Simpson Evidence Can Be Used, Judge Rules : Court: The crucial decision endorses police entry into the ex-athlete’s estate without a warrant. The defense will continue to contest the search.

The judge in the O.J. Simpson murder case ruled Thursday that a police entry into the superstar athlete’s home June 13 was legal, clearing the way for prosecutors to begin introducing physical evidence that they contend links Simpson to the murders of his ex-wife and a friend of hers.

Speaking to a hushed courtroom on a matter with enormous implications for the celebrated case, Municipal Judge Kathleen Kennedy-Powell endorsed the decision of police officers to leap over Simpson’s fence and enter his estate without a warrant.

Simpson’s attorneys had argued that the police violated the ex-football star’s 4th Amendment right to be secure in his home. But Kennedy-Powell found that the officers’ behavior was justified by what they found outside Simpson’s home and by the brutal murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman a few hours earlier.

“The court finds that (the officers) were in fact acting for a benevolent purpose in light of a brutal attack,” she said. “ . . . They reasonably believed that a further delay could have resulted in the unnecessary loss of life.”

The judge rejected the arguments of Simpson lawyer Gerald F. Uelmen--a former professor whose class Kennedy-Powell took years ago--that ruling in favor of the prosecution in this case would undermine the Constitution and the protection it gives to civilians against unjustified intrusions by police.

“In my mind,” she said, “the 4th Amendment is alive and well.”

Although widely predicted by legal analysts, the ruling was anxiously awaited because it could have stricken from the preliminary hearing several pieces of evidence--including a bloody glove found outside Simpson’s home and bloodstains discovered in his car and driveway. The crowd outside the courthouse gathered even earlier than usual, with one man taking his spot in line Wednesday evening to ensure that he could secure a prized seat the following morning.

In court, the tension was palpable: As Kennedy-Powell announced her ruling, Nicole Simpson’s father, Louis Brown, slumped forward, rested his head on the bench in front of him, and wept.

Later, Brown said through an intermediary that he was crying with relief that the judge had allowed the evidence to be considered.

Led by Uelmen, Simpson’s attorneys had sharply criticized the conduct of the officers. They suggested that the police went to Simpson’s home believing that he was a suspect and only later pretended to have been concerned with the welfare of the occupants of the estate. Kennedy-Powell disagreed.

Far from criticizing the police for entering Simpson’s property without a warrant, she praised the officers for trying to notify the celebrity of his ex-wife’s death and for trying to arrange for his two young children to be picked up from the police station, where they were taken after the bodies were discovered.

“The place for two small children whose mother has been murdered is not at the police station, sitting in a corner drawing pictures on a tablet,” Kennedy-Powell said. “The place for those kids is with their family.”

Once at the scene, officers first tried to raise someone by using the bell, she added. And only after they had failed to do that and had discovered a small stain they believed to be blood did they decide to jump the fence, she said, echoing the testimony of two police officers.

Just as important, Kennedy-Powell said, the officers did not conduct an extensive search once they were on the property but instead confined themselves to searching for additional victims who might be dead or injured on the grounds.

“This would be a very easy decision for me if in fact these officers went in there like storm troopers, fanning out over the property, examining every leaf, every car, every closet, every nook and cranny of this location,” she said. “But the testimony as elicited by the officers, and as supported by the witnesses who testified on behalf of the defense, show that this was not what happened.”

After the hearing, Uelmen said Simpson’s team of lawyers would renew its objections to the search and to a warrant that was subsequently obtained if Simpson is ordered to stand trial in Superior Court. Uelmen said he expects the motion to receive an extensive hearing at that stage of the case.

“I felt very confident in our position. I still do,” said attorney Robert L. Shapiro, who signed autographs as he waited for Thursday’s hearing to begin.

Although several legal experts said they believed that the legal challenge mounted by Simpson’s attorneys had merit, they expressed doubt that another judge will overturn Kennedy-Powell’s decision.

“Their chances are next to zero,” said Peter Arenella, a UCLA law professor who has been monitoring the hearing. Barring new evidence, he added, a Superior Court judge would almost certainly defer to Kennedy-Powell’s analysis of the facts because she heard the testimony herself.

Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., one of Los Angeles’ best known lawyers and a friend of Simpson, agreed, saying that Kennedy-Powell’s ruling would make it extremely difficult for the athlete’s lawyers to win this issue should they raise it later in the case.

“She found the officers credible,” Cochran said. “No Superior Court judge is going to touch that. . . . She effectively denied the motion and at the same time made it extremely difficult for anyone to overturn this.”

Armed with Kennedy-Powell’s ruling, prosecutors immediately plunged forward with the heart of their case, laying the groundwork for the introduction of blood samples recovered from Simpson’s home and the murder scene. To do that, they called a number of police investigators and others to establish the chain of physical evidence.

That is standard practice in criminal cases, and prosecutors undertook it in an attempt to prevent Simpson’s attorneys from arguing that blood or other samples were contaminated by sloppy handling. Shapiro has hammered on what he has called careless handling of some aspects of the investigation, repeatedly grilling police officers about missing reports or leads that were not pursued.

As prosecutors sought to establish that the evidence was properly handled, they first called Detective Tom Lange, one of two lead investigators assigned to the case. Lange, a soft-spoken LAPD veteran who negotiated with Simpson during the celebrity’s low-speed flight along Southern California freeways three weeks ago, described the grim scene that confronted him and other investigators on South Bundy Drive in the early morning of June 13.

Under questioning by Deputy Dist. Atty. Marcia Clark, Lange leafed through a stack of small photographs of the scene of the crime. On the hearing’s first day, prosecutors had displayed large photographs of the scene, but since then have turned to smaller ones that are not visible to audience members or to Simpson.

Although the photographs were shown to Shapiro before being shown to witnesses, Simpson did not glance at them even though he sits within inches of his lead attorney. When the photographs of Nicole Simpson’s body lying in a pool of blood were briefly unveiled in court last week, Simpson winced, stared at the ceiling and gasped for breath.

On Thursday, Lange reviewed photographs of the grisly scene and recounted what awaited him when he arrived there about 4:30 the morning after the killings. He said he saw two bodies--Nicole Simpson’s on the walkway at the foot of three steps and Goldman’s slumped beneath a tree off to one side.

In addition, Lange recalled spotting a white envelope lying at the feet of Goldman, a blue knit cap also near Goldman, a dark brown leather glove and a ring containing five keys. The bodies were surrounded by large pools of blood, Lange said, and an animal had tracked through it.

Leading away from the scene, Lange added, was a trail of shoe prints, to the left of which were a series of thick blood drops.

Those drops and their location to the left of the footprints are potentially of great importance to the prosecution because when Simpson was questioned by police the day after the murders, he had at least one cut on his left hand, an injury to the main knuckle of his middle finger--a picture of which was displayed in court.

On the day of Simpson’s arraignment, Shapiro said that his client had two cuts on his left hand and a number of smaller scratches, which he compared to “paper cuts.”

Investigators believe that Simpson suffered at least one of those cuts in a fierce fight with Goldman. Shapiro and Simpson’s previous attorney, Howard Weitzman, said they actually were the result of Simpson smashing a glass in a Chicago hotel room when he learned of his ex-wife’s slaying.

Detective Philip L. Vannatter, one of two lead investigators in the case and a familiar sight on the witness stand in recent days, testified again Thursday and said that when he first saw Simpson on the day after the slayings, he noticed a bandage on the middle finger of the athlete-turned-actor’s left hand.

Vannatter, who was busily collecting blood samples from Simpson’s home and the murder scene, spotted the injury when the athlete returned home from Chicago. Once they were at police headquarters, Vannatter said he asked Simpson for a blood sample. According to Vannatter, Simpson agreed.

Although Vannatter said he believes that the person who committed the murders wore gloves--losing one at the scene and dropping the other one on a dark walkway at the Simpson estate--that account was aggressively challenged by Shapiro, who pointedly cross-examined the detective for the second straight day.

Under questioning from Shapiro, Vannatter conceded that there is no slice in the left glove, even though he contended that the assailant was wearing gloves at the time of the attack. That disclosure raises questions about how Simpson’s hand was cut without the glove being sliced as well.

As he has throughout the preliminary hearing, Shapiro derided the handling of some of the evidence, noting, for instance, that a representative of the media managed to put a cup of coffee on the hood of Simpson’s Ford Bronco while the car was parked in front of the former athlete’s Brentwood mansion. By attacking the handling of certain evidence, Shapiro was attempting to show that the Bronco could have been tampered with and is therefore unreliable as evidence.

At one point, Shapiro sarcastically set out to suggest that Vannatter had failed to protect evidence from the car by allowing it to be towed away: “So as one of the lead homicide detectives in the Los Angeles Police Department, you feel secure that you can leave the scene, have an unknown tow-truck driver come hook up the . . . “

Clark interrupted with an objection, calling Shapiro’s question argumentative.

“I haven’t even finished,” he responded. “It gets better.”

In aggressive questioning of both detectives, Shapiro also questioned why they had not interviewed the caller who first alerted them to the possibility of trouble outside Nicole Simpson’s condominium and why certain reports had not been completed. Although Lange and Vannatter each defended their actions and those of other officers, Shapiro returned again and again to those issues in an effort to raise doubts about the competence of the police investigation.

On the stand Thursday, both detectives described their handling of various blood samples, insisting that all of them were carefully labeled and protected. A registered nurse who works at the Police Department’s Downtown jail even testified about taking blood from Simpson. The nurse stressed that he had decades of experience in performing that routine procedure and that nothing went awry that day.

But all that testimony is the prelude to the main event: determining whether any blood that matches Simpson’s was found at the murder scene or whether any blood that matches the victims’ was found at his home two miles away. Either finding would figure heavily in the case against him.

Police sources have said that blood samples recovered from the scene of the crime match Simpson’s blood type. More rigorous testing also has been performed in an attempt to narrow the number of people whose blood could match that found at the scene.

The most precise type of testing, DNA analysis, can strongly point to a suspect, sometimes establishing million-to-one odds against the samples being from different people. Although DNA testing is being performed on the samples in this case, that process is not completed and prosecutors do not intend to use preliminary DNA results in this hearing, where they do not need to prove Simpson guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

The preliminary hearing is merely to determine whether there is enough evidence to have Simpson stand trial for the murders.

As the court day closed Thursday, prosecutors appeared on the verge of eliciting the first testimony linking blood samples at the crime scene to Simpson. Gregory Matheson, a supervising criminalist at the LAPD crime lab, spent half an hour on the stand establishing his credentials and reviewing the testing procedures used on blood.

Near the end of his testimony, Matheson said he tested four blood samples June 27. Three of those were from the victims and Simpson. The fourth was from one of the blood drops that fell to the left of the bloody footprints leading away from the murder scene, Matheson said.

But before he could say anything about that blood sample and whether it matched the characteristics of Simpson’s blood, Kennedy-Powell recessed court for the day. It resumes today, the sixth day of testimony in a hearing that has attracted millions of viewers nationwide.