Victims’ Families Should Be Heard

Observing the families of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman on television this week blasting the lawyers and pronouncing O.J. Simpson guilty, I wondered how they had contained themselves for so long.

How must they have felt sitting in front of their television sets the past few months, watching the defense team of Cochran & Shapiro craft their production of a drama entitled “The Persecution of O.J.”?

On weekends, for example, friends, relatives and lawyers are shown visiting Simpson in the County Jail, giving assessments of his mental state, telling how much he misses his kids and how he dreams of spending the holidays with them. This suspect has more visitors in a week than some prisoners have in a life sentence.

Ever present at these episodes is Robert L. Shapiro, his face soulful and sympathetic, although it’s hard to take him seriously when he’s wearing a garish warm-up suit and an odd baseball cap.

The buildup became really big the week before the USC-UCLA football game when TV sports shows repeatedly showed the tape of old Trojan Simpson’s famous 1967 winning run against the Bruins. So it is perfectly understandable that Denise Brown, Nicole’s sister, said Tuesday that the family refuses to “allow another day to go by with TV news programs filled from one end to the other with sympathetic stories about the defendant, with heavy emphasis on his broken field running abilities, and his brilliant acting roles. We just want the people of this country to remember that he stands accused of committing a terrible crime.”

Not much is held back in the families’ assault. Asked by ABC’s Diane Sawyer whether she thinks Simpson killed her sister, Brown said in an interview for tonight’s “Primetime Live” that “my feeling is yes. Yeah, I think he did it.” As for Simpson, she said, “He believes his own lies.” Goldman’s father, Fred Goldman, said on “Good Morning America” this week that “from the evidence that’s come forth, it’s hard to believe it’s anyone else.”

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In court on Wednesday, Shapiro and co-counsel Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. objected to the criticisms of the victims’ families. Under their rules, you’re not supposed to fight back.

But the defense attorneys cannot overlook a body of federal and state law that makes sure victims and their relatives are not consigned to the sidelines, that their loss will be remembered, even by the cruelly impersonal criminal justice system, that they can fight back.

I talked about victims rights with Prof. Rory Little of the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, who teaches legal ethics. Little, who was a federal prosecutor for seven years, recalled how victims rights laws grew out of a feeling “that the victims were viewed as an unnecessary fifth wheel, and they were left out of the process even though they were the ones most affected.”

“What really stimulated this feeling was plea bargaining, bargaining away sentences by the prosecution,” he said. “A rapist would get a few months in a treatment center and the victim would read about it in the paper.”

Now, he said, victims or their survivors are notified of each legal step before it occurs. Victims and their relatives speak to the court before sentencing. “It forces you (as a prosecutor) to put yourself in the victim’s shoes. It forces you to listen. The criminal justice system can be pretty mechanical, pretty routine and people in the system lose sight of individual cases because they have so many cases to process.”

By speaking out, the Brown and Goldman families are acting within the spirit of these laws.

The families are also exercising their rights under another law, the 1st Amendment, guaranteeing freedom of speech. Courts can gag a lawyer but, as Professor Little noted, “there isn’t anything that restricts the rights of someone who isn’t a lawyer.”

Little said Denise Brown, seeing “the spotlight on O.J. in a carefully orchestrated campaign by his attorney has decided to tell her story, and I think she has the right to do that.”

And by doing so, Little said, she has hurt the Simpson team. “Shapiro’s job is to create as a positive public image of his client as he can and this (the families’ words) is wreaking havoc with the strategy.”

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Cochran and Shapiro fought back in the hand-to-hand combat manner they use in the courtroom.

The friendly duo you see on television--the creators of the warm Simpson image--turned into attack dogs when confronted by the families. Unbelievably, Cochran tried to portray the mourners as tools of the prosecution rather than see them as bereaved human beings. Cochran went so far as to say that you “can hardly turn on the television without seeing Denise Brown.” This from an attorney who is making a handsome living representing big name defendants who frequently land him on TV.

To Cochran and Shapiro, the families are trouble. In their scenario, there can be only one victim--O.J. Simpson, battered by his wife, framed by the police, crucified by the media.

This is as dumb as it is reprehensible. The defense response made sure the story will continue to be covered by the media. It won’t fade away soon.

We’ve been powerfully reminded that a young woman and a young man were stabbed to death last summer and that two families’ lives will never be the same.