Bailey Says Simpson Won’t Plead Insanity : Courts: Lawyer declares defendant has alibi. He also chastises prosecutors for their public pretrial remarks.

Football legend O.J. Simpson’s defense strategy won’t include a plea of insanity in the slayings of his ex-wife and her friend, attorney F. Lee Bailey said Sunday, providing the first glimpse at how the sports hero’s bevy of high-powered attorneys could battle charges of murder.

“The defense is: If you say I did something that’s criminal, you prove it,” Bailey said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” He was one of many players on both sides of the case who have used the airwaves in recent days to woo the public--and potential jurors--to their points of view.

Last week, Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti appeared on several national television programs, including “Nightline” and “This Week With David Brinkley,” to work to press the prosecution’s case in the public’s mind.

Bailey, a new public presence on Simpson’s team of lawyers, chastised prosecutors for public predictions last week that Simpson would probably admit to the murders but would use the insanity defense to show he was not responsible for the gory deaths.

Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, another Simpson attorney in the case, had said last week that the football legend’s likely defense would be insanity. But Bailey said Dershowitz had been “sucked in” by leaks of supposed evidence that turned out not to exist.

Bailey’s comments came two weeks after the killings, which dominated Sunday morning’s three national news shows as media pundits and prosecutors rehashed the case.

In other developments:

* On CNN’s “Late Edition,” Bailey said he was not sure if prosecutors had enough evidence to hold Simpson in jail until a trial is held. “Now there is no reason to believe they can” show probable cause, Bailey said. “No evidence that turns out to be true is before the public that would amount to probable cause. They may have more. They’ll have a chance to show it.” He added that “unless they have probable cause . . . O.J. Simpson is entitled to be free.”

He also said prosecutors are pinning much of their case on DNA testing of blood samples.

* Bailey denied, among other things, news reports that bloody clothes had been found in O.J. Simpson’s washing machine.

* As jockeying continued in advance of Thursday’s preliminary hearing, former Los Angeles Rams player, actor and minister Rosey Grier visited Simpson for a second time in a week at the Men’s Central Jail.

* As many as 20 Los Angeles churches held prayer vigils for Simpson. “I don’t care what you say about O.J., O.J. needs a prayer,” the Rev. Carl Washington told the congregation at True Friendship Missionary Baptist Church.

Bailey, who has handled such high-profile cases as Patty Hearst’s, said that Simpson had a sound alibi--waiting at home for a limousine to take him to the airport--and that the Hall of Famer had said nothing to police to implicate himself.

Even as he spoke on a news show himself, Bailey berated prosecutors for their public pretrial remarks. “They have convinced the public that O.J. has no trial, (implying) he should plead guilty, he should kill himself,” Bailey scoffed.

He also was critical of the release of 911 tapes in which Nicole Brown Simpson pleaded for police help in a domestic dispute with her famous husband. “Why in the world is it necessary to take evidence of doubtful admissibility and put it in through the media without waiting to see what a judge will do? I don’t understand that.”

Despite the controversy over release of the 911 tapes, a hearing was set for today in Municipal Court on a request by news organizations for sealed documents from a 1989 case in which Simpson pleaded no contest to beating Nicole Simpson.

Bailey said domestic arguments “in the same flavor” go on all the time in hundreds of households but do not result in homicides.

He said he believed it was “very questionable” whether Simpson, who has pleaded not guilty to charges of murdering his ex-wife and her friend Ronald Lyle Goldman on June 12, could get a fair trial given the barrage of publicity.

In addition to Bailey, the spotlight Sunday was also on William Hodgman. On Saturday, the district attorney’s office disclosed a change in the prosecution team, naming a high-level official, Central Operations Division Director Hodgman, to serve as co-counsel with Deputy Dist. Atty. Marcia Clark. Hodgman joined the office in 1978 and supervises about 200 lawyers, including the district attorney’s special trials unit.

Even Hodgman’s frequent courtroom rival, attorney Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., characterized Hodgman as a formidable foe, saying he has an outstanding record of winning 80% to 90% of the cases he takes to trial.

“When I saw he had been appointed to this case, I said, ‘This time they got it right. They have a good team,’ ” noted Cochran, adding that Hodgman is also good at bringing the prosecutors and police together on a case--an important consideration because the two sides have blamed each other for releasing the 911 tapes.

“He is one of the best prosecutors in that office,” said Cochran, a leading Los Angeles defense lawyer who was an assistant district attorney when he hired Hodgman.

“He is relentless. He doesn’t ever give up.”

But others noted that Hodgman has lost at least one high-profile case, in which “Diff’rent Strokes” television star Todd Bridges was accused of shooting a convicted drug dealer, who testified that Bridges fired at him eight times at point-blank range inside a crack house. Jurors said they found witnesses in the case hard to believe.

By contrast, Hodgman secured one of the district attorney’s high-publicity victories during the last decade, successfully prosecuting former savings and loan executive Charles H. Keating Jr. for defrauding small investors and for misrepresentations that led to the $2-billion collapse of Lincoln Savings and Loan Assn., the most costly thrift failure ever.

Hodgman came late to that case, after more than half the charges in the initial 42-count indictment against Keating had been thrown out. Hodgman was credited with salvaging a complex case many legal experts thought to be hopeless. After the victory, he was named “prosecutor of the year” by the California District Attorneys Assn.

In the Keating case, Hodgman endeared himself to the jury by quickly learning their names and appearing friendlier and more at ease than Keating’s rapid-fire Chicago lawyer, who jurors said came across as a little too slick, possibly arrogant.

“He is not flashy. He may strike you as plodding in the beginning. But ultimately, he grinds you up,” said John Lynch, Hodgman’s former boss and now head deputy of the district attorney’s Santa Monica office.

Hodgman replaced Deputy Dist. Atty. David Conn, who approved the controversial release of the 911 tapes of domestic violence reports against Simpson. He returns to being co-counsel in the Menendez brothers murder case.

“Clearly, Hodgman will be the lead lawyer” on the case, said former Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner, who said he could not recall a case in which a supervisor such as Hodgman had been brought in to try a case. “This is a very unusual move. The D.A.’s office was looking for the best lawyer they could find.”

Hodgman’s strong suit, Reiner said, is to take the irregular pieces of a case and put them together for a jury “in a way that leads to only one interpretation. . . . He can take 300 facts and when he is done it looks like a clear picture.”

That will be complemented by Clark’s strengths, he said. “She is as tough as they get. She will bore in on cross-examination. She will come at them like hard steel. Hodgman’s style is really more bringing together a mosaic of facts.”