Debate Intense on Simpson Evidence; Crucial Ruling Due : Court: The defense argues that entry onto the estate was illegal. Prosecutor says the police would have been pilloried if they had failed to act.

By ANDREA FORD and JIM NEWTON

July 7, 1994 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITERS

Prosecutors and lawyers for O.J. Simpson squared off Wednesday in a dramatic, high-stakes legal battle over evidence seized from the celebrity’s home, with one side defending the actions of the police and the other accusing them of illegally entering Simpson’s estate.

Municipal Judge Kathleen Kennedy-Powell said she would rule on the matter this morning. Her ruling is likely to play a crucial role in how the case unfolds, as a number of important pieces of evidence hang in the balance.

Among the witnesses who testified Wednesday was Simpson’s 25-year-old daughter, Arnelle Simpson, who smiled and winked at her father after she left the stand and passed the table where he was sitting. In her testimony, she said she was sleeping at her father’s estate in Brentwood when police jumped over a fence before dawn on June 13--providing the grist for the spirited constitutional debate on the legality of the officers’ subsequent search.

Defense attorney Gerald F. Uelmen argued that when police officers jumped the fence, they violated Simpson’s constitutional right to be secure in his home. Uelmen alleged that police then manufactured an excuse for that entry by pretending that they believed that more victims might be inside.

Uelmen, a former law school dean and ex-federal prosecutor, belittled the primary piece of evidence that officers cited to justify their decision to jump the wall and enter Simpson’s estate--a small bloodstain found on the door of a Ford Bronco parked on the street. That stain, which Uelmen called a “speck,” was “just as consistent with a dripping taco or a driver with a hangnail as with any circumstances of murder, suicide or bleeding victims on the premises,” he said.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Marcia Clark countered by saying that the officers had just arrived from the scene where the bodies of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman had been discovered lying in pools of their own blood. With that scene fresh in their minds, she argued, the officers would have been negligent had they not entered a home when they had reason to believe that there could be other victims either dead or injured--a fear that they said they developed after seeing the blood on the car and several other suspicious signs outside the house.

Had the officers failed to act, she said, they would have been rightly pilloried.

“We would have said they were derelict,” said Clark, pacing in front of the lectern in a courtroom where the nation’s attention has been focused for the past week. “We would have said they were incompetent. . . . Instead, they did fulfill their duties.”

The intensity of Wednesday’s arguments reflected the magnitude of the stakes in the debate over how police came upon evidence at the Simpson estate, using it to help obtain a search warrant a few hours later. Among the disputed pieces of evidence are a bloodstained glove, bloodstains on Simpson’s driveway and more bloodstains found on the athlete’s Ford Bronco, parked outside.

Prosecutors have indicated that they hope to introduce that evidence during the preliminary hearing. Other evidence seized at the home includes stains found in Simpson’s upstairs bedroom and bathroom.

Although those items were not debated Wednesday, they too could be lost to prosecutors if Judge Kennedy-Powell finds that the initial entry into Simpson’s home violated the 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which protects the rights of all citizens to be safe and secure in their homes and prevents unlawful searches by police officers.

In his closing statement on the search issue, Uelmen stressed the importance of the 4th Amendment as a brake on police conduct, and, in an unusual acknowledgment of the intense public interest in the Simpson case, he urged the judge not to be swayed by people outside the courtroom.

“I know and Your Honor knows that the pundits and the cynics who are following this case suggest that this case is too high profile a case for a motion to suppress to be granted,” Uelmen said. “We do not share that cynicism. I think it’s important for us to bear in mind that what is at issue here is the application of an exclusionary rule whose purpose is to teach. What better vehicle do we have to teach the lesson that the 4th Amendment is alive and well in Los Angeles.”

Where Uelmen’s argument was rich in history and in the vitality of the 4th Amendment, Clark’s was deeply rooted in the practicalities of police work. Clark, who never refers in court to Simpson by name but only as “the defendant,” argued that detectives were faced with difficult choices and had to act quickly to preserve human life.

Their primary motivation when they jumped the wall, she said, was not to gather evidence but to protect residents of Simpson’s home from the grisly fate that had befallen Nicole Simpson and Goldman just two miles away. Although officers did spot evidence after entering the grounds, all that evidence was in sight and thus legally admissible, she argued.

Clark commended the eloquence and passion of Uelmen’s presentation, but she accused him of overstating the officers’ actions when they entered Simpson’s property.

“He attempts to depict in very graphic terms the search or the activities that were conducted at the location of 360 Rockingham as though a Sherman tank were being driven through the back yard and being plowed in through the doors,” Clark said. “In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.”

Legal experts watching the hearing praised the lawyers for both sides and agreed that the stakes are enormously high. Loyola Law School professor and former federal prosecutor Samuel H. Pillsbury said he expects an appeal from whichever side loses.

“It’s almost the kind of question you use for a law school exam because there is a good deal to argue on both sides,” he said.

Leo Terrell, a longtime civil rights lawyer who often files suppression motions related to alleged police misconduct, described the two arguments as “the professor versus the litigator.”

“The professor cited constitutional case law,” Terrell said. “I thought that Clark may have been the more aggressive in her presentation, but the substance of Uelmen’s comments were more persuasive. A judge is not going to be swayed by flair or dramatics.”

Nevertheless, Terrell believed that the prosecution would win the right to introduce the disputed evidence because of current legal trends.

Attorney Harland W. Braun, who defended one of the officers accused of beating Rodney G. King, praised Uelmen’s presentation but also predicted that prosecutors will prevail.

“The officers did basically what we would expect,” he said. “If they come to my house and find blood on the door, I’d want them to knock down the door. . . . It’s really stretching it to say these guys acted illegally.”

Although motions to suppress evidence are rarely granted, Simpson’s lawyers have waged an intense effort, and the issue dominated court sessions Tuesday and Wednesday.

Fighting back, prosecutors filed a 25-page document opposing the motion and called two police officers to the stand to explain their actions on the morning of June 13. It was about 5 a.m. that day when detectives said they arrived at Simpson’s house to tell him of the slayings and to have him take care of his two children, who were left motherless when Nicole Simpson was killed outside her condominium as they slept inside.

Detective Mark Fuhrman from the LAPD’s West Los Angeles Division was the first to testify on the issue of the search, repeatedly stressing that the officers were genuinely concerned about the safety of the home’s occupants and the possibility that the killer could be in the area.

Fuhrman, who found the glove, said the four detectives who let themselves onto Simpson’s estate after failing to raise anyone inside were confronted with frightening uncertainties.

At one point, Fuhrman said, he was forced to explore a long, dark walkway with a small flashlight and no bulletproof vest. When he came upon the glove, he said, “my heart started pounding. I realized what I had found. . . . I was kind of taken aback by the whole event. We didn’t go up there for this.”

Fuhrman’s testimony was echoed by that of Detective Philip L. Vannatter, one of two lead investigators in the case.

Vannatter, a craggy-faced homicide detective with more than 200 cases under his belt, spent much of his time on the stand in a testy faceoff with Robert L. Shapiro, the well-known lawyer who has represented numerous celebrities and heads Simpson’s high-profile team of attorneys.

Shapiro wasted no time attacking the detective, opening his questioning of Vannatter by immediately challenging the way in which the LAPD has handled its investigation.

“We will show that improper procedures were followed from the very beginning of this investigation,” Shapiro said, “that times, dates and records of events that should be recorded are not recorded. . . . And quite frankly, Your Honor, this will go to the credibility of Detective Vannatter.”

From that point on, Shapiro questioned nearly every detail of the detective’s account, focusing on his decision to send a colleague over a wall and onto Simpson’s property without a search warrant--a decision that Vannatter said he made after discovering what appeared to be blood on a car belonging to Simpson and fearing that more victims might be inside the athlete’s mansion.

Vannatter, who works as a homicide specialist in the department’s robbery-homicide division, initially was questioned by Clark, and he calmly explained his actions.

Under questioning from her, the detective stressed over and over that investigators did not go to Simpson’s house in search of a suspect but rather because they wanted to notify him of his ex-wife’s death and advise him that his children were at the police station.

Only after getting no answer from a gate intercom and seeing such things as what they believed was blood on Simpson’s Ford Bronco did Vannatter say that he made a decision to go onto Simpson’s estate without a warrant.

“I was concerned that something had occurred there, whether I had a second murder scene, whether I had someone injured, whether I had someone that was stalking Mr. Simpson and his wife,” Vannatter said. “Whatever, I had become concerned that someone could be hurt or injured in that location.”

But Shapiro attacked Vannatter’s account, suggesting that investigators actually went to Simpson’s home because they believed he had committed the murders and that they only now are claiming to have had other motives to justify their decision to enter the property.

Shapiro also accused Vannatter of lying when he drafted a search warrant later used to conduct a search of the house and grounds.

At times, both the veteran detective and the high-profile lawyer grew short-tempered, resorting to sarcasm and sniping.

When Vannatter said detectives were concerned that no one was coming to the door in part because they had been told that Simpson had a live-in maid, Shapiro asked: “Does a full-time, live-in maid to you mean seven days a week, 24 hours a day?”

“I don’t know, sir,” Vannatter responded. “I’ve never had a maid.”

Later Wednesday, however, Simpson’s daughter cast doubt on Vannatter’s insistence that police were concerned with the maid’s safety.

Speaking softly and glancing occasionally at her father, Arnelle Simpson said police had awakened her about 5:30 a.m. and had solicited her help in locating her father. Although she testified that officers asked about the maid, she said they seemed more preoccupied with locating her father.

Although Wednesday was devoted to the issue of the police search, prosecutors also revealed a few new nuggets in their case that are sure to figure in the days ahead, as the closely watched preliminary hearing continues and the judge weighs whether there is enough evidence to order Simpson to stand trial.

Early Wednesday, prosecutors announced that they will seek to introduce during the preliminary hearing blood droplets from Simpson’s driveway, a pair of bloodstained gloves, bloodstains on his car, and blood recovered from the scene of the crime. Those pieces of physical evidence in many ways form the backbone of the prosecution case, meshing with witness accounts of Simpson’s whereabouts in an effort to show that he was at the scene of the slayings, which occurred June 12.

Vannatter disclosed that a string of blood spots leading away from the murder scene ran along the left side of bloody footprints.

That last, seemingly small, detail could prove important because Simpson’s lawyer has said the athlete has at least two cuts on his left hand--as well as a number of scratches that Shapiro described as “paper cuts.”

Armed with coroner’s findings that suggest a fierce struggle at the scene, investigators believe that Simpson suffered most of those injuries in a battle with Goldman.

Simpson’s attorneys contend that at least one of the cuts was suffered in Chicago, when they say Simpson smashed a glass into a counter upon learning that his ex-wife had been murdered.

* RELATED STORIES: A4, A5

The Evidence at Stake

Defense attorneys for O.J. Simpson are trying to suppress some of the evidence seized at the O.J. Simpson estate soon after the murders. Some of the items could be thrown out by the judge today. Here are the approximate locations of some of the items taken by police:

OUTSIDE

A) Wood stick

B) Cigarette butt

C) Red stains

D) Red stains

E) Brown leather glove with red stains

F) Blue plastic bag

G) Red stain found 5 feet up on wire

INSIDE HOUSE

H) Red stain in foyer

I) Two navy blue socks from master bedroom (not shown on diagram)

J) Red stain on master bedroom floor (not shown on diagram)