Test Suggests Simpson Blood at Murder Scene : Courts: Finding is introduced by prosecution as battle escalates over DNA. Detective explains racial remarks.

Prosecutors and lawyers for O.J. Simpson tangled in court Monday as government attorneys released new test results suggesting that Simpson’s blood was found at the murder scene.

Results of one set of DNA tests were presented to the Los Angeles County Grand Jury in June; they indicated that a blood drop containing identical genetic markers to Simpson’s was found near the bodies of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman.

Monday, prosecutors filed a motion in which they disclosed preliminary results of a more discriminating DNA test. Those results echoed the earlier findings.

By day’s end, still another motion brought another development. LAPD Detective Mark Fuhrman, who has been accused of racism by defense lawyers, filed a declaration for the first time explaining racially charged remarks he made in a 1983 pension case.

In his declaration, Fuhrman said he had never made derogatory remarks about his military colleagues or “any particular ethnic class. These statements attributed to me were misquoted and taken out of context. Any other racially insensitive comments that I may have made to (a city-hired doctor) were in the context of a therapeutic session and were specifically intended to refer to my work with violent gangs and gang members and the emotion that this stressful, dangerous and difficult type of police work engendered in me.”

Fuhrman’s declaration was filed in connection with a 13-page motion urging Judge Lance A. Ito to deny the defense access to the detective’s Marine Corps records. The request violates Fuhrman’s right to privacy and would produce material that is so old it would be irrelevant, Fuhrman’s lawyer Robert Tourtelot said in the motion.

In court, meanwhile, it became increasingly evident that one of the most crucial and hardest-fought battles during the upcoming trial will be over the reliability and admissibility of DNA test results that could link Simpson to the stabbing deaths.

Defense attorneys sought to show that prosecutors are conducting unnecessary and duplicative tests, using up samples that otherwise could be analyzed by defense experts. Prosecutors responded that they are merely ordering up the tests needed to show conclusively whether Simpson is the source of various bloodstains.

“Is it of value to you to do a number of different tests?” Deputy Dist. Atty. Lisa Kahn asked Gary Sims, a senior criminalist at the California Department of Justice lab in Berkeley.

“Yes,” Sims answered, “because that provides additional genetic information to answer the question as to whose blood is where.”

Ito, who appeared to grow exasperated at times with the exhaustive defense questioning, is being asked to decide whether some of the samples need to be apportioned, or “split,” so that Simpson can have his own experts analyze the DNA evidence. The judge did not make that decision Monday, but is expected to return to the topic this morning.

The discussion of DNA evidence in court Monday was a largely dry scientific debate about splitting samples, and a few of the case’s leading lawyers skipped the session. Deputy Dist. Atty. William Hodgman excused himself early, while Simpson lawyer Johnnie L. Cochran missed it altogether--another Cochran client, Rep. Walter Tucker III (D-Compton), was being arraigned across the street on charges that he solicited bribes and then failed to pay taxes on them.

Flanked by half a dozen of his other lawyers, Simpson fidgeted as the session dragged on through the afternoon.

Monday’s hearing came amid a flurry of sometimes conflicting reports of what preliminary DNA tests have so far shown. The issue is potentially crucial to the case because DNA test results could form the strongest physical evidence linking Simpson to the murder scene.

According to documents and sources familiar with the case, a blood drop found on Goldman’s shoe does not match Simpson’s blood, while at least two other samples being tested by Cellmark Diagnostics in Maryland have not yielded conclusive findings.

Those results were received by defense attorneys last week and were good news for Simpson--particularly the finding that his blood is not on Goldman’s shoe, because it would have been all but impossible for Simpson’s attorneys to explain how their client’s blood ended up on the shoe of a murder victim with whom he had no known relationship.

Other preliminary DNA tests, however, have indicated that blood discovered inside Simpson’s home and car is consistent with his blood and that blood taken from a trail of droplets leading away from the bodies also matches his.

Some of those results were first reported by The Times in June, before Simpson’s preliminary hearing, and those results later were presented to a grand jury that month. At that hearing, a police analyst testified that preliminary DNA tests of blood recovered from Simpson’s Ford Bronco, the foyer of his house and the blood trail leading from the bodies all matched Simpson’s blood.

In addition, early DNA testing of blood found on a glove outside a guest house at Simpson’s Brentwood estate showed stains consistent with the blood of both victims and indicated a possible mixture of his blood and that of the two victims, the police analyst, Collin Yamauchi, told the grand jury.

Some of the preliminary DNA test results were reiterated in a prosecution motion filed Monday, which noted that additional results from a more sophisticated type of DNA testing continue to point to Simpson as the source of the blood from samples discovered in his home and car, as well as from one drop at the crime scene.

The prosecution motion did not update tests being conducted on the gloves--one of which was discovered at Simpson’s estate and the other near the bodies.

The results detailed in the prosecution motion include preliminary findings from RFLP tests, a more sophisticated and discriminating type of analysis than PCR testing, which had produced the earlier findings. One of the RFLP tests shows that the banding pattern of a blood drop from the crime scene matches Simpson’s blood, according to the prosecution motion.

But the RFLP tests still are not complete, the motion makes clear.

For the defense, the most troubling of the results so far are those suggesting that Simpson could be the source of the drops leading from the murder scene. Those drops were found to the left of bloody footprints, and Simpson had a cut on his left hand when interviewed by police, leading investigators to conclude that Simpson cut his hand while committing the murders and then dripped blood from that cut as he strode away from the scene.

As a whole, “the DNA tests conducted so far implicate the defendant,” prosecutors wrote.

Further tests on those and other samples will be conducted in Maryland and at a state Department of Justice lab in Berkeley.

It is those tests and the way that they are being conducted that defense attorneys have vigorously challenged and that they again assaulted during Monday’s hearing.

Peter Neufeld, one of two defense legal specialists on DNA testing, questioned the California Department of Justice expert at length, suggesting that tests being conducted may needlessly risk destroying certain samples before defense experts can test them. Neufeld, one of the nation’s premier DNA legal specialists, also detailed questions about handling of samples by police analysts--part of the defense effort to discredit the blood samples and to suggest that the investigation of Simpson has been marred by sloppy work.

Neufeld’s partner, Barry Scheck, another renowned DNA lawyer, took up that theme later in the day, pointing out discrepancies in the reports as to the number and descriptions of blood samples.

The attack on investigators forms one prong of the defense DNA challenge. But Simpson’s attorneys also have aggressively criticized the conduct of prosecutors.

Gerald F. Uelmen, another of the athlete-turned-actor’s lawyers, argued Monday that prosecutors have misled Simpson’s camp about the status of testing. An inventory of samples given to defense attorneys before the preliminary hearing and again last week omits important information, Uelmen said. Deputy Dist. Atty. Marcia Clark blamed that in part on defense attorneys failing to understand documents provided to them, but Uelmen disagreed.

“This isn’t a matter of confusion,” Uelmen said. “This is a matter of credibility.”

Ito appeared to be taken by surprise last week when prosecutors disclosed that a small number of samples had not been sent to the Maryland lab, as they had previously stated. Instead, those samples had been held back by the Los Angeles Police Department, and later were sent to the Berkeley lab, which is prepared to begin testing on them.

Clark said last week that she too had been confused by the process and had thought that all of the samples were being tested in Maryland. When she learned of the additional samples, she notified defense attorneys and alerted them that the samples were being sent to Berkeley for testing there.

Although Clark acknowledged that her assumptions about the status of testing had been incorrect, she also blamed defense attorneys for misreading the evidence inventory sheet given to them before the preliminary hearing. Defense attorneys had assumed the inventory list detailed all blood samples in the case, but Clark said Monday that the list only included samples in the possession of the LAPD as of June 29, the day the inventory was prepared.

By that time, a number of samples had been sent to Cellmark, prosecutors said. Those samples were not included in the inventory.

As they have before, attorneys for the two sides sniped at one another Monday, this time over a letter that Simpson attorney Robert L. Shapiro filed late Friday. In his letter, Shapiro reiterated defense allegations that prosecutors have misrepresented the size and location of various blood samples.

Copies of that letter were received by news organizations before prosecutors or Ito had reviewed it, a fact that prompted Clark to angrily object.

Calling the issue a “matter of grave concern,” Clark said she was seeking guidance from Ito. “This defense practice merits serious concern as it has a severe impact on the right of the people to a fair trial,” she said.

Clark tried to vent her concerns in court, but Ito cut her off.

“Forgive me for interrupting you, but this is a matter that I’m going to take up with counsel for both sides in chambers,” Ito said, adding that he wanted to handle the matter in private and was concerned that lawyers were using hearings in the case to make public statements, not to influence his rulings.

Court is scheduled to resume at 9:30 a.m. today.

Splitting the Samples

Samples such as blood from a crime scene are lifted with a cotton cloth, soaked with distilled water, sealed in a plastic bag and sent to a laboratory. In general, here is the way experts have testified that the samples are being handled by labs involved in the Simpson case:

LAB 1

A) At Maryland-based Cellmark Diagnostics, technicians use special scissors to cut off 10% of the samples, which are refrigerated.

B) The majority of the sample is consumed in conventional DNA testing, called RFLP. At Cellmark, if the RFLP test is inconclusive, then the set-aside 10% can be used for a PCR test, which is faster but less definitive.

LAB 2

A) At the Berkeley-based California Department of Justice lab, technicians have cut between 20% and 25% off a sample and set it aside. RFLP testing could consume the rest. BLOOD SAMPLE RFLP testing: 90% Set-aside: 10% ***

SIZE OF SAMPLE NEEDED

* RFLP requires a bloodstain about the size of a dime, while PCR can be conducted on one much smaller.

* Whether a sample is large enough to perform an RFLP test is determined by the molecular weight of the DNA within the sample.

* In this case, the samples are of varying sizes.

ARGUMENTS

PROSECUTION: Wants to perform all its testing first, then hand over set-aside amounts for the defense to work with. Where samples are large enough to split now, prosecutors have said they will share those as well.

DEFENSE: Wants half of all samples immediately to perform its own tests. The judge so far has not allowed that.

THE DIFFERENCE IN THE TESTS:

RFLP PCR Time required: 4 to 8 weeks 1 week Chances of identical results: 1 in 1 million 1 in 500 to 1 in 2000 Admissibility in California courts: Some precedent, No precedent but disputed

NOTE: Almost all samples were sent to Cellmark; a few went to the Berkeley lab in mid-August