A Reluctant Headliner : Deputy D.A. Marcia Clark Likes the Challenge of High-Profile Cases--but Not the Publicity

After police and crime scene experts had gathered all their evidence, Deputy Dist. Atty. Marcia Clark sent them back to check a seemingly innocuous and overlooked item for fingerprints.

Although they did what she wanted a bit grudgingly, the veteran prosecutor’s thoroughness paid off. The prints played a central role in Clark winning a conviction in a double murder trial last year.

“Her mind is always clicking,” said Sheriff’s Sgt. Dirk Edmundson, a homicide detective who worked with Clark on that case. “She likes the challenge. She likes making the case.”

Now Clark will be trying to make the most important case of her career, and the nation will be watching. Experts estimate that as many as one in four U.S. homes tuned in to the opening day of O.J. Simpson’s preliminary hearing, in which Clark has taken the lead role. Her boss, Deputy Dist. Atty. William W. Hodgman, is backing her up as co-counsel.

Clark has already sparred openly and frequently with Simpson’s lead defense attorney, Robert L. Shapiro, both in and out of court. She has engaged in some theatrics during the first two days of the preliminary hearing, at times calmly but sarcastically lecturing Shapiro on the finer points of law and evidence gathering. But Clark has done so only to protect her case and the evidence that she hopes will bolster it, say those who know and have worked with her.

“I don’t think she particularly cares for publicity. That is not her style,” Edmundson said. “But she will counterpunch very well with someone who is a grandstander. She can counterpunch with the best of them.”

Her brash, polished and confident courtroom demeanor has been praised by those who have worked with and against Clark since she joined the district attorney’s office in 1981. But those who know Clark say her success in a series of high-profile cases lies not just in the courtroom, but outside as well.

She is particularly adept, they say, in getting police, witnesses, legal scholars and evidentiary experts to help her build an airtight case. By doing so, they say, she can anticipate the moves of defense lawyers so well that she can easily outmaneuver them once the courtroom battle ensues.

“She is aggressive, she is smart, she is fair and she is extremely honest,” said Superior Court Judge Dino Fulgoni, a former prosecutor for almost 28 years. “Probably what stands out most is her dedication and her desire to find out everything about a case. When she goes into a trial, she figures out what the defense is most likely to do and prepares a counter to it.”

In Clark’s most high-profile trial before the Simpson case, she persuaded Fulgoni in a 1991 non-jury trial to not only convict obsessed fan Robert John Bardo of fatally shooting actress Rebecca Schaeffer after stalking her, but to send him to Death Row. When the defense put nationally renowned psychiatrist Park Dietz on the stand to say Bardo acted in a moment of unpremeditated rage, Clark had her counterattack planned.

“It was quite obvious that when (Dietz) would try to divert her, she not only understood what he was doing but was way ahead of him and had a counter tactic,” Fulgoni said.

Few who have worked with or against Clark have anything bad to say about her, except that her tenacity, her zeal to prosecute the perfect case and her demands can be overly taxing. But even they concede that in the end, Clark has won prosecutions in cases where others may not have and has won tougher sentences.

They note that police have been sent out to look for more clues and evidence to tie the former football great to the slayings of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Lyle Goldman.

During the preliminary hearing, Clark has appeared calm, collected and in control of the situation, despite facing a highly touted legal defense team, including Shapiro, Gerald Uelmen, F. Lee Bailey and Alan Dershowitz.

She has done most of the talking, even though Hodgman has tried twice as many murder cases (more than 40) and is her boss as director of central operations for the district attorney’s office.

While associates say Hodgman is genial and almost professorial, Clark is routinely described as “hard as nails” and “in your face,” particularly by adversaries.

“Marcia is an outstanding trial lawyer, effective in all phases of trial work,” said Barry Levin, a defense attorney who fought Clark for 20 months in a murder case and lost. “She is what a prosecutor should be. She is tough, she is fair and you can’t intimidate her. I know. I tried to do that many times.”

But those who know her also say she is highly intelligent, quiet and sensitive, with a keen sense of humor and an ability to get along well with everyone.

Clark, 41, is a graduate of UCLA with a degree in political science. After graduating in 1974, she attended the Southwestern University School of Law, receiving her law degree in 1979 and passing the Bar the same year. After two years in private practice with a highly touted criminal defense firm, she became a prosecutor.

Clark appears to relish a good courtroom battle. Edmundson, the sheriff’s homicide investigator, remembers when Clark geared up to work on the earlier double-murder case, in which two Russian nationals were charged.

“It was almost like in sports, when you get an adrenaline rush before a big game,” he said. “She got that hungry look, like a rush was coming on.”

Besides the Bardo case, Clark has won convictions in a number of high-profile cases, including that of Albert Lewis and Anthony Oliver, half brothers who in 1989 used a sawed-off shotgun to fire into a Bible class at the Mt. Olive Church of God in South-Central Los Angeles, killing two.

Clark also helped handle the successful two-year prosecution of James Hawkins Jr., a onetime Watts folk hero convicted and sentenced to life in prison for drug-related slayings. She also helped obtain convictions against four defendants accused in the 1985 murders of a UCLA student and her boyfriend.

Clark has steadfastly kept her personal life private. Those who have worked closely with her say they know little about her outside life, except that she is married and has at least one young child and that she once was a professional dancer.

Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti said Friday that he picked Clark for one of his office’s highest profile cases because she “simply is a special talent as a trial lawyer.”

“The bottom line is that she is remarkably effective as a trial advocate,” Garcetti said. “She is very fair, but at the same time, she doesn’t let anyone push her around.”

But even Garcetti said he knows so little about Clark that he does not know if she has a family.

“She is an incredibly hard worker,” he said. “She is married to the district attorney’s office.”