Marcia, Marcia, Marcia! Geez

The Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney, Marcia Clark, who was the lead prosecutor on the 1995 O.J. Simpson murder case, was interviewed not long ago and included as part of a promo barrage for a made-for-TV fantasy drama due to air next year.

In the interview with ET, she said, “I knew if there was a verdict, it was going to be a not guilty, and still there was that little part of me that said, ‘But they can’t! They can’t do it.'”

My reaction was, just believing a defendant is guilty isn’t enough, Marcia. You had to make the jury think so, too. Beyond a REASONABLE doubt.

Clark might have thought “The evidence was overwhelming” as she told ET, but I think there was plenty of evidence proving that she didn’t use the evidence she thinks was overwhelming to prove Simpson’s guilty beyond a reasonable doubt to the jury. Two glaring examples of what might have planted seeds of doubt in jurors’ minds are(1)  having Simpson try on gloves that were guaranteed not to go on over his latex-clad, arthritis-swollen hands, and (2) the lead detective on the case committing perjury on the witness stand.

One bit of fantasy being promoted as fact in the upcoming TV drama is this contention: Kris was often present in the courtroom with Caitlyn Jenner, formerly Bruce Jenner, as Kris’ ex-husband Robert Kardashian was a part of Simpson’s legal “Dream Team.”

All I can say is, NOT! The Jenners showed up one day very late in the trial, Sept. 27, to be exact, and sat with their buddies former Dodgers pitcher Steve Garvey and his wife. I wrote about that strange spectacle on page 67 of Anatomy of a Trial.

 

Shock Disbelief Joy Dismay Outrage

Judgment day is here.

Jurors somber, Simpson grim.

Not guilty verdicts.

10/3/95

Everything from elation to outrage erupted in the Simpson courtroom when the not-guilty verdicts were read. Those reactions exploded out of the courthouse and into the streets, through Los Angeles, up and down California, across the country and around the world. Yes, people everywhere were following the Simpson trial. In places as remote as Tibet, people knew what “the trial” was without anyone having to explain.

My own was disbelief. Weirdly, I didn’t know why. All during the trial, I swung from “It doesn’t look too good for Simpson” to “Well, I don’t know” to “Yeah, he had to have done it” to “I wonder…” Maybe it was because the jury had come back with a verdict so quickly — less than four hours. The jurors couldn’t have even selected a foreman and looked at the list of evidence in that time, much less discussed it. If I wasn’t convinced beyond a reasonable doubt, surely at least one of the jurors hadn’t been either. I later learned that even if one or more did, that didn’t matter nearly as much as getting out of the hotel where they had been sequestered for nine months and back to their homes. They had packed their bags the night before — after notifing the court that they had reached their verdicts: Not guilty of murdering Simpson’s ex-wife, Nicole Brown. Not guilty of murdering Nicole Brown’s friend Ronald Goldman.

It was easy to see the emotions on most of the faces in the courtroom. One face I couldn’t see because his back was toward me. When I did see it in TV footage later, it pretty much convinced me of Simpson’s guilt.

That was Robert Kardashian. Here are a couple of photos of him standing to Simpson’s right as the court clerk, Deirdre Robertson, reads the not guilty verdicts and a split second later. Watching the TV footage is even more telling.

 

Kardashian, who was Simpson’s longtime friend, lawyer and confidant and whose ex-wife, Kris Jenner, was supposedly Simpson’s ex-wife Nicole Brown’s good friend, obviously knew the truth.