Judge Cites ‘Ample Evidence,’ Orders Simpson to Stand Trial : Court: Criminalist testifies that blood drop found at crime scene matches former athlete’s type. Defense attorney says he will push for an early trial date.

Football great O.J. Simpson must stand trial for the murders of his ex-wife and a friend of hers, a Municipal Court judge ruled Friday, setting the stage for a spectacle that could send the superstar to Death Row.

“The court has carefully considered the evidence in this case and the arguments of counsel,” said Municipal Judge Kathleen Kennedy-Powell as a six-day preliminary hearing televised across the nation came to a close. “The court feels that there is ample evidence to establish the strong suspicion of the guilt of the accused.”

Speaking from the bench, Kennedy-Powell directed the somber-faced Simpson, dressed in a dark suit and maroon tie, to stand. She then informed him that “there is sufficient cause to believe this defendant guilty” of the murder charges against him and ordered him to be arraigned in Superior Court on July 22.

Until then, he will be held without bail at the Men’s Central Jail, where he has been locked up since his arrest last month.

When the hearing concluded, family members of Nicole Brown Simpson left arm-in-arm, followed by those of Ronald Lyle Goldman, who also huddled close together for comfort. Simpson, who turns 47 today, was taken away in handcuffs.

He could come to trial as early as mid-September. Although declining to comment in detail, Simpson attorney Robert L. Shapiro said he will seek a speedy trial.

“We are going to have the trial in a very short period of time,” he said as he ducked into his car to avoid a crush of reporters outside the Criminal Courts Building in Downtown Los Angeles. “We are going to start working tonight. We are not going to waste time.”

At a news conference after the hearing, Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti said his team of prosecutors will be ready to begin in September if Simpson’s lawyers exercise their right to insist upon a trial within 60 days of his Superior Court arraignment.

In court, Simpson sat impassively as Kennedy-Powell announced her decision, which had been predicted by experienced lawyers but vigorously contested by Simpson’s high-profile legal team. For the past six days, they subjected prosecution witnesses to intense cross-examination and accused police of illegally searching Simpson’s home in the hours after the murders.

They lost that effort, and on the hearing’s final, climactic day, a police scientific analyst testified that a blood drop found at the scene of the crime matched Simpson’s blood type in several important respects. That was the first time that physical evidence has been presented in court linking Simpson to the scene of the crime. The analyst, LAPD crime lab supervisor Gregory Matheson, said the blood sample narrows the list of people who possibly could have left that drop to as few as 1 in 200.

A deputy medical examiner who performed the autopsies in the case followed Matheson to the stand and, using drawings, described in grim detail the many wounds inflicted on Goldman and Nicole Simpson, who were found lying in deep pools of blood on June 13. The examiner, Dr. Irwin L. Golden, noted that both victims suffered gashes across their necks and numerous wounds on their hands, an indication that they tried to fend off the thrusts of the assailant’s weapon.

He also for the first time raised the possibility that more than one weapon might have been used in the attacks, noting that at least some of the wounds appeared different than the majority of cuts.

The testimony by Friday’s witnesses capped a preliminary hearing in which prosecutors introduced a pair of bloody gloves--one found at the murder scene, one on a walkway behind Simpson’s home--as well as bloodstains taken from his car and driveway. The district attorney’s office also pounded away at Simpson’s alibi by introducing witnesses who suggested that the murders may have occurred as early as 10:15 p.m. or 10:20 p.m. on June 12--testimony that challenged the contention of Simpson’s attorneys, who said their client could not have committed the murders in part because he was home waiting for a limousine at 11 p.m.

For their part, Simpson’s lawyers attacked the credibility of witnesses and accused the police of mishandling the investigation. On Friday, they also raised questions about the coroner’s work, noting that medical examiners waited hours before performing tests that might have more closely pinpointed the time of death.

In a last-ditch effort to have the case dismissed without a trial, Shapiro urged Kennedy-Powell to toss out the case because the prosecution theory linking Simpson to the crime “just doesn’t stand up to logic.” Shapiro based that argument largely on what he said were holes in the prosecution cases.

To have committed the crime, Shapiro said, Simpson would have had less than an hour to kill two victims, abandon his bloody clothing, dispose of the murder weapon and a pair of bloody shoes “and then go back to his house and leave a bloody glove in his back yard.”

Shapiro, his voice rising, also launched a two-prong challenge to the testimony indicating that a blood sample from the crime scene matches Simpson’s blood type. First, he said, tens of thousands of people in Los Angeles alone have blood with the same characteristics; and, second, even if it does turn out to be Simpson’s blood at the scene, the location also was the home of his children, which he visited often. Simpson therefore could have cut himself on another occasion, explaining the blood droplets, Shapiro said.

Shapiro also raised the possibility that other suspects may be under investigation because a police detective testified Thursday that new leads continue to arrive all the time and that the investigation continues. But police sources said Friday that there is not any other suspect being sought, an assessment with which Garcetti concurred at his news conference.

When it came her time to address the court Friday afternoon, Deputy Dist. Atty. Marcia Clark, who has sparred with Shapiro since even before the hearing began, said her adversary’s closing remarks typically misrepresented the case against Simpson.

“The evidence is consistent and very powerful,” she said, “even at this early stage of the case to indicate that the defendant has indeed committed every crime that he is charged with.”

Clark conceded that the blood tests presented in court Friday do not single out Simpson as the only possible suspect in the case. But when combined with other evidence, such as the matching bloody glove found at his house and the circumstances surrounding his whereabouts during the hour that prosecutors believe the killings took place, Clark said, “virtually everyone except for the defendant” can be eliminated as a suspect.

The prosecution built its case methodically over the past week, an unusual approach to a preliminary hearing because prosecutors often present only minimal evidence in those proceedings. But with the nation watching, they called witness after witness, following what Clark described as a “trail of blood” leading from the crime scene and picking up at Simpson’s house. They left the most important evidence for the hearing’s final hours.

Matheson, a supervisor at the Los Angeles Police Department crime lab, provided the cornerstone of the prosecution’s physical evidence, and his testimony had been interrupted late Thursday when court recessed for the day without him getting the chance to detail the results of any blood tests.

That left an air of suspense hanging over the proceedings when they reconvened Friday morning. But Clark quickly dispelled it by moving Matheson to the heart of his testimony.

Under questioning from Clark, Matheson produced a chart detailing specifics of the blood types of O.J. Simpson, Nicole Simpson, Goldman and a sample taken from the cobblestone path leading away from the murder scene. Using that chart, Matheson explained the testing procedures employed to determine a person’s blood type and to rule out possible matches.

In this case, he said, only one of the three people whose blood type was analyzed could have been the source of that droplet.

“Could Nicole Simpson have left the blood drop at 875 South Bundy?” Clark asked.

“No,” Matheson responded.

“With respect to Ronald Goldman . . . could he have been a source of that blood drop on the trail?” the prosecutor continued.

“No,” Matheson answered. “He could not.”

“With respect to the defendant, could he have been the source of the blood drop that was found on the trail at 875 South Bundy?” Clark then asked.

“Yes,” Matheson said. “He can be included in the group of possibles.”

Continuing with that questioning, Clark then sought to show that the group of people who could have been the source of that blood was small enough to suggest Simpson as a likely suspect.

Matheson said he computed the frequency of each of the three genetic markers occurring in a single sample and determined that 0.43% of the population would share those characteristics--meaning that the odds against someone having an identical match are more than 200 to 1.

In his cross-examination, however, Simpson lawyer Gerald F. Uelmen elicited an admission from Matheson that samples recovered from crime scenes sometimes blend blood from more than one person, confusing the analysis and changing the odds. Given the blood characteristics in this case, Matheson said that could mean that one out of every 100, rather than 200, people could have produced characteristics such as the one found leading away from the two bodies.

“When you talk about that kind of frequency in a population the size of Los Angeles, for example, where we have 8 million people, you’re saying that there are something on the order of 40,000 to 80,000 other people whose blood would produce the identical genetic markers that you have identified?” Uelmen suggested to Matheson.

“Approximately, that’s correct, yes,” Matheson said.

The test results presented in court Friday represent a first glimpse at the battery of procedures that investigators expect to perform on blood samples recovered from the scene of the crime and Simpson’s home. The most precise, DNA tests, will not be completed for several weeks.

Although preliminary DNA tests have been completed, prosecutors did not seek to admit those results during the preliminary hearing. They need only show at this hearing that there is sufficient evidence for Simpson to stand trial, not that he is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

In a news conference after the hearing, Garcetti said he is confident that the DNA results will be ready in time for trial.

Matheson’s testimony provided the linchpin of the prosecution’s preliminary hearing case, but he was followed to the stand by an equally captivating witness, the medical examiner who performed the autopsies on the victims’ bodies and who clinically described their extensive injuries before a spellbound courtroom Friday. Simpson sighed heavily and rolled his head back as Deputy Medical Examiner Dr. Irwin L. Golden of the Los Angeles County coroner’s office described the black dress and undergarments that Nicole Simpson was wearing when she was murdered a few feet from the front door of her Brentwood condominium, where her two children were sleeping inside.

Golden was questioned by Deputy Dist. Atty. William Hodgman, whose gentle style contrasts with Clark’s scrappy approach to witnesses. After describing his qualifications, Golden quietly detailed the cutting, slashing and puncture wounds to both victims.

As they have been throughout the preliminary hearing, family members of the two victims were in court for that testimony. Members of the Goldman family hugged each other tightly as the medical examiner described the state of the bodies in clinical terms. Nicole Simpson’s sister grimaced and clenched her teeth, staring directly ahead as Golden explained how her sibling died.

Nicole Simpson, Golden said, died from a cut to her throat so deep that it nicked her spinal column. Golden described it as a “gaping” wound and pointed to a chart in which it was highlighted in deep red.

Although Nicole Simpson’s knife wounds were largely confined to her head and neck, Goldman suffered dozens of knife wounds up and down his body, including three sets that could have killed him--punctures to his right lung, a deep pair of slashes across his throat and a five-inch deep wound to the left side of his abdomen.

Both victims also were cut on the hands, evidence that they attempted to fight off their attacker, Golden said.

Goldman’s sister and stepmother, who have sat side by side through much of the hearing, cried quietly and held each other’s hands while Golden described the attack on the young man, who would have turned 26 last weekend. Goldman’s father left court before hearing the medical examiner testify.

As the case passes from Municipal to Superior Court, a mystery moves with it. In court last week, Judge Kennedy-Powell held up a bulky envelope containing evidence that Shapiro had turned over to another judge for safekeeping. Neither police nor prosecutors have been allowed to look inside.

Kennedy-Powell said Friday that her decision to order Simpson to stand trial was not influenced in any way by the envelope or its contents, which are unknown even to her.

“That envelope, in a sealed condition, will be transferred,” Kennedy-Powell said, “to the Superior Court for such further rulings as are appropriate at a future point in time.”

Times staff writers Tina Daunt and Carla Hall contributed to this report.

The Deadly Attack

Dr. Irwin L. Golden, a medical examiner who performed the autopsies on Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, testified that the following injuries were the most severe:

NICOLE BROWN SIMPSON

1. A “gaping wound” that severed both carotid arteries and nicked both jugular vein, causing extensive blood loss. The fatal wound reached to her spine.

2. A bruise on the right side of scalp

RONALD LYLE GOLDMAN

3. Two wounds on right side of his neck, one of which severed jugular

4. Two wounds that entered through rib cage and into right lung; both considered fatal

5. 5.5-inch-deep wound to the abdomen considered fatal

OTHER WOUNDS

Golden also noted many “defensive” cuts and abrasions to the victims’ arms, hands, faces and bodies. Smaller stab wounds were found on the right side of Nicole Brown Simpson’s neck, and she had three cuts on the back of her head. Goldman had a deep but not fatal wound to the left thigh.

Source: Court testimony