three,
four, five, six, seven, eight -- and I think three in
the foyer -- 11 -- maybe got 11 drops of blood at
Rockingham.
Now, we all know that when you cut
yourself, you bleed the most first -- you bleed the
most first, and then the cut stops bleeding.
So why do we have five drops at Bundy and
11 or 12 at Rockingham, which supposedly is sometime
after the murders have been committed?
Period of time after that.
Now, can I have the right-handed glove
over there, please. I'm just using this for
illustrative purposes.
(Counsel places right glove on his
own hand.)
MR. BLASIER: You have to make some sense out
of this before you're entitled to give any money for
this.
Okay. We've got -- we've got -- the
killer there starts out with two gloves and ends up
with one glove.
Now, if I'm a killer and I'm going to
kill somebody, I'm going have my fists like this
(indicating closed fist). Nobody is going to be able
to pull a glove off me.
Let's say it did. The glove comes off.
As I recall the testimony, there was not
much blood -- or a lot less blood on the -- the Bundy
glove as the Rockingham glove.
And their theory is that the glove comes
off, presumably early; then Mr. Simpson cuts his
finger and does the rest of the killing with his bare
hand.
Of course, you don't see any of his blood
around the bodies or on the bodies. The coroner
washed the bodies, so we'll never know whose blood
might have been on the bodies.
They didn't think there to preserve much
of the blood around where the bodies were. Can't
prove that theory.
So anyway, you've got -- you've got a
right-hand glove now, and you've got a left hand
that's bleeding.
What do you do with it if you want to
stop the bleeding? You do this (indicating). You
hold it.
If you do that, you're going to find
Mr. Simpson's blood in the palm.
There is none. There is none.
What blood -- what very small amounts of
blood that were consistent with Mr. Simpson's DQ Alpha
are down around the wrist area?
And we'll talk again in a little bit
about Mr. Yamauchi handling the glove right after the
reference vial -- right after he opens the reference
vial. We'll talk about that later.
So I don't have any blood at all where
you would expect it, in the palm.
Now, how do I drive my car? My hand,
supposedly, is still bleeding, because it's still
bleeding at Rockingham, bleeding worse at Rockingham.
Takes, four, five minutes to drive between the two
places. There's going to be 10, 20 drops of blood in
the Bronco if I drive like this. (Indicating.)
There aren't. There aren't. You could
see the pictures. There's some blood in the Bronco.
We'll talk about that, not a lot.
And as you know, there was only one
sample that they could do an RFLP test on, which is
the one that requires a little more blood. That was,
they had to put three stains together. All the blood
in the Bronco was a very, very small amount.
In any event, so what am I doing when I'm
driving from Bundy to Rockingham with this scenario?
How am I avoiding getting blood from my left hand onto
the glove? What am I doing with the glove?
Now --
MR. PETROCELLI: May I see that, please?
MR. BLASIER: Sure.
MR. PETROCELLI: How many of these pair do you
have?
MR. BLASIER: There were several pair produced
in the criminal case by Aris Isotoner. That's what
this is.
Is there something wrong with that?
Excuse me.
Where was I?
Oh, how do I get this off? How do I get
this off?
I do this. (Mr. Blasier pulls glove off
from fingers.)
Mr. Simpson's blood would be up here in
the fingers, not there, not there (indicating).
That's how I take the gloves off. You don't take the
gloves off from the wrist; you don't do this
(indicating).
And if he had done it that way, there
would be a heck of a lot more blood down here in this
area that could be attributable to Mr. Simpson,
believe me, especially if he's still bleeding --
bleeding more now than when he was at Bundy.
So this doesn't work, either.
Now, he somehow gets back to the back
of -- by the air conditioner, presumably, and drops
the glove.
Now, you remember Mr. Petrocelli says he
then drops the bag by the Bentley?
Well, what is he trying to tell you
there? He's trying to tell that you Mr. Simpson has
already cleaned up; and another inference that I drew
from it, that he's already cleaned up, and that the
murder weapon and the clothing are inside this bag.
Well, what the heck is he doing with the
glove? If he's already cleaned up, why is the glove
someplace where it could fall on the ground by the air
conditioner?
And there is no evidence that anything
happened back by that air conditioner.
None whatsoever.
Just a glove. Just a glove.
Your Honor, could we take a break at this
point?
THE COURT: Okay. Ten minutes, ladies and
gentlemen.
Don't talk about the case. Don't form or
express any opinions.
(Recess.)
(Jurors resume their respective
seats.)
THE COURT: You may proceed.
MR. BLASIER: Thank you, Your Honor.
CLOSING ARGUMENT (continued)
BY MR. BLASIER: Okay. Where were we?
We got this right-hand glove just
dropping out of something.
Now, here's another question.
If O.J. Simpson changed his clothes after
the killings, but before he went home, and put them in
this bag, what did he change into? Because his left
finger is still bleeding.
Look at all the blood on the driveway.
Where's the second set of bloody clothing
that you would have if he had changed earlier.
Where is it?
Where is it?
Now, and again, you remember the -- The
glove was found way back.
And, Dan, could you just hold up that
other chart just for a minute. I want to demonstrate
the scale of that.
The distance -- that's not the one with
the distance on it.
I think -- it was my recollection it was
220 feet. 220, 280 feet. I'm not sure. Something
like that.
(The board entitled 360 North
Rockingham Avenue and blood drops
360 North Rockingham Avenue,
June 13, 1994 is displayed.)
MR. BLASIER: Long distance from that grate
where that blood was found. And there was nothing
from the garage back to where the glove was found.
And glove was sitting there with no dirt on it, still
moist, described as appeared moist in the morning, no
evidence of insect activity, no cobwebs, just sitting
there, no evidence of any blood drops along that
pathway that would be consistent if Mr. Simpson was
still bleeding.
Where are the blood drops over there?
You can take that down, Dan.
The blood that's there appears to be
going from the Bronco area to the front door, or the
other way around.
You can't -- I mean, you can't tell which
way that's going. It could be going both ways. Who
knows.
But it has -- it's not going toward the
garage, which is where the significant area is.
And how about this one.
How does Mr. Simpson leave all of these
blood drops while Mark and Kato are right there.
Remember now, according to
Mr. Petrocelli's theory, this all happens -- the blood
here at Rockingham gets there while they're there.
Yet they don't see a cut. They don't see
him bleeding.
It just doesn't work that way.
Put that theory back up there, Phil.
(Document displayed on Elmo.)
MR. BLASIER: Actually, I guess I can.
How does he get -- he's still bleeding as
profusely as they suggest after he gets back from the
killings, how did he stop that in the five or
six-minute period, whatever period of time it was from
when he supposedly goes inside and then comes out to
leave in the limo, how does he stop the bleeding?
How does he stop the bleeding?
And where's the blood on the inside?
There is no blood on the carpet going
upstairs, there is no blood on the switch plates,
there is no blood on the door, no blood upstairs,
there is no blood in the bedroom.
We'll talk about the socks later.
Now, there was one described as, I
believe, one drop of blood in the bathroom on the
floor, not drops like Mr. Petrocelli said in his
opening.
And I don't recall if there was any
testimony at all about whether that was fresh or not;
if that looked fresh or not. I don't believe there
was.
But, you know, your notes are -- you
should follow your notes.
Having a man's blood in his own bathroom
is not something particularly unusual, by the way.
In any event, where is all the blood?
I mean, we got all this blood out in the
driveway.
Where is it in the house?
Now, if he hasn't changed clothes, and he
is still wearing the bloody clothing, and he's got
these Bruno Magli's on, and he gets by Park and Kato
bleeding profusely, although they don't see any of
that, there's going to be blood in the carpeting going
upstairs from his shoes, plush carpeting, you heard
that there's going to be blood there.
Wasn't any.
Wasn't any blood on the back door.
If he's still bleeding, why isn't there
blood on the back door?
Doesn't make sense. His theory doesn't
work.
Well, he said there's blood in the sink.
No. There's a presumptive test that
shows the possibility of blood in the sink.
No blood. They don't find blood.
There was no confirmatory testing of any
such thing.
And that's not unusual at all, to get a
presumptive test positive in a sink.
Come on, folks, use your common sense.
If he's still bleeding there profusely by
the time he gets back to Rockingham, where's the blood
on towels?
If he cleaned up upstairs, where are the
towels and the hamper that's covered with blood?
They don't exist. There aren't any.
Nothing was collected from the bathroom
because there was nothing there of any value.
No second set of clothes with blood on
them. No towels with blood on them.
Nothing. Except the socks. We'll talk
about the socks a lot.
Okay. Let's go to the Bundy board, with
the drops around it.
(The board entitled Blood drops at
Bundy -June 13, 1994.)
MR. LEONARD: Is that it?
MR. BLASIER: Yeah. I also want to see the
envelope -- two envelope pictures and the two glove
pictures.
Okay. Now, recall that we've got -- Fung
and Mazzola already were on their way to Bundy; I
think it was 10 o'clock when they got there. The
coroner has finally been called and is there.
We've got all the evidence there, and
what happens?
The coroners get in and take the bodies
before or in the middle of Fung and Mazzola trying to
process the crime scene. And you saw a couple of
videos, they were from the media, that was -- you saw
how many people were walking around that scene while
it was being processed. There were a lot of people.
You saw Phil Vannatter with his
clipboard. There were a lot of detectives catching
bad guys. That's what they do; they go to crime
scenes and get bad guys. And they're all there
mucking about and messing up the scene.
Could you hold up the two envelope
pictures.
(Photographs of envelope
displayed.
MR. BLASER: This is just to remind you that --
and we know this from Mr. Rokahr's photographs. At
some point -- and we don't know when, we weren't
there. At some point that envelope got moved or
picked up or taken somewhere.
And you know what's interesting about
that envelope, it's never been fingerprinted.
Wonder why. Wonder why.
Why?
Cause they might find somebody's prints
on it that would be very embarrassing. Never been
fingerprinted.
Okay. Put that down.
Now, the glove.
Same thing. That's it.
You can see here that the glove here
on -- on my left has the label this way, going right
along the tile. And over here, right around the time
it was collected as No. 102, it's got the label
someplace else, a different orientation, it's
obviously been moved, picked up, altered.
I can't tell you that. I can't tell you
that. I wasn't there.
But I can tell you from those pictures,
somebody did something to it, and they haven't
explained it, they have not told you how that
happened.
And they have not brought a witness in to
explain that. Maybe they think it's not important,
but you make up your own mind.
This is critical evidence at this crime
scene, I'm telling you.
And I think -- if you look it, it may not
be terribly clear, I think -- and you can look at
these pictures in your deliberations, I think the
hat's been moved, too. But I'll let you decide that.
Okay. You can take those down.
Do we have the piece of paper pictures?
While we're gathering a couple more
exhibits, I wanted to make a comment.
Mr. Baker, he alluded to the fact that
this was OJ's dog, Kato, or that OJ had purchased the
dog for the family. The dog knew OJ, and I would
submit to you, that dogs, contrary to what we'd like
to believe in the Lassie and Timmy scenario, dogs are
not particularly smart, and I would submit to you that
if OJ Simpson was the killer, the dog would have
followed him out the back, would have followed him out
the back and not gone out the front.
In any event, what do you have there for
me? Oh, piece of paper.
Do we have the one that we can put on the
Elmo, Phil? Okay.
One thing before -- Dan, why don't you
move a little bit (indicating to Elmo).
Remember we looked at probability imprint
evidence on the pole to the right of the cap.
(indicating to Elmo)
Now, I don't know if you can see it. Can
you get in?
(Indicating to Elmo.)
(Elmo is adjusted.)
Again, you have to look at these things
very carefully over and over and over again. I'm not
sure this is the one that you can see it very well on,
but you guys remember when we looked at this and saw
these parallel line imprints that appear to be the
same as the parallel line imprints on the envelope and
this piece of paper?
Put the piece of paper on.
MR. P. BAKER: He has the board.
MR. BLASIER: I'm sorry. Oh, you have the
board.
Now, you have seen this on the Elmo, so
we won't put it on the Elmo. You can see it better.
But you got parallel line imprints, you
got this piece of paper that Detective Lange, by the
way, just simply lied to you about. It disappeared.
It flat disappeared. He didn't examine that.
If he examined that, that would have been
one of the first things collected good heavens. It
was right between the two bodies. It was right
between the two bodies, and it's got imprint evidence,
it's got blood evidence on it.
Who knows what's written on the back?
Maybe what's written on the back, if
there is something written on the back, had something
to do with why these killings occurred.
Who knows?
We'll never know.
We'll never know.
Because somebody -- the integrity of the
scene was such that somebody could get it, make that
disappear, and nobody notices it until the defense in
the criminal case sees it in the picture.
Where did this go?
Detective Lange. Oh, well, I picked it
up and I looked at it, and it sure didn't have any
evidentiary value to me; no fiber evidence, nothing.
I can tell that. I'm Detective Lange.
Come on, folks. That's ridiculous. It
was lost. It was lost because they cannot -- they
cannot show you that that crime scene has integrity in
it. There's so many people, the cops, walking all
over the place.
Mr. Petrocelli made a comment in his
closing, well, nothing was touched in the house; no
evidence of anything being touched in the house.
How do we know that?
Well, we do know, of course, that there
was no ransacking. Give you that.
Do you remember who the first person on
the scene was?
Officer Riske.
Officer Riske comes in, and what did he
do?
What's the first thing he does?
You got these horrible bodies lying
there, tremendously bloody crime scene, and you got
the door open and the lights on; and what does he do?
He decides to go in. And the first thing
he does is ruin two clues; he picks up the phone
obliterating any fingerprints that might be on it, and
he screws up any redial capabilities, of pushing the
redial button, to see who was the last person that
Nicole talked to. Maybe she talked to somebody and
maybe that would help solve this crime.
So that's the first thing he does.
He's the first guy on the scene and he
screws up two things walking in the door.
Now, is he going to tell you there's no
hair and fiber evidence on the inside of that
condominium?
No. Of course, he's not.
By the time they even start thinking
about processing the scene, with everybody inside the
condominium, it's no longer of any value, whatsoever,
as a potential crime scene.
Fung and Mazzola. You can look at fiber
evidence all you want. Come on. You're not going to
find it because the cops have been going in and
they've been using it as a command post, almost.
They've been using the phone. That's how they've been
getting access to the bodies. This entire crime scene
should have been the entire condominium, the entire
condominium.
Suppose we have Mr. Simpson's left glove
off, hand cut severely, bleeding a lot.
No bloody fingerprints. No bloody
fingerprints at all, identifiable or unidentifiable,
on that -- on the -- I'm not positive about that, but
certainly none of Mr. Simpson's fingerprints there.
I don't think that he testified that any
fingerprint was in blood. You sure would expect it if
their scenario is correct.
Oh, the blanket. I'd like to mention it
a little bit -- mention it a little bit more.
The idea here of the blanket is when you
bring it outside, and Detective Lange did this to
cover up the body, and I mean it's the compassionate
thing to do, okay, but when you spread the blanket,
however you do it, you create wind currents and that
causes hair and fiber evidence, if there is any of any
value, to potentially move from one thing to another.
To move around. It compromises the scene.
Whether it did here, who knows?
The fact that it may have come from the
dryer is even worse. You people who do your own
laundry, when you put something in the dryer with
other things, especially something like a blanket,
you're going to pick up things.
So I can't -- I'm not going to sit here
and tell you that that ruined some evidence. I don't
know.
All I can tell you is that it was a
stupid thing to do. It shows you their ineptness. It
shows you their lack of care, their lack of
understanding of the importance of this stuff, and is
relevant to the integrity of all of this evidence.
And, of course, they leave it there.
And it's also put over the body of
Nicole Brown Simpson thus obliterating some of the
blood on her body that might have been from the
perpetrator. That's gone.
They could have -- The coroner, of
course, screwed it up; they washed the bodies without
preserving any blood that was on the bodies that might
have been from the perpetrator.
But there very well could have been a
transfer onto that blanket. But they didn't save the
blanket either.
Okay.
Let's -- oh, can you get the chart with
the blood drops and the shoe prints?
MR. LEONARD: I'll try.
MR. BLASIER: Take a quick look at that.
While he's he doing that -- Dan, I'm
going to need that later, but --
MR. LEONARD: Okay.
MR. BLASIER: While he's doing that, let me
remind you of some of the other things that we were
able to find in the video of Dennis Fung bringing the
Rockingham glove to the Bundy scene and stepping over
the body to take it to Detective Lange.
Of course, Detective Lange just lied
about that. He said, no, that was the crime-scene
truck I remember it not like I think it was. He said,
as I recall, that happened at the crime-scene truck.
I wouldn't -- I wouldn't have had him bring it into
the scene. We want to protect the scene.
You saw it on the video.
You saw Fung carrying the Rockingham
glove over the bodies at Bundy.
Now, can I prove to you that something --
that that contaminated something?
I can't. Can't prove that to you.
But that's a fact from which you can draw
inferences, if you choose to.
One of many about the integrity of this
evidence.
Now, here we have the diagram of the
blood drops and the shoe prints.
The first blood drop -- let me see if I
can get over here.
MR. LEONARD: Let me get you a pointer.
MR. BLASIER: All right.
Okay.
Clearly, we have number 52 out here -- or
actually 52 is out in back (indicating to board
entitled "Shoe Prints at Bundy June 13, 1994"). 52
out here is not to the left of any shoe prints. In
fact, it's way near the corner, indicating that the
person's walking out. It wouldn't be from their left
side. It would be from more likely the right side.
This is very close to that wall. You can check the
pictures. It's very close to this -- this wall. This
one's not near any shoe prints. No shoe prints
whatsoever.
Can you pull it this way a little bit?
MR. LEONARD: Towards you?
MR. BLASIER: Yeah.
I'm just going to stand up and do this.
It's -- we're --
All right.
The first blood drop is found here, and
that's the one that I will grant you is in the
vicinity of that shoe print. I'll grant you that one.
Here's a second one. We got some shoe
prints around it, but you can't tell -- you can't say
that's to the left of a shoe print. You just can't
simply say that. Possible. But you can't say that.
You simply can't say that about that piece of
evidence.
So, let's see, that's one, that's two.
Three, look at this one, it's to the
right -- well, actually, I take that back. We don't
know about this one because I think this was one that
Bodziak said he couldn't tell which direction it was.
So it could be. But it sure isn't certain that that's
to the left of the print. Could be to the right.
Could be to the right.
And then we have the two at the end that
aren't near any shoe print.
So I offer that to you just to illustrate
that just saying it doesn't make it so.
I want to change to a different subject.
Talk about fingernails.
You want to pass this right down, please
(indicating to glove.)
(Mr. Gelblum hands glove back to
defense counsel.)
MR. BLASIER: You can take that down.
Can you get that EAP chart ready, Phil.
Remember that testimony about fingernail
scrapings from Nicole Brown Simpson?
And they were tested by Greg Matheson,
who I submit to you is a very honest man and does a
good job.
And he tested those, he tested the
scrapings from the fingernails of Nicole Brown Simpson
and he found blood with an EAP type B.
Let's talk a little bit more about what
that means.
EAP is just another genetic marker.
We've been talking about them all for months now. It
just happens to be one of them. And it happens to be
one where we have some differences or we know that
none of the people, none of the victims, neither
Nicole nor Ron Goldman, nor O.J. Simpson have an EAP
type B.
So, if there is an EAP type B from the
fingernail scrapings of Nicole Brown Simpson, it came
from somebody else. It came from somebody else.
Somebody other than Mr. Simpson, Ms. Simpson or Ronald
Goldman.
And of course there was a brief bit of
testimony about EAP type B blood being found on the
knife at some point after the murders.
Do we have -- do you have the serology
report?
First let me show you what Greg Matheson
did. And again, this is the first set of serology
notes that he did for the conventional serology work
that he did.
And we've got a report here that says,
first of all, "Problem, no match to anyone."
(Document displayed on Elmo.)
MR. BLASIER: "Problem, no match to anyone."
Got to do something about that problem.
Maybe Mr. Simpson didn't do it.
"Problem, no match to anyone."
So we go down and we see at 84 and 85,
you can tell -- I'm sorry -- 84A, B, you can tell from
our copy here that that's been highlighted. That's
what they're talking about, "Problem, no match to
anyone."
And let's go to the results page of Greg
Matheson's report where he gives the types.
There you go (indicating to Elmo).
Let's go down to 84A and B in the
right -- why don't you show the top of the document so
we know that the right-hand column is the EAP.
There you go. There you go.
So we go down to 84A and B. Type B,
that's his professional opinion when he writes the
report, that that's what it is. That that's what it
is.
If that's correct, if he is right in his
professional judgment, I got a stranger -- we got a
stranger submitting blood under Nicole Brown Simpson's
fingernails.
Now, let me give you their answer to it.
Not going to mislead you. They tried to explain it.
Got to come up with an explanation. Doesn't fit our
theory.
This is -- this is not the police
department kind of working to find the truth. This is
adversarial. This is adversarial. This is the police
department against O.J. Simpson, okay. Don't lose
that -- don't ever lose sight of that.
All right.
So what their explanation is, well, let's
see, is there any way that we can say that that's
something other than a B. And Greg Matheson comes in
and says, well, maybe, maybe that's a BA, 'cause
Nicole was a BA, maybe it's really her blood and
somehow it got from a BA to a B.
Okay.
So we -- we had some testimony about
that. Scientific testimony.
Phil, why don't you put up the EAP chart,
and put up the red blood cell one.
Now, let me give you one of their
responses.
Go ahead and just zoom in on the blood
cell and the DNA.
There you go.
One of their explanations was, hey, we
tested -- Cellmark, I think Dr. Cotton said, we tested
it, we did DNA tests on that, and it came back
consistent with Nicole Brown Simpson.
Well, of course it did. Of course it
did.
When you take scrapings from your
fingernails, you're going to get your DNA.
Not necessarily from your blood.
From skin, from cells.
Remember, every cell in the body except
red blood cells has DNA.
So that doesn't answer it. That doesn't
answer it at all.
I'd be surprised if they didn't find her
DNA under there.
So that's not the answer. That doesn't
say, oh, well, therefore this blood type B -- EAP B
has to be hers. Doesn't help you at all. Because
remember, the EAP marker that we're looking at, we're
looking at the red blood cells that don't even have
DNA. So it's apples and oranges. It's apples and
oranges.
You can't -- you can't search a tomato
truck and say there aren't any oranges on that tomato
truck when you're only looking at tomatoes. Okay.
So let's go to the next chart.
So we clearly can have from Nicole
Simpson, DNA from her, as well as blood from somebody
else, maybe a very, very small amount, with a
different type from anybody in the case that we know
of.
How did that get there, if that's
correct?
So Matheson says now, no, that's a
degraded -- that's a degraded BA, I think. My
professional opinion, that's a degraded BA.
So -- and I got to get into this science
stuff with you folks, I know it's technical, but I
want you to understand it because you're the ones that
are going to decide this. I don't want you to decide
it based on some conclusory statements someone told
you about. I want you to have some understanding of
what's going on here.
So go to the next slide.
Okay.
Greg Matheson and I went through this.
Nicole Brown Simpson's EAP type is a BA,
which looks like the one on the left with the four
bands. The four bands. Called A1, A2, B1, B2 bands.
You remember that?
The unknown type found under her nails,
and this is Greg Matheson's professional opinion,
looks like on the right. Two bands in that are B, in
the area B. You don't have to understand how they get
from sample to this -- this kind of a chart, but all
you need to understand is that what they found was a B
pattern that has two bands at the place where you
would expect to find a B.
Let's go to the next one.
(Document displayed on Elmo.)
Now, when I questioned Greg Matheson
about what is the -- what's your -- what's your
authority for saying that BA can degrade to a B, he
said, well, you know, the literature talks about that.
And it does, the scientific literature
talks a little bit about that. But what did it tell
you. It says that when a BA degrades, what happens is
you start losing bands from the top down.
Go to the next chart.
So you have a BA. It's gradually
degrading now.
One more point. Remember, I think Greg
Matheson said, you know, one of the reasons I think
this is a degraded BA is because Nicole Brown
Simpson's fingernails were in blood.
They all weren't. Look at the pictures.
One of them was. The other wasn't.
Okay.
So we move down the column -- go down to
the next chart.
If you follow the scientific literature
that studied this, you see that after your -- you got
4 bands, the next thing you're going to get is 3
bands. That's still called a BA. It's degrading but
it's still a BA.
Go to the next one, please.
Next you get two bands. Next you get two
bands. That's called a BA also. It's a degraded BA
but it's a BA.
Go to the next one.
Finally, you get a BA degrading at the
very far right and a one band to a B. And this is how
it can happen. This is how you can have a BA turn
into a B.
And the literature says this and it
describes that.
Go to the next one.
Not a two banded B pattern. You can't
have that. That's not what the literature says.
That's not how it works according to the scientists
who have studied this.
Next slide.
This is an EAP type B two banded. Not a
degraded BA.
It's somebody else's. It's somebody
else's.
Next slide, please.
Whose is it? I can't tell you. Not my
client's. It's not my client's.
That's exculpatory evidence. It's not my
client's. You're entitled to infer from that that she
had somebody else's blood under her fingernails from
the struggle.
Okay, let's go to hair and fiber.
I'm going to be fairly quick on this
because hair and fiber is, as you've been told, a
very, very subjective area, and the kind of judgments
that are made by people like Douglas Deedrick, you
can't really -- you can't really -- it's very
subjective, the characteristics that they look at.
Let me mention first why the idea of hair
and fiber evidence in this case is one of very little
value.
We've got a place where O.J. Simpson
hangs out at. We've got the Bronco that goes back and
forth. We've got Nicole -- Arnelle told you that
Nicole drove the Bronco. We've got Nicole and
Arnelle -- we've got Arnelle driving the Bronco, and
the kids back and forth and the dogs back and forth.
What you've got here is an environment
that has been frequented by people coming from the
Bronco, particularly O.J. Simpson.
Okay.
So you've already got a place where you
would expect to find carpet fibers, hair fibers. Not
unusual at all.
And in fact they did collect a soil
sample. It's called an environmental study. It's the
first step if you want to really check this out, if
you really want to find out what's the frequency with
which you're going to find that person's hair and
fiber there anyway is an environmental study. You
collect it and then you analyze it.
Well, what do we have here? They
collected it. They've never looked at it. That might
hurt their case. They've never been looked at.
Police never analyzed, scientific investigation
division never looked at it. They didn't care. Might
have hurt their case.
Now, hair. Deedrick admits to you that
he can't tell you -- all he can say is, you know, I
got this hair here and I got this hair here and I
looked at them under a microscope and I saw some
things that appear to be similar.
And the characteristics that they're
talking about is the curl, things called cuticles,
there's a lot -- a long list of things about hair.
They aren't unique at all. They are very subjective.
When you talk about ovoid bodies, I think was one of
them, you remember the strands of hair with kind of
like footballs in it.
You never -- you never have an exact
match between one hair and another. Every hair is
different. Every hair on your own head, my head --
what I have left -- is different.
All you can say is that, you know, it
could come from the same person. That's all you can
say. And that ain't much. 'Cause it could come from
somebody else, too. Okay. You could say it could
come from him but it might not. And he can't tell you
how many other people it might have come from, okay.
No way to tell.
This is not significant evidence, I'll
submit to you.
And you remember Mr. Leonard when
Deedrick put his acetate over the chart and when he
says it's a match -- by the way, we're going to talk
about terminology. Match -- when he says something is
a match, doesn't mean it's the same. I mean somebody
came up to me and said, you know, this matches that, I
would -- my common sense interpretation is that means
that they're the same.
Not in forensic science. Not in forensic
science. We don't like that kind of precision. It's
a match because it could be the same or similar, could
be similar, not even the same.
And consider again how they do this.
They have two layers of whatever length, they blow it
up, magnify it 400 or 800 times I believe, and look
along the hair and see if they can find the spot that
looks similar, and that's what they take a picture of,
is that little spot. They don't show you the rest of
it. The scale of the photos that you were seeing, if
you saw the entire hair, would be all around the hair.
Okay.
Blue-black cotton fiber. The only
significance of this is that there was a blue-black
cotton fiber that could have come from the same
source. Again, maybe not. I can't say. Found on
several items. On the sock -- I forget the other
items.
And the plaintiffs spent a great deal of
time trying to establish that Mr. Simpson had a
blue-black cotton sweatsuit.
So what do we have?
They bring in Leslie Gardiner. She's
their witness who's going to come in and say that
Mr. Simpson has a blue-black cotton sweatsuit,
presumably.
And what happens?
She comes in and she's asked what kind of
material was this material that Mr. Simpson wore in
this video. Cashmere.
Cashmere isn't cotton, folks. Cashmere
comes from some other animal. I don't even know what
it looks like. But it ain't cotton.
So what happens next?
Well, the plaintiffs don't like this.
She said the wrong thing. So they bring her back.
They bring her back.
And the second time, her testimony is
different.
She's been taken to the woodshed.
She now returns and says wait a minute,
the cashmere -- let's forget the cashmere, that didn't
fit, now I remember that, now I remember that, it
didn't fit.
After she admits that what she told
Mr. Leonard in the hallway before her first testimony
is that what this item of clothing was, was a
combination of cotton and polyester fibers,
which again, is not cotton. Cotton and polyester is
cotton and polyester together; it's not cotton, and it
doesn't have any white piping down the front of it.
And it's not blue-black. Absolutely
worthless.
Bronco carpet fiber.
Do we have the Bronco carpet chart,
please.
(Board entitled Bronco Carpet,
LAPD Item 33, was displayed.)
MR. BLASIER: Mr. Petrocelli told you in his
argument that this piece of carpeting was cut out of
the Bronco on June 14 and was put away, by itself, and
sealed and/or frozen, and nothing was done to it for
some time -- I think he said until September, is my
recollection.
Look at that. That is a large piece of
carpet. That is a good-size piece of carpet. If any
one of you have cut carpet, you know that the strands
come off the sides; that's the nature of carpeting.
You cut a big piece of carpeting like that and do
anything to it, you're going to get carpet fibers.
What does LAPD do for a carpeting too big
for that bag? They roll it up in a piece of paper, a
piece of butcher paper, try to tape it up, and they
put it in a relatively small box -- we had it in here,
you remember -- with, I think it was, 43 other
evidentiary items. 43 other items: The glove, the
hat, the other items that they were going to do
comparisons on.
And lo and behold, when we get the knit
cap to the FBI in Washington, after it's been looked
at several times from the same box as that carpeting,
they find debris that came out of the knit cap, a
Bronco fiber.
Big deal. Big deal.
That is not useful evidence. That is not
the way to store evidence. If you're going to compare
two things together, you keep them apart. It's common
sense. Okay.
Real quickly, let's go to pathology.
Do you have the chart -- do we have the
Spitz chart?
MR. P. BAKER: Yeah.
MR. BLASIER: I'm going to talk briefly about
pathology.
Oh. Oh, okay.
One more thing. And hair and fiber.
MR. LEONARD: Do you need the board?
MR. BLASIER: No.
We have another chart that I meant to
show you. And this is what they didn't find in terms
of hair and fiber on articles and whatever.
And this, we submit to you, is
exculpatory evidence that's in the Bronco.
There was no hair consistent with Nicole
in the Bronco or with Ron Goldman.
In the Bronco, there was no fiber
consistent with the glove, no fiber consistent with
Mr. Goldman's clothing.
If Mr. Simpson had been in a violent
struggle with Mr. Goldman, he likely would have had
fibers from his clothing on him. And those,
presumably, could have transferred to the Bronco.
No such thing.
No fiber consistent with the dress that
Nicole was wearing, as well.
Again, been in a violent struggle with
her, with bodily contact, might expect to find that.
Doesn't exist.
Next chart.
Both gloves no hair consistent with
OJ Simpson on the Bundy glove, no hair consistent with
OJ Simpson on the Rockingham glove.
Okay.
And, by the way, we're he not contesting
that these are the murder gloves, if anybody implied
that to you. We certainly didn't.
Both gloves, no hair consistent with
OJ Simpson -- on the Bundy glove; no hair consistent
with OJ Simpson on the Rockingham glove.
The socks, no hair consistent with Ronald
Goldman, no hair consistent with Nicole Brown Simpson.
The socks fibers, no fiber consistent
with either glove, no fiber consistent with
Mr. Goldman's clothing, no fiber consistent with
Nicole Brown Simpson.
Okay.
Dr. Spitz's pathology here, I mean,
there's no big secret as to how these people died.
They were stabbed and they bled to death. That was
easy. That part was easy.
What do the pathologists here try to do
for you? They're trying to give you some information
that might help you in deciding some issues.
Time of death. The coroner wasn't called
for hours. There's just no real help here in terms of
the pathologist's ability to tell you anything.
The duration of struggle. That's one
thing that we talked about. The duration of the
event, which is another issue which we talked about,
which we think is the more important issue: Not the
duration of the struggle, but the duration of the
whole event. How long was the perpetrator or
perpetrators there? Because that's significant to
whether Mr. Simpson had time to do this clean-up, to
get home, stop his bleeding go to the airport.
So let's have the chart from Dr. Spitz.
Dr. Spitz, you will recall, was extremely
combative on cross-examination. I submit to you that
that's evidence you can consider in deciding whether
he is here as an impartial expert or whether he has a
bias.
He has the answer to how every blow was
inflected in this case in virtually every order. And
he didn't write a single note -- didn't write a single
piece of paper down, nothing -- nothing to show his
analysis. He just came in he had all the answers.
All the answers.
(Board displayed illustrates
drawing of a body dissected in
half.)
MR. BLASIER: I submit many of the scenarios
that were shown with left arm held under your chin, if
that had been the way this happened, the perpetrator
would have struck himself in the arm. But
nevertheless, this stuff has limited value. Let me
tell you folks, it has limited value.
It's up to you to decide how much you
want to put into this.
There are only a few points here to talk
about. One point I would make is that you notice
Mr. Petrocelli keeps talking about this being a rage
killing. That isn't what Dr. Spitz was seemingly
describing; he was describing something very
professional, very fast, knew what they were doing:
Killed two people in one minute, 15 seconds. That's
it. Gone.
And he says -- and the reason he
testifies that way is because they need to have a
short -- a short event, okay, in my opinion.
Now, what does he do? He comes in and he
says that the cause of death for Ronald Goldman was
the wound to the aorta and -- that's abdominal wound
in the lower back, with the knife penetrating the
aorta and the peritoneal sac -- and Mr. Goldman
bleeding to death through internal bleeding in the
space behind the retroperitoneal sac. Remember?
Dr. Baden brought in the plastic bag that
is similar to the peritoneal sac, which is very thin,
cellophane-like, which contains the abdomen. And
behind -- and the aorta runs right against it. And
behind that is the retroperitoneal space. In doctors'
terms, like we have lawyers' terms, we have a special
language.
And Dr. Spitz, his whole opinion is based
on the fact that there were, I think -- I thought he
said a quart, two quarts -- I forget the amount -- a
lot of blood in the retroperitoneal space. And his
evidence for that was this tissue picture.
Do you have that handy?
(Displaying on Elmo.
MR. BLASIER: His only evidence for it was this
piece of the aorta, which is a very small piece of
tissue, which he never looked at.
By the way, I don't believe all he had
was this picture. This does not demonstrate that
there was massive amounts of blood in the area where
he described.
And Dr. Golden, who was not brought here
by the plaintiffs, could have been, if he -- if he
disagreed -- if he agreed with Dr. Spitz, they could
have bought Dr. Golden in here.
In fact, Dr. Golden agreed with
Dr. Baden; he didn't see any massive bleeding back
there.
His only evidence is this picture of
tissue, period. That's it. That's all he has.
The autopsy report describes that wound
as one of the last wounds.
In terms of sequence in their report,
that's important. That's important.
And why is this -- why is this important
at all? It's important on the issue of the -- on the
length of this event.
Now, Dr. Baden -- and this chart, by the
way, is exceedingly misleading, because where the
knife area is, penetrates the aorta, and then
penetrates the -- there's a space there.
Would you point to that space down
between the retroperitoneal sac and the aorta?
Yeah.
There is no space there in our body; it's
right against it. It's right against it. So that
when you cut through the aorta, you're going to make
the same size cut into the abdomen.
(Mr. Leonard indicated to board.)
MR. BLASIER: There would be massive bleeding
coming from that kind of wound if there was a lot of
blood pumping through a person's body at the time that
wound was made, and you would find a lot of blood in
the and abdomen.
There wasn't. There was one to 200 cc's.
That was the whole point of that. There was not much
blood in the abdomen. And there's no evidence of
massive bleeding in the space behind that, as well.
And what can you infer from that -- and
Dr. Baden, you know, changed his times a couple of
times about how long Mr. Goldman would be standing up.
We can't tell. We don't have that.
I think Mr. Petrocelli conceded that
yesterday. We really we can't say. We can't say.
All we can tell you is that there was a
certain period of time, which Dr. Baden estimates as
five to ten -- I think maybe he had gone up to --
appears five to ten minutes between the first wound to
Mr. Goldman's neck and the last wound to the aorta.
Could it be that the perpetrator or
perpetrators, in a short struggle, inflicted all the
wounds, started to leave one of them, come back, did
the last wound? That's one inference you can draw
from that.
The importance of that evidence is the
time of the event, not the time of the struggle.
And we also note there's the issue about
blood on the perpetrators, perpetrator.
We know that there was blood transferred
between the two victims. Remember? There were -- I
believe it was 16 different transfers of Nicole Brown
Simpson's blood getting on Ron Goldman's clothing and
Ron Goldman's blood getting on Nicole Brown Simpson's
clothing.
What does that tell you?
You can infer from that, that they had
some contact; that they had some contact. That's one
thing I can infer from that reasonably circumstantial
evidence, that they had some contact during this
struggle.
Why is there no more screaming?
Can one person do this?
Can one person control these two people
who, I submit to you, were interacting, without
somebody screaming more?
I think not.
I think not.
I think one of the persons had to have
been restrained, or you would have heard evidence of
from Heidstra and other people of more struggle.
THE COURT: Ladies and gentlemen, we'll give
you a ten-minute recess.
Don't talk about the case. Don't form or
express any opinions.
(Recess.)
(Jurors resume their respective
seats.)
MR. BLASIER: Thank you, Your Honor.
CLOSING ARGUMENT (continued)
MR. BLASIER: Okay. Let me just correct one
misimpression I may have given you. Obviously, there
is significant controversy about the Bundy glove. All
that happened after -- while I was gone at Christmas.
We're not contesting that the right-hand
glove, the Rockingham glove, was part of the murder,
but there's now significant question whether what they
brought here is the Bundy glove.
MR. PETROCELLI: I object to that. He just
said they weren't contesting both gloves.
MR. BLASIER: I misspoke.
THE COURT: I agree with you.
MR. PETROCELLI: It's not a very good one.
MR. BAKER: I think his gratuitous comments
ought to be stricken. His opinions can be given to
this jury when Mr. Petrocelli has an opportunity.
MR. PETROCELLI: Talk about wood-shedding,
Mr. Baker.
THE COURT: Mr. Petrocelli --
MR. BAKER: I'm sick of his comments.
Save those for rebuttal.
MR. BLASIER: Can we go on guys?
Bring me my tinker toys.
You're going to guess what we're going to
talk about next.
MR. PETROCELLI: None of this stuff is in
evidence.
I guess if they're toys, I don't have any
objection.
MR. BAKER: Do you feel compelled to make a
comment every time, Mr. Petrocelli?
MR. PETROCELLI: Not in evidence, Your Honor.
I don't know what he's doing.
MR. BLASIER: I told them before, Your Honor.
He said these were okay.
MR. PETROCELLI: I haven't seen these.
THE COURT: You may use them. Go ahead.
MR. BLASIER: Okay.
I'd like to talk about DNA. And again,
this is a very complicated topic. And I'm going to
cover it in some detail again, so that you understand
exactly what's involved here, and what these tests do,
and what they don't do, because they've been grossly
oversold to you in terms of their value, in terms of
what they really mean.
Now, you remember that we talked with
Dr. Cotton. DNA is really a fairly simple structured
compound that's made up of what are called base pairs.
And a base pair is simply two molecules
that are attached together with, like, a little rung.
And in the DNA in all of our bodies there are only
four different kinds of these. And I've got green,
yellow, blue, and red to represent the fact that there
are only four different ones in the entire DNA chain.
And this includes DNA from every living thing.
You open a piece of spinach, look at the
DNA, same four molecules.
And they attach -- do you remember, we
were talking about how two of them always go together,
and the other two always go together, so the only
pieces you can -- possible in a DNA, in your DNA,
throughout the entire DNA, are this one and this one.
That's it.
These are the only two pieces (referring
to demonstrative objects). We talked about how you
inherit from each parent your DNA, and that the DNA
has a structure of a ladder. If it's uncoiled -- and
you remember it's all coiled up in what are called
chromosomes, and it has the structure of a ladder,
when you uncoil it -- and I've got two -- my wife and
I, my lovely wife, who is in the courtroom, spent last
night painting these and making people here. So this
is meant to represent two pieces of DNA. Okay.
Do you remember that -- just to give you
an idea of the scale of what we're talking about, the
example that I used with Dr. Cotton was if you had a
ladder that had the rungs a half an inch apart, the
DNA that you inherit from one parent would go around
the world once. Okay.
These are about 6 inches, so that's about
12 times. So that the DNA that this scale that you
inherit from each parent will go around the world 12
times. 12 times.
Now, for one person's DNA to match a
crime scene DNA, you have to have every one of these
absolutely identical, all 3 billion. Actually, 6
billion. 3 billion from each parent have to be
exactly the same.
If I do this and turn this around on one
base pair, it is a different person. These are not
the same people anymore. Okay.
Different. Any difference, if I take
this off of here, different person 'cause now it's a
little different length, okay.
And this is very important because unlike
fingerprints where all you need is to look at the
fingers and you can establish identity uniquely, the
only way to establish identity uniquely -- I mean your
DNA has to match. If you're a suspect, and the
evidence, and you match it, to be the same DNA, it's
got to have all 6 billion of these base pairs exactly
the same.
Now, in the DNA testing that we've heard
about that they refer to the forensic community they
don't look at all. And I will point out to you that
there is testimony that in humans, from one human to
another, I think it was 95, 98, 99 percent of our DNA
is the same to begin with, so it has no value for
purposes of trying to identify somebody.
But that's still leaves a lot -- a large
amount of DNA where there will be some differences
from one person to another, and so they've decided,
let's see, can we use this in some fashion to identify
people.
What a great tool for the forensic
community if we could figure out some way to look at
DNA in a way that allows us to try and identify people
in some fashion.
Well, you have been told that they can't
do it yet. I mean, they can't do it in the sense they
can't look at all the DNA; it's simply not practical.
So they've designed some tests, and the
first test I'm going to talk about is the RFLP test.
That's the one that looks at pieces of repeating DNA.
Repeating identical DNA. Make any chain back in here.
Do you remember Dr. Cotton told you that
there are areas in the DNA -- let's say in my analogy,
let's say on our ladder, and we're at the city limits
of Pittsburgh, there may be a piece of DNA like this
that may have several base pairs that repeat over and
over and over again.
In me, it might repeat 10 times.
In you, it might repeat 20 times.
And in somebody else it might repeat 50
times or 100 times.
So they use this idea that there are
parts of the DNA where you have repeating sections as
a way of identification.
How do they do it?
They've got to determine that, again,
evidence that's picked up at a crime scene, if it's
going to match a suspect, it has to be identical for
all 6 billion base pairs.
They only look at a very small amount.
Here, with a five-probe match in the RFLP
system, I think we were using an example of like
10,000 of these per probe, which is not very much when
you consider a ladder going around the world 128
times.
Five-probe is about 50,000 rungs of the
ladder. And that's all they're able to look at.
But are they able to measure that
precisely?
Well, let's check on that.
And again, the process that they go
through is they collect the DNA off the ground, and
we'll talk about -- a little bit about Andrea Mazzola
and how she -- her collection techniques, and Dennis
Fung's collection techniques.
And it's put through a many-step process,
and it's cut into pieces, and they try to measure
those areas that I told you where there's repeating
lengths, repeating sections of DNA.
Now, here's what they don't tell you.
Dan or Phil, the match window first slide
up, please.
(Document displayed on Elmo.)
MR. BLASIER: Okay. Okay.
Let's -- if they find DNA at a crime
scene, and they find this particular section again,
and they're able to do that -- they're able to do
that, they're able to locate the piece of DNA on the
borderline of Pittsburgh, or whatever, for my analogy,
they do a measurement and they come up with the
evidence at the scene measures 10,000 base pairs.
So they have 10,000 rungs of the pattern.
That's what their machinery -- that's what their test
tells them is in the evidence.
So the person who contributed that would
have to have identical DNA to that for there to be a
true match. Okay.
So then what do they do next?
They measure the suspects -- you want to
put up the next slide.
(Document displayed on Elmo.)
MR. BLASIER: Can you zoom out a little bit.
Lo and behold, they measure their
suspect, and the suspect comes back with 9,500 base
pairs. Well, "Gee, Charlie, what are we going to do
about that?" This doesn't help us very well, doesn't
look like the same person, does it?
What they do is they use what's called a
match window.
And what they say is -- put up the next
slide, please.
(Document displayed on Elmo.)
MR. BLASIER: Rather than learning how to
measure better, we're just going to say, let's give
ourselves a plus or minus two and a half percent slop
factor, to call something a match -- to call two
things a match.
And you can see from my chart -- and
Dr. Cotton, I think they said her match window was
even a little bigger than that but plus and a half --
plus and a half 2.5 percent is easy to work with the
numbers.
So that if you have a 10,000 base pair
section found at the crime scene, and the suspect has
any number of base pairs between 10,500 and 9,500,
roughly, little different statistically, but that's
close enough.
Everybody in that range is going to be
called a match.
Next slide.
(Document displayed on Elmo.)
MR. BLASIER: They all match.
Again now, listen to the terminology.
Doesn't mean they're the same.
They can't say that. They can't say that
because they can't measure it any better.
Now, I just want to make a couple points
about this terminology again.
We've heard lots of different terms used.
Some of the experts have said that -- you know, is it
possible that this could have happened? Well, yeah,
it's possible.
Possible is not very helpful at all.
That's not very helpful when an expert
says that something is possible or could have
happened. Gives you almost no information at all.
Not very precise work.
And if experts are asked questions, is it
possible, this or that, you're not getting very much
information about that.
Now, the next term, kind of on the ladder
of terminology, if you will is, is it consistent with.
And again, that terminology -- and this
is -- all this stuff is used in the forensic community
all the time; is it consistent with.
All consistent with means is, yeah, it
could have come from the same place, but then again,
it might not have.
That's all that means. It's no stronger
than that. And we've heard a lot of that.
Next term on the ladder is probable.
It's probable that this happened.
Now we're getting a little bit more
quantitative, and a little bit more precise, and now
your expert's telling you that something is probably
more likely to be this way than not.
Okay.
Then we go up to terminology like
reasonable degree of medical or forensic or scientific
certainty.
Again, that's a higher standard that
Dr. Baden talked about quite a bit, and that's like,
I'm reasonably certain as a medical expert, or
whatever, that what I'm telling you is accurate.
Then there is, this is absolutely true.
Okay. You shouldn't hear an expert say
it's absolutely true because you can't prove anything
absolutely, contrary to Mr. Petrocelli.
Now, we've gone this far. And we've got
two pieces of DNA that match, even though, again,