Simpson To Testify
SANTA MONICA, Nov. 15 (Evening) -- O.J. Simpson is scheduled to take the witness stand in his civil trial on Friday, Nov. 22. He will testify until Tuesday, Nov. 26, when the court breaks for Thanksgiving. Although Simpson is in the midst of a custody case in Orange, Calif., the judge in that trial agreed to the plaintiffs' lawyers request that Simpson be freed to testify here in Santa Monica.
Simpson's testimony will cap off a week where the plaintiffs plan to present witnesses who are expected to identify the shoes used by the killer as size-12 Bruno Magli; relate various incidents of domestic violence; including Nicole Brown Simpson's now-infamous 911 recording; and discuss Simpson's whereabouts on June 12, 1994.
Before Simpson, scheduled witnesses are: criminalist Collin Yamauchi; FBI shoe print expert William Bodziak; 911 operator Sharon Gilbert; and two LAPD officers and one former officer who responded to domestic violence calls involving the defendant. These witnesses will be followed by Kato Kaelin and limousine driver Allan Park.
In the morning session Friday, Judge Hiroshi Fujisaki dismissed an alternate juror for repeatedly sleeping during the proceedings, Friday morning in the O.J. Simpson civil trial. On the witness stand, DNA analyst Gary Sims finished his testimony about blood evidence in the case.
The dismissed alternate juror is a 19-year-old student. During the voir dire process, she said that Simpson could have been a batterer, but that did not mean he was necessarily a murderer. The young woman is the second alternate juror to be dismissed, leaving six alternates left.
Defense attorney Robert Baker asked for the juror's dismissal after her heavy lids provoked Judge Fujisaki to order a ten-minute recess Thursday and sarcastically call Robert Blasier's cross-examination "scintillating."
During a sidebar conference after the recess, Judge Fujisaki said that he, too, noticed the alternate sleeping in court. "I am quite troubled with her sleeping through," Fujisaki said. "She seems to have some sort of metabolic problem that causes her to have an inability to stay awake."
Also during the sidebar, both Baker and Petrocelli pointed out that another juror -- the only African American on the 12-member panel -- also snoozed during testimony. Fujisaki said he would "keep a further eye on her."
In testimony during the morning session, defense attorney Blasier sharply questioned Sims about whether blood on the socks from Simpson's room and on the back gate of Bundy could have been planted. Of all the 108 items of evidence analyzed by Sims' lab -- the California Department of Justice DNA laboratory -- the socks and the gate had the most DNA on them, Blasier noted. Yet the blood on both was found, or collected, a number of weeks after the murders.
Blasier also used Sims to counter the plaintiffs theory that Nicole Brown Simpson's blood on the socks could not have been planted because it was richer in DNA than the blood in her sample vial. But Sims noted that DNA degrades in a liquid blood sample faster than it would if it dried on a thin fiber, such as the socks.
Simpson, who has not been in court all week because of his custody trial and his mother's knee surgery, was in court this morning. He left during the 11:00 a.m. break.
Court reconvened for a short time this afternoon so the plaintiffs could read into evidence "requests for admissions"-- the defense's responses to questions posed by plaintiffs' attorneys about whether or not certain facts in the case are true. Running contrary to their argument that DNA is not an exact science, the defense agreed that many of the DNA results matched the DNA types of Simpson and the two victims.
Defense admissions included: the blood on the back gate and front walk of the Bundy crime scene matched Simpson's DNA, some of the drops in Simpson's Bronco matched DNA types of Simpson, Ronald Goldman, and Nicole Brown Simpson; and the blood on the sock found in Simpson's bedroom had DNA that matched O.J. Simpson and Nicole Brown Simpson.
By agreeing that the blood testing showed a match, defense lawyers are not giving up their theories that blood might have been planted or contaminated. They are not conceding that his blood was at the crime scene.
Robert Schmidt
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