Simpson Lawyer Assails Collection of Evidence : Courts: Defense attorney zeros in on criminalist Fung’s credibility in gathering samples for DNA tests.

In an escalating faceoff, an attorney for O.J. Simpson succeeded Tuesday in wresting admissions from a Los Angeles police criminalist that he had very little training in gathering DNA evidence, that he failed to count the number of blood swatches he collected and that his memory about when he collected some evidence was faulty.

Although impassive in previous appearances, criminalist Dennis Fung was irritable and vacillating Tuesday as defense lawyer Barry Scheck bored in on the criminalist’s handling of the evidence in the Simpson murder investigation. At one point, Fung firmly denied that he had handled one piece of evidence--a bloodstained envelope containing a pair of eyeglasses--with his bare hands.

Scheck based that accusation on a videotape in which Fung can be seen handling a white, rectangular object without his gloves. Pouncing on a frame of that tape in which the object changes hands, Scheck barked: “There, there, how about that, Mr. Fung?”

Fung denied that the object was the envelope, however. He bolstered his recollection by pointing out that coroner’s officials were shown on the tape, and Fung emphatically insisted that he and his colleague, Andrea Mazzola, did not collect any evidence until after those officials had left the scene.

That appeared to leave that dispute in a standoff, but after the morning break, Scheck confronted Fung with a second tape showing Mazzola collecting evidence while a coroner’s investigator walked by.

Fung then changed his earlier testimony, delivered just minutes before.

“So, you did begin evidence collection before the coroners left?” Scheck asked after showing the second videotape to Fung and the jury.

“Yes,” Fung responded this time.

“So what you said before wasn’t true?” the lawyer then asked in a soft voice.

“It was the best of my recollection at the time,” Fung said.

The defense attack on Fung’s credibility and competence--which legal analysts said has been expertly spearheaded by Scheck--is a potentially crucial blow to the prosecution. Fung and his partner, Mazzola, were responsible for collecting and preserving nearly all the physical evidence in the case, and the defense has long signaled its intention to challenge the integrity of that evidence.

Simpson has pleaded not guilty to the June 12 murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Lyle Goldman. In building their case against him, prosecutors have relied heavily on a battery of DNA tests that they say link Simpson to the scene of the crime.

Superior Court Judge Lance A. Ito has ruled that the defense gave up its right to mount a full-fledged challenge to the scientific basis for the DNA testing of blood and other samples, but if the Simpson lawyers can successfully raise doubts about the quality of the samples that were submitted for testing, they may be able to undermine the significance of the results.

The courtroom confrontation between Fung and Scheck marked the first day of testimony since Thursday--a delay caused by the illness of three jurors. In the interim, the comments of an excused juror have raised concerns about the panel’s integrity and have forced Ito to launch his own investigation.

The former juror, Jeanette Harris, has been ordered to court this afternoon. The judge also has issued a subpoena to David Goldstein, a reporter for KCAL-TV Channel 9, who has said Harris told him that jurors had discussed their opinions on the case among themselves--if true, a violation of court rules.

Harris has challenged Goldstein’s report about those remarks, which he said were made during an off-camera interview. In on-camera interviews, Harris has raised other questions about the jury, saying that panelists had the opportunity to speak to outsiders without sheriff’s officials monitoring their talks and accusing the deputies of promoting racial divisions within the panel. She also has accused another juror of kicking her and another black member of the jury.

For their part, defense lawyers have accused prosecutors of targeting jurors for removal, and the Simpson team filed a motion Tuesday asking Ito to appoint an agency other than the Sheriff’s Department to monitor the panel and urging the judge not to dismiss any more jurors without holding a special hearing first.

The defense also suggested that if the number of jurors and alternates in the trial drops below 12--it now stands at 18, with six having been excused during the past 11 weeks--that the charges against Simpson be dismissed and that prosecutors be barred from trying him a second time.

Prosecutors expect to respond to that motion this week, after which Ito may consider it. At a news conference after Tuesday’s court session, Deputy Dist. Atty. Christopher A. Darden denied that prosecutors have targeted any jurors and said the government lawyers “do not want a mistrial in this case, and we don’t expect a mistrial.”

Darden also took issue with the defense proposal to replace the Sheriff’s Department. “I think that’s a dangerous move,” he said, adding that if one or two deputies are creating problems, they could be replaced without ousting the entire department. “Somebody has to provide for the security of the jury, and the Sheriff’s Department is trained for that.”

As they took their seats Tuesday morning, the 18 remaining panelists--six of whom are alternates--seemed unusually subdued. Many entered the jury box with their eyes down, and they barely mumbled a response when Ito cheerfully inquired about their health and weekend activities.

Protecting the panel from outside influences has been a monumental task, as evidenced by a strange occurrence over the weekend. On Tuesday, Ito directed jurors to disregard a comment shouted to them during a jury outing, which he did not describe in open court other than to say that a band member from a local university had yelled something.

Outside court, sources said that jurors attended a Los Angeles Lakers game and that a member of the USC marching band had yelled a comment urging the jury to acquit Simpson.

While speculation about the jury has occupied many pundits for the past several days, Tuesday’s hearing brought still more grist for popular consumption: Deputy Dist. Atty. Marcia Clark, the trial’s only leading attorney who is a woman, arrived for court with a new haircut.

As she strode down the hall leading to Ito’s courtroom, a group of journalists and other spectators burst into applause. Clark smiled widely, did a quick twirl and chuckled at her reception. Once inside, Ito himself cocked an eyebrow as he made his morning introductions of the lawyers.

Jury machinations and new hairstyles aside, the testimony of Fung was the trial’s main event Tuesday. The criminalist struggled with a tenacious cross-examination by Scheck, who challenged virtually every aspect of Fung’s performance and belittled some elements of his training.

Fung testified that he was not an expert in DNA testing and had received only cursory training in collecting blood or tissue samples for subsequent DNA analysis. Scheck belittled that training and implied that it could have contributed to what the defense has consistently characterized as a sloppy, badly mishandled police investigation of the murders.

One painstaking point at a time, Scheck attempted to support that depiction Tuesday, and in the process he elicited a number of concessions from Fung, whose puckish responses in the morning session gave way to weariness as the day wore on. By the conclusion of the session, Fung was struggling on a number of fronts, and he appeared tired, his eyes baggy and his shoulders slumped.

Later, Darden did not deny that Fung seemed uncomfortable on the stand. But Darden stressed that Fung’s demeanor was less important than the content of his testimony.

“That’s a small issue. That’s not a big issue,” Darden said of Fung’s discomfort. “The real issue here is the collection of the evidence and whether the evidence has been contaminated. It hasn’t been, and that will be established as the case proceeds on.”

During his testimony, Fung did acknowledge some less-than-perfect procedures employed during the evidence collection. Among other things, he said he did not change gloves between collecting various samples--a failure that he conceded could have transferred microscopic evidence from one item to another.

“You did not change gloves between the collection of each sample, did you?” Scheck asked.

“Not that I can recall, no,” Fung said.

“And you did not instruct Miss Mazzola to change her gloves between the collection of each sample?” the lawyer continued.

“That’s correct,” Fung responded.

“And you know that she did not change her gloves between the collection of each sample?” Scheck then asked.

“From reviewing the videotapes, yes,” the criminalist acknowledged.

Fung also said he had not collected all the blood samples from Simpson’s Ford Bronco during a search June 14, and admitted that he did not see blood on a pair of Simpson’s socks when he recovered them from the defendant’s bedroom June 13.

In addition, Fung described collecting blood samples and placing them in plastic bags, a procedure that Scheck suggested was improper, comparing the effect on blood samples to allowing milk to sour. Outside court, experts disagreed about the significance of that collection technique.

“The issue raised by Mr. Scheck in his cross-examination of Mr. Fung is a serious one,” said criminalist Carol Hunter, owner of CalLabs, a Tustin-based laboratory frequently used not only by local defense lawyers, but also by the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office. “The collection of any body fluid in plastic promotes moisture. If your sample is wet, which it usually is--and, in this case they re-moistened it with distilled water before putting it into plastic--it won’t dry. That’s a major problem.”

But Howard Coleman, president of a Seattle-based DNA laboratory, said Scheck’s line of examination about storing blood samples in plastic bags “basically is blowing smoke.”

“Temporary storage in plastic is not going to be a problem,” Coleman said. “If they left the samples in there for a long period of time or froze them in the plastic and then took them out and thawed them in the plastic, that might be a problem.”

Near the end of the day, Fung testified about two more points that may chip away at jurors’ faith in the reliability of the investigation. He said that he found no soil in Simpson’s house despite evidence of a struggle between Goldman and his assailant outside Nicole Simpson’s condominium, a fight that may have taken place in a plant bed near her front door.

And Scheck attempted to knock the pins out from beneath another piece of prosecution evidence as well: DNA tests that suggest Simpson was the likely source of blood drops found on Nicole Simpson’s back gate. To do that, Scheck displayed photographs of the gate taken June 13, the day after the murders, and July 3, the day Fung returned to the scene to collect those drops, which he said he had forgotten to gather on his initial visit.

The photographs showed blood drops on different parts of the fence, a disparity that defense lawyers may try to use to suggest that the blood drops were planted at the scene after the initial search.

Although experts disagreed about whether the police investigation was badly marred by the mistakes Fung acknowledged, several said his testimony could cause problems for prosecutors on a different level: Even if the actual effect of investigative slip-ups in collecting evidence did not have any real effect on the test results, Fung’s vacillating, uncomfortable testimony may cause jurors to doubt the credibility of the evidence he and his associates collected.

“What is so bad about this for the prosecution is that so much of this, as sloppy as it is, is of no ultimate consequence objectively, but it is so bad subjectively in terms of the effect it has on the jury,” said former Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner, who has been consistently critical of the prosecution in the Simpson case.

But while the former chief prosecutor raised the potential damage that Fung’s testimony could do to the government case, a prominent defense attorney warned that the Simpson team has its share of obstacles ahead as well.

“The defense,” said lawyer Gerald L. Chaleff, “still has to show how articles with Simpson’s blood became mixed with the samples collected at the crime scene and how that could have occurred without Simpson being involved in the crime.”

Times staff writers Henry Weinstein and Tim Rutten contributed to this article.