Defense Plans to Query Ito’s Wife at Hearing : Trial: Simpson’s attorneys want to determine if Police Capt. Margaret York took part in an inquiry involving a controversial detective in the case.

Lawyers for O.J. Simpson hope to question the wife of Superior Court Judge Lance A. Ito at a special hearing next week to determine whether she was involved in an internal LAPD investigation of a detective who discovered key evidence in the Simpson case.

Ito’s wife, Capt. Margaret York, is the highest-ranking woman in the Police Department. In 1985, she was assigned to the LAPD’s West Los Angeles station, where Detective Mark Fuhrman was then a police officer and where he now works on the homicide desk. Fuhrman, the detective who said he found a bloody glove outside Simpson’s Brentwood mansion a few hours after the bodies of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman were discovered, has been the subject of an aggressive defense campaign to discredit him.

According to Simpson attorney Robert L. Shapiro, York has volunteered to testify at next week’s hearing. Shapiro added that Superior Court Judge Curtis Rappe, will preside over the session to avoid creating a conflict for Ito.

Shapiro did not specify what internal investigation York would be asked about, but sources told The Times in July that Fuhrman came under scrutiny for his alleged affiliation with an informal group of officers at the West Los Angeles station known as MAW--short for Men Against Women. The existence of that group, whose proponents were said to deride the abilities of female police officers, became known in the early 1980s. A subsequent investigation led to its dissolution, though police sources say remnants of it persist today.

At the time, Fuhrman was at the station where York was assigned in 1985 when she was promoted to lieutenant and given her first post as a watch commander. Although a television tabloid show said last month that York was involved in running that internal investigation, people familiar with the inquiry said Wednesday that the televised report was incorrect.

The investigation, sources said, was not handled by station officials but by the department’s Office of Operations and its Internal Affairs Division.

Sources said York was aware of the inquiry, but they added that it was largely concluded by the time she arrived at the station. They stressed that she was not involved in it except to be interviewed as a possible witness. She did not accuse Fuhrman of any wrongdoing but rather praised his work, the sources added.

Retired Police Chief Daryl F. Gates assigned York to the post in West Los Angeles and said Wednesday that she had favorable comments about Fuhrman. “She was satisfied with his work, thought he was a hard-working guy,” Gates said. “She considered him highly sought after because he was an aggressive, competent officer, and she was very pleased with him.”

According to sources, Fuhrman’s name surfaced briefly in connection with an internal LAPD audit of the West Los Angeles station this year. That audit was launched in an effort to root out sexual harassment at the station; it has been completed and some officers have been transferred out of West Los Angeles to improve the working environment at the station.

But those same sources said Fuhrman is no longer considered a target of the West Los Angeles inquiry and is not expected to face internal charges growing out of it. Police Chief Willie L. Williams, who received the audit, has publicly stated his faith in Fuhrman and the other detectives involved in the Simpson case.

Nevertheless, Simpson’s attorneys want to question York and may seek to discover whether she was involved in any investigation of Fuhrman. If so, it could raise the possibility that she would be called as a witness in Simpson’s trial, raising the specter of a possible conflict for Ito.

“There may be some conflict of interest,” Shapiro said, though he stressed that he was not aware of any conflict and that defense attorneys are not seeking Ito’s removal from the case. Shapiro described Monday’s session as a “fact-finding hearing.”

“If there’s a possibility she could be a witness,” Shapiro added, “we want to know those things before trial, so no one will be embarrassed.”

Citing a 1983 pension case filed by Fuhrman, Simpson’s lawyers have accused the detective of harboring racist views, a contention that Fuhrman’s lawyer vehemently denies. The defense sought access to police records relating to Fuhrman, but after reviewing them, Ito found that there was nothing relevant to the Simpson case and denied their request to view the records themselves.

Laurie Levenson, a Loyola University law professor who has closely followed the Simpson case, said that before defense attorneys could call York to the stand during the trial, they would need to show that she has something relevant to offer.

“The first threshold is does she know anything,” Levenson said. “If she knows anything, could her information be allowed in the case?”

Allowing York to testify at the trial would potentially be problematic if Ito were presiding, Levenson and others said. Normally, a judge would not be allowed to preside over his own spouse’s testimony, but defense attorneys early on in the case waived objections to Ito’s selection based on possible conflicts created by his relationship with York, which was disclosed before he was picked to try the case.

If defense attorneys could show that York was needed as a material witness at the trial, theoretically they could move to excuse Ito. But that tactic would risk antagonizing Ito and, if successful, would set back Simpson’s insistence on a speedy trial and throw open the doors to the appointment of any judge in the Superior Court--a risky gambit with potentially dire consequences.

“They have to think about this,” Levenson said. “You have to be careful what you wish for.”

In court, meanwhile, jury selection continued with four candidates for alternate juror service accepted and two excused, including one who was dismissed after he described the murder of his brother, who was stabbed to death.

That prospective juror, a 29-year-old black man from North Hollywood, did not mention his brother’s violent death on the exhaustive questionnaire that all jury candidates were required to complete in September. As a result, his disclosure in court Wednesday seemed to take Ito and the lawyers by surprise.

They questioned him closely about the incident, with Shapiro at one point asking whether he would be able to examine crime scene photographs of the stabbed and slashed bodies of Nicole Simpson and Goldman.

“I can deal with it,” he said. “I have a strong heart.”

Nevertheless, that man was excused, becoming the 19th alternate jury candidate dismissed since questioning of those people began last week--by day’s end, one more was excused, bringing the total to 20. Just 15 have been cleared for further service, and they will return Dec. 5, when lawyers for both sides will begin exercising peremptory challenges to weed out panelists with whom they feel uncomfortable.

The process has moved with glacial speed in recent days but picked up Wednesday when Ito imposed a time limit on the lawyers for their questioning and placed a clock in the courtroom to monitor their compliance.

Two panelists who were allowed to remain in the pool of prospective alternates said they had initially believed that Simpson probably was guilty of the slayings, but both insisted that they could be fair. One, a 37-year-old Latina from West Los Angeles, said she had initially concluded that he committed the murders and that she viewed his nationally televised low-speed trek across Orange County and Los Angeles as a sign that he was fleeing prosecution.

But that woman said that she could be fair and that she no longer was convinced of Simpson’s guilt: “It could be true,” she said, “but anything could be true.”

Another woman interviewed Wednesday, a 28-year-old Pico Rivera real estate appraiser, said she believed that Simpson was the only person with an apparent motive to kill Nicole Simpson, but also said that she did not consider DNA evidence infallible. Prosecutors expect to introduce an array of blood samples, some of which have been subjected to DNA tests, in their effort to link Simpson to the crime scene.

That woman said she too could be fair. She was allowed to stay on the panel.

The session Wednesday marked the third day in a row that prospective jurors have said they saw advertisements for a televised interview that a local television station conducted with Ito and that is being broadcast all week. Commentators have expressed bewilderment and surprise that Ito agreed to that interview, and on Wednesday, Ito, who has urged jurors to avoid all publicity about the case, said he now had some regrets--if not about the interview, at least about the station’s intensity in publicizing it.

When one prospective juror said she had seen a newspaper ad touting the station’s talk with the judge, Ito responded: “If I had known they were going to do that, I wouldn’t have done that” interview.