THE O.J. SIMPSON MURDER TRIAL : Emotional Power of Images Is Important for Both Sides

The power of images to persuade, even manipulate, was hammered home in the O.J. Simpson trial Wednesday when he showed the jury his football knee and his lawyer displayed photographs of the sports hero clad only in briefs.

Each of the dramatic exhibitions of the Simpson body made a powerful point for the defense case.

When Simpson walked slowly, and with the hint of a limp, from his seat across the courtroom to the jury and revealed four surgical scars on his left knee, it was aimed at showing that the once-great athlete was so crippled from football injuries he could not have killed his ex- wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Lyle Goldman. “He was perhaps the greatest running back in the history of the NFL, all kinds of records, but you pay a price,” said his attorney, Johnnie L. Cochran Jr.

In some respects, the photo display was even more powerful. First, Cochran showed the jury a picture of Goldman’s bloody hand. He said it showed Goldman’s “hand and fist came in contact with the perpetrator, that there was a blunt force trauma and he was able to strike his assailant.” This was followed by one picture after another of Simpson’s body--his hands, back, face, torso and thighs, the last of which showed him in briefs. There were no bruises anywhere.

*

Great pictures have emotional content. They operate on more than one level, they make you think, they reach into your psyche.

So it was with the pictures of Simpson in his underwear. He had all but stripped naked to prove to the jurors that he was innocent.

But the picture told more than that. The message of the image was clear: This man is so determined to prove his innocence that he will bare his body to prove it. Perhaps that will impress the jury. Maybe it will forge a feeling of intimacy between Simpson and the jurors. The prosecution has talked much of a hidden Simpson. Wednesday, he didn’t hide much, at least physically.

Earlier in the day, Cochran used images to show another side of Simpson.

The first was a picture of Simpson and his daughter taken at Paul Revere Junior High School after the child’s dance recital, a few hours before her mother was killed. Cochran referred to her as Simpson’s “sweet little daughter Sydney.”

The picture, Cochran said, was taken by a family friend, Dr. Ron Fishman, whose daughter was also in the recital. They were all part of a Brentwood crowd of young families. Dance recitals, picnics and preschool. The life of a family man, not the sinister stalker portrayed by the prosecution the day before.

The second picture, Cochran said, was “graphic evidence” of “O.J. Simpson and who he really is”--a picture of Simpson at a charity event last June 11, the day before the murder.

In her opening statement Tuesday, Deputy Dist. Atty. Marcia Clark also used pictures effectively.

Her images led the jury on what amounted to a horror tour, peaking with a close-up shot of the murdered Ronald Lyle Goldman, his torn shirt drenched with blood. These were so graphic that Judge Lance A. Ito kept them off television, as he did Wednesday with the picture of Goldman’s bloody hand.

Later in her presentation, Clark flashed pictures on the courtroom’s big screen to illustrate DNA blood-matching evidence. She briskly clicked the pictures along with her hand-held control as if she were channel surfing. As fast-paced as MTV, the pictures flashed by, each one showing blood. As she described them, her tone was cool, the narrator not wanting to get in the way of the pictures.

We’ll see more in the days and months ahead. The defense Tuesday showed a videotape of the crime scene that has the jumpy, gritty look of “NYPD Blue.” Judge Ito wouldn’t permit Cochran to use it to illustrate his opening statement, but expect a courtroom screening in the near future.

*

Old-timers reading this will say visual aids aren’t new to the courtroom. That’s true. Prosecutors traditionally bolster their arguments with bloody murder scene photos. And as far back as the 1890s, famed Los Angeles criminal attorney Earl Rogers won a murder case with a trick that made the history books.

Rogers was defending a plumber accused of murdering a customer in a dispute over a $4 bill. Rogers said the customer knocked the plumber down with his cane. The plumber, still on the floor, pulled his gun and shot the man. Rogers got the dead man’s intestine from the morgue and showed the jurors how the bullet wound slanted upward through the gut, as if it had been fired from the ground. The jury voted not guilty on the grounds of self defense.

But the Simpson trial is different. Earl Rogers did parlor tricks for olden-day Angeleno jurors who were as unsophisticated as their frontier state. The Simpson case lawyers are trying to persuade a sophisticated generation of jurors whose view of the world is shaped by images on TV and in the movies.