Detectives’ LAPD Files Not Relevant, Ito Rules : Simpson case: Judge deals setback to defense strategy. Selection of jury is pushed back a week to Sept. 26.

O.J. Simpson’s defense team will not be allowed to review the personnel records of four Los Angeles police detectives involved in the murder investigation of the former football great, the judge in the case ruled Wednesday.

At the outset of an elaborate hearing into evidence sharing and media objections to a proposed gag order, Superior Court Judge Lance A. Ito announced that he had examined some records of two of the officers that have been sought by Simpson’s attorneys. The other two detectives’ records did not warrant review by the court, Ito found.

“I did not find any . . . information that was pertinent to the issues in this case,” Ito said. “And thus there is nothing at this point to turn over to the defense.”

Because of Ito’s ruling, Simpson’s defense will not receive records of any of the four detectives--Philip L. Vannatter, Tom Lange, Mark J. Fuhrman and Ronald Phillips. Defense attorneys have waged a particularly spirited attack on Fuhrman, suggesting that he is a racist who might have planted a glove to implicate Simpson in the June 12 killings of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman. Simpson has pleaded not guilty to the murders.

Meanwhile, in other developments Wednesday:

* Prosecutors said in a surprise announcement that it could be weeks before they reach a decision on whether to seek the death penalty.

* Prosecutors and defense attorneys clashed bitterly over sharing evidence, with one Simpson attorney muttering an epithet that was overheard by the judge.

* Ito pushed back the scheduled start of jury selection by a week.

* Lawyers for news organizations and the American Civil Liberties Union urged Ito to abandon his proposal for a sweeping gag order.

* Ito deferred a decision on whether to open a mystery envelope, saying he first needed to see the prosecution’s witness list.

Ito’s action on the police records was the day’s most significant development, and it represents a serious setback to the Simpson attorneys’ planned attack on the integrity of the officers--a tactic revealed in a number of defense motions and argued in court on several occasions. Now that Ito has found that the personnel records do not support their argument that the officers either were racist or had shown a propensity to lie, Simpson’s lawyers have little on which to base their challenges and could be forced to shift their strategy away from an assault on the investigating officers.

In Fuhrman’s case, Simpson’s lawyers have submitted a sworn declaration from a woman who alleges that the detective made racially charged comments to her in 1985 or 1986. Fuhrman denies having had that conversation, and his lawyer, Robert H. Tourtelot, said his client was “ecstatic” about Ito’s ruling. Tourtelot said the ruling gave Fuhrman “a clean bill of health.”

Simpson’s lawyers have presented no information about the other detectives that raises questions about their conduct in other cases.

“The problem for the defense is that they’ve never had much evidence of racial animus or fabrication,” said Loyola law professor Laurie Levenson, a former federal prosecutor. “They made a big issue out of Fuhrman and the likelihood that he planted a glove. Now there just doesn’t seem the evidence to support it.”

Peter Arenella, a UCLA law professor who has closely followed the Simpson case, agreed that Ito’s ruling makes it more difficult for the defense to attack the integrity of the detectives, especially Fuhrman.

“The defense must be terribly disappointed to find that there’s nothing of impeachment value in Detective Fuhrman’s files,” Arenella said. “Now I think we’ll see a shift from attacks on the integrity to simple competency.”

Wednesday’s session also included a surprise update from the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office: Prosecutors had pledged to announce whether they intended to seek the death penalty for Simpson but instead revealed that a decision may not be made for weeks.

Deputy Dist. Atty. William Hodgman told Ito that it could be as late as Sept. 19 before the committee weighing the death penalty issue determines how to proceed. Under a new trial schedule that was agreed upon Wednesday, jury selection would begin Sept. 26.

That could leave lawyers for both sides with as little as one week’s notice to plan strategy.

“We think it is fundamentally unfair for us to be left in a situation where we don’t know what to prepare for,” said Robert L. Shapiro, one of Simpson’s lead attorneys.

Ito agreed, saying he did not want to rush the district attorney’s office in such a delicate and important matter, but he added that not knowing how prosecutors plan to proceed “complicates all of our lives immensely.”

Ito asked prosecutors to alert him as soon as they reach a decision--even if it means having the judge’s clerk track him down on his upcoming vacation.

Wednesday’s hearing was dominated by a long discussion of evidence sharing between the two sides, and there were rare flashes of anger from two of the case’s most subdued lawyers, defense attorney Gerald F. Uelmen and Hodgman.

Uelmen initiated the exchange by accusing Hodgman and his colleagues of withholding their witness list, even though Wednesday was the deadline for the two sides to exchange information. Uelmen called that a “serious breach of the discovery scheme.”

Clenching the lectern with one hand, Hodgman said: “I am slow to anger, but I am getting very angry with regard to what I feel is just absolute sandbagging by the defense.”

As Hodgman was speaking, Shapiro muttered something, and Hodgman accused Shapiro of uttering an expletive. Shapiro sat silently but later apologized to Hodgman, indicating later that he had said “bullshit.”

Trying to resolve the disputes over evidence, Ito meticulously reviewed each of the defense complaints outlined in a motion filed this week. In that motion, Simpson’s lawyers argued that the prosecution’s “staggered, piecemeal approach to the scientific testing” of that evidence and the disclosure of the results of those tests is keeping the defense from reviewing test results and data, “much less conducting its own independent tests.”

Ito addressed each of the complaints, resolving some, dismissing others and directing prosecutors to turn over whatever material they reasonably could provide.

The evidence sharing has reached a critical stage because the trial is fast approaching in the celebrated case. Ito announced Wednesday that he wants to postpone the beginning of jury selection from Sept. 19 to Sept. 26, but that still leaves less than a month for the two sides to prepare.

Meantime, a number of volatile issues still need to be resolved. Prosecutors announced that they expect to ask Ito to sequester the jury, a move that they say is needed to protect jurors from an avalanche of publicity.

That poses other complications. If jurors are sequestered, they could face enormous hardship. Ito estimated that the trial could last six months, nearly twice as long as jurors were sequestered in the Rodney G. King civil rights trial.

In addition, Ito has said he hopes to pick a jury before holding a potentially complex hearing on the admissibility of the DNA evidence. The trouble is that the hearing must take place outside the jury’s presence, and Deputy Dist. Atty. Marcia Clark said Wednesday that she believes it could last a month or longer--raising the question of what the sequestered jurors would do during that time.

The issue of whether the jury is sequestered reflects the building intensity of the case and the publicity surrounding it as it moves toward trial.

News reports have disclosed much evidence in the case--sometimes erroneously--and the continuing bombardment of coverage has irritated Ito, who earlier this week gave attorneys a copy of a proposed protective order. If implemented, that order would bar people close to the case from talking about it and would require that all motions be filed under seal.

Already, Ito has directed attorneys to submit motions under seal. One result is that the public has yet to see defense motions asking Ito to dismiss the case against Simpson for lack of evidence and another asking him not to allow into evidence items discovered at Simpson’s estate hours after the bodies were discovered in front of Nicole Simpson’s townhouse.

On Wednesday, news organizations and the American Civil Liberties Union told Ito that his proposed order is unconstitutional. They urged him to reconsider.

“Frankly, the remedy, I think, is worse than the risk,” said Kelli L. Sager, an attorney representing The Times and other news organizations. “More speech is the answer, not less speech.”

Sager argued that gagging participants in the case would allow false reports to flourish and that cutting off the press’s access to court files would deprive the public of a reliable source of information. Her comments were echoed by Douglas Mirell, a volunteer lawyer with the ACLU who successfully fought a gag order imposed during the King civil rights trial.

Ito, who had not released the proposed order, sparred with Sager during her presentation to the court and complained that The Times had published excerpts from his proposed order despite his efforts to avoid public discussion of it until he had fine-tuned the two-page document. He cited that as an example of the difficulties he is confronting in controlling attorneys in the high-profile case.

“When I issued my draft of this protective order, I admonished counsel that this was a draft, and it was not for dissemination,” Ito said. “I then pick up the L.A. Times the next morning, and read the text of the protective order in the L.A. Times. . . . My admonishment was useless.”

When Sager suggested that one way to protect a fair trial was to sequester the jury, as prosecutors had proposed, Ito responded: “Is the L.A. Times going to foot the hotel bill for the sequestration?”

Although Ito argued that the release of the proposed protective order illustrated the need for him to take additional steps to control public discussion of the case, Sager countered that the inability of the court to keep the document from being leaked merely illustrates how difficult it would be to enforce any protective order.

In a previous case, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals recognized that “whether or not there was a sealing order, publicity would continue and leaks would continue,” Sager said. “The only effect that a sealing order would have is to remove from the press the most accurate and verifiable source of information about what’s happening in the court.”

Ito did not rule on the gag order Wednesday, but his comments from the bench suggested that he was inclined against imposing at least the portion of it requiring all motions to be filed under seal.

Although only a short time remains before trial is to begin, new evidence continues to surface. Ito suggested that there still could be more surprises.

“There are numerous pieces of evidence that have not been presented, that are still confidential, that will have a very direct and important bearing on this case,” he said.