INTO THE SPOTLIGHT / JANET MOXHAM : THE O.J. SIMPSON MURDER TRIAL : Stenographer Takes Biggest Typing Test as World Watches

You think prosecutor Marcia Clark was upset when defense lawyer Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. waited until the last minute to turn over the names of more than a dozen new witnesses?

Try sitting in Janet Moxham’s chair.

Moxham has a tedious job to begin with, typing court testimony at a rate of 250 words a minute on a stenograph machine no bigger than a loaf of bread.

But in 15 years of court reporting, Moxham, the lead stenographer in the Simpson trial, has never seen the likes of this: Defense witnesses with hard-to-spell names disclosed at the last minute. Lawyers interrupting each other too furiously for her to keep up. And the dread of everyone looking over her shoulder.

Thanks to new technology, every word that Moxham pounds into the 26-key courthouse stenograph machine is instantly transmitted--typos and all--to media around the world.

“Nothing compares to this,” said Moxham, who reports to work at 7 a.m. and stays until late in the evening completing trial transcripts, with only a few hours left for sleep some nights. “With all the media attention, it’s intimidating.”

One of her worst headaches has grown out of one of the trial’s most contentious issues: surprise witnesses mentioned for the first time during opening statements by lead defense lawyer Cochran. Moxham had thought she was prepared: She’d spent weeks programming her stenograph machine to automatically key in the proper spellings of all the case’s major players, including anticipated witnesses. Cochran’s surprises forced her to wing it on phonics.

As a result, she typed the name of Mary Anne Gerchas, a West Los Angeles jeweler who claims she saw four men run from Nicole Brown Simpson’s condo, as MERRY ANNE GEAR CHASE. Howard Weitzman, Simpson’s first criminal defense attorney, came out MR. WHITES PLAN. Mark Partridge, a Chicago-area attorney who sat in the first-class section with Simpson on his return flight to Los Angeles the morning after the slayings, was typed as MARCH PARLTD EYE.

Anybody who subscribed to a wire service got to see these mistakes as instantaneous transcripts flowed into newsrooms for the first time in trial history.

There have been other typos since the trial started.

Instead of writing “ANY COMMENT BY THE PEOPLE,” Moxham accidentally hit the wrong key one day last week and wrote: “ANY COMMENT WHITE PEOPLE.” Instead of typing, “ARE THERE ANY RULINGS THAT YOU OBJECTED TO,” a missed stroke came out as “I AM LAME RULINGS.” And once Superior Court Judge Lance A. Ito was referred to as JUDGE EAT.

“We’re not perfect,” said Moxham, who under normal circumstances has the luxury of editing her transcripts before they are made public. “The world is seeing us on our bad days.”

On Tuesday, Moxham and Christine M. Olson, who is assisting with court reporting on the Simpson case, were still working out the steno-glitches. But, overall, they were getting used to the trial’s pace.

“It’s hectic, but it’s OK,” Moxham said. “We’ve started testimony. There are a lot of questions and answers, which gives us a little break.”

Moxham, who has worked for Ito for more than four years, is no novice when it comes to high-profile cases. She produced the transcripts of financier Charles Keating Jr.’s trial and was eager to participate in the Simpson proceedings.

“I like working criminal cases,” Moxham said. “They’re interesting and they’re hard work. But this is indeed a challenge.”

Dealing with the hot and heavy debate was the first obstacle to overcome.

“It’s tough when the attorneys start talking over each other,” Moxham said. So, by using new technology available for the Simpson trial, she programmed her machine to flash a message to the computer terminals on the defense and prosecution tables whenever the attorneys were interrupting each other. It reads: “Rude, rude, talk one at a time.”

The lawyers usually ignore her.

Then there are the lawyers who won’t finish their sentences.

“Mr. Cochran is a very nice man,” Moxham said. “But he’s very hard to record. He swallows a lot of words and he talks very fast. . . . Marcia sometimes gets going, too.”

So Moxham told them, via computer: “Slow, slow.”

“When I’ve done that, no one seems to look,” she said. “So I just put my head down, close my eyes and write as fast as I can. You just hope the next person who stands up is a little slower.”

She longs for the days when Gerald F. Uelmen, the Stanford professor who assisted with Simpson’s defense during the preliminary hearing, was marking arguments in court.

“He is slow and very articulate,” Moxham said of the professor, who has returned to Stanford for the semester. “Court watchers might say, ‘God he sounds boring.’ But he makes a good record. You can just write him and it comes out almost perfect.”

Courtroom antics aside, nothing has been more disconcerting for Moxham than the knowledge that every word she types is translated from shorthand by a computer hooked up to her stenograph machine and sent over the wire to the news media.

“I didn’t really want to do it,” she said. “It’s like your rough notes. But the judge really wanted to do it. This is the time to show what court reporters have to offer.”