Criminalist Quizzed Before a Sterner Ito

Under the stewardship of a newly authoritative judge, testimony in the murder trial of O.J. Simpson resumed Tuesday with a pointed cross-examination of a police criminalist who acknowledged less-than-perfect techniques in collecting some blood evidence in the case.

The criminalist, Andrea Mazzola, had been off the stand since Thursday, but defense attorney Peter Neufeld picked up where he left off, grilling her about her training--the lawyer repeatedly and derisively described her LAPD education as a “mini-academy”--and forcing her to defend her work and that of her colleagues.

Bolstering that argument, Neufeld used a videotape that prosecutors had prepared as part of their case. With that tape, Neufeld attempted to pick apart Mazzola’s evidence-collection technique, faulting her for such things as failing to change her gloves and for placing one hand on the ground as she was demonstrating how to collect samples.

Neufeld’s line of questioning is part of a broader, two-pronged defense attack on the evidence in the case: Simpson’s attorneys have suggested that sloppy handling compromised some of the evidence and that police deliberately tampered with other items in order to frame Simpson for the June 12 murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman. Simpson has pleaded not guilty.

At times Tuesday, Neufeld confronted Mazzola with what he said was evidence of her own sloppiness, and occasionally backed her into defensive answers. She responded, for instance, that she does not make mistakes and also testified that none of her Los Angeles Police Department colleagues would ever tamper with evidence--both positions that Neufeld tried to ridicule.

Despite Neufeld’s occasionally accusatory tone, Mazzola remained confident and impassive throughout most of that questioning, though she balked when the lawyer seemed to suggest that she was careless or that she and her colleagues would deliberately manufacture evidence against a defendant.

When Mazzola responded to a question about mistakes in collecting evidence by saying, “You don’t make mistakes on how to pick it up,” Neufeld theatrically displayed his disbelief.

“Are you saying it’s impossible for you to make mistakes at a crime scene?” the lawyer asked incredulously.

“I collect the evidence the way I was trained,” Mazzola responded. “That is the only way I know how to do it.”

“Miss Mazzola, please answer my question,” Neufeld then asked. “Are you saying that it is impossible for you to make mistakes when collecting evidence at a crime scene?”

“Mistakes can happen,” she acknowledged grudgingly.

“And mistakes do happen,” the lawyer continued. “Is that correct, Miss Mazzola?”

“It’s possible that they do,” she answered.

Later, Mazzola testified that her memory about when certain bloodstains were collected at Simpson’s home had changed between last week and Tuesday. Neufeld also pounced on that shift and tried to suggest that she was altering her recollection to enhance the role played by her supervisor, Dennis Fung.

Mazzola denied that, but acknowledged that her testimony had changed. She attributed her more recent account to reflecting further about what she and Fung did at Simpson’s Rockingham Avenue estate and at the Bundy Drive crime scene. As he has before, Neufeld lingered over the change in testimony--this time until Ito demanded that he move on.

Ito Gets Tough

Throughout the court day, the judge displayed a new impatience and temper, cutting off Neufeld when his questions strayed off the topic and ejecting two members of the audience whom he caught talking. Ito even released an order shortening the lunch break from 90 minutes to an hour starting Monday.

Time and again, the judge interjected, sometimes to sustain prosecution objections, other times to voice his own--and to sustain those as well. When lead Simpson trial lawyer Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. rose to make a point before the jury entered, Ito crisply warned him to hold his comments to 60 seconds. When prosecutor Hank Goldberg reminded Ito of some earlier testimony, the judge sarcastically noted: “You have to assume that since I was here, I was probably listening to the testimony.”

After the hurried morning session with the lawyers, Ito invited the jury in. And once the testimony had resumed, the judge frequently interceded to keep the trial from languishing and to prevent the lawyers from going over the same ground time and again, a habit they have developed in the three months since opening statements in the nationally televised trial.

In another departure from previous sessions, Ito refused repeated requests for sidebar conferences, whose frequency has interrupted the flow of the trial for weeks. And when questions struck him as vague or misleading, the judge sometimes interrupted, rephrased the question himself and posed his own version to the witness.

At one point Tuesday, Ito grew impatient with a line of defense questioning intended to suggest that Mazzola should have done more to see that photographs of Simpson’s estate fully documented the size and placement of various blood drops. Mazzola already had testified that it was not her job to oversee the photographer, but with previous witnesses, Ito had given the lawyers considerable latitude to pose similar questions.

This time, the judge--who has come under considerable criticism for allowing the trial to wander--cut the questioning short.

“She was the probationary trainee,” Ito lectured Neufeld in front of the jury. “This is interesting, but not terribly relevant to this witness.”

Despite Ito’s new drive to keep the trial from straying off track, the afternoon session was delayed by nearly half an hour over the prosecution videotape. Ito watched the tape, which the defense wanted to use in questioning Mazzola, then ruled that a disputed section of the soundtrack could not be used.

Although he prevailed in that argument, Goldberg then rose in an attempt to clarify one point.

“Sit down, Mr. Goldberg,” Ito said. “Let’s have the jurors.”

After a brief moment, Neufeld then piped up: “Your honor, may I make one other comment?”

“No,” Ito responded, glaring. “Thank you.”

Ito’s stricter approach seemed to keep Neufeld from establishing a smooth rhythm with his questioning, but it yielded immediate results: Jurors, who have become accustomed to hearing an average of less than three hours of testimony a day, listened to about twice that Tuesday.

Jurors Return

The questioning resumed after a four-day hiatus in which the trial was temporarily derailed by insurgent jurors who demanded a chance to express their dismay over Ito’s decision to oust three sheriff’s deputies from the trial. Ito spent part of two days hearing their complaints--some of which were highly emotional--and his patient counseling efforts appeared to have defused the standoff.

When the panelists returned Tuesday morning, many were smiling, and they quickly settled back into their old routines. Much attention in recent days has focused on the jury’s clothing--many panelists came dressed in dark clothes to signal their mourning for the missing deputies last week and then returned in bright spring clothes on Monday. But on Tuesday, the 18 jurors and alternates arrived in a mishmash of apparel, defying easy analysis by the legion of eager trial watchers gathered to chronicle the case.

Back in court, the jurors filed in as usual, and a 38-year-old woman said to have led the recent protest took her usual seat in the back row. She smiled slightly as she sat down.

A few seats away, meanwhile, was an airline flight attendant so fed up with the deputies that she was ready to quit last week. Their removal mollified her, however, and Tuesday, she too resumed work. During the session, she stared straight ahead, looking at a blank television monitor--as she typically does during the trial.

The rest of the panelists donned the impassive faces that they have publicly displayed since the trial began. They all appeared to follow the day’s questioning closely and attentively.

Intense Questioning

When court resumed after the lunch break, Neufeld stepped up the pitch and intensity of his questioning, immediately putting Mazzola in the awkward position of criticizing a prosecution exhibit. Prosecutors had prepared a list of blood samples detailing who collected them and where they were sent for testing.

On a number of samples, prosecutors had listed evidence as collected by Fung and Mazzola, and Fung testified that that was accurate because they had worked together throughout the day. Mazzola, however, testified that she had collected many of the samples by herself.

“So the prosecution diagram . . . is incorrect?” Neufeld asked.

“As it stands there, yes,” she answered.

That response appeared to put Mazzola at odds with her supervisor and with the prosecutors themselves, an embarrassing contradiction that Goldberg is likely to try to repair when it is again his turn to question the witness, perhaps today.

At another point in her testimony, Mazzola firmly stood up for her colleagues, a position that Neufeld also tried to exploit by suggesting that she was being unreasonably defensive.

When Neufeld asked whether Mazzola and her colleagues had ever been taught that careful packaging and record-keeping would keep evidence from being tampered with, the criminalist sternly suggested that his question was out of place.

“No one would tamper with the evidence,” she said.

“That’s an assumption you’re making, is it not, Miss Mazzola?” Neufeld asked, a question that Ito deemed argumentative and thus did not require her to answer.

“Well, Miss Mazzola, you can certainly speak for yourself, is that correct?” the lawyer asked.

“I can speak for myself,” she answered, “and I know the people I work with.”

“And you’re saying, Miss Mazzola,” Neufeld asked, “that there’s nobody who you ever met, who you know at the Los Angeles Police Department who would ever tamper with evidence. Is that right?”

“The people I know wouldn’t,” she answered firmly.

Near the end of the day, Neufeld became the latest attorney to turn to videotape in questioning a witness--this time by producing the tape that lawyers had argued about earlier in the day. Prosecutors had videotaped a demonstration of Mazzola showing how blood samples are collected, but Neufeld introduced it in an attempt to show that even under demonstration conditions, the criminalist was sloppy.

At one point, for instance, the tape showed her putting her gloved hand down on the pavement, then using the same hand to wield a pair of tweezers used to swab the pavement and stain. Neufeld several times asked Mazzola about the effects of the “dirty concrete” on the evidence collection.

“Miss Mazzola, did you see the dirt on the third and fourth fingers of your glove?” Neufeld asked at one point, directing her attention to the videotape.

“Yes,” Mazzola responded glumly.

Neufeld suggested that was improper and implied that it could reflect an overall carelessness when it came to collecting blood evidence in the Simpson case--even those samples that were subjected to highly sensitive DNA tests.

That argument is central to the defense case, though Simpson’s attorneys have yet to explain how sloppy work could have produced DNA test results that pointed to Simpson or the victims as the source of blood drops found at the crime scene as well as in Simpson’s car and at his estate.

Courtroom Artist

Although Ito aggressively sought to speed up the trial Tuesday, he also agreed to cancel Friday’s session because of scheduling conflicts. Rather than waste that day entirely, however, he scheduled an unusual session involving one of the courtroom artists sketching the Simpson case.

According to court officials, artist Bill Robles has not been submitting his drawings for prior review by Ito, as the judge demands in order to assure that no drawings are published or broadcast that would give away the identity of any juror. Robles is one of the nation’s most respected courtroom artists whose renderings are so accurate that they often are highly sought after by trial participants.

The trouble with Robles’ drawings from the Simpson case is that Ito apparently is concerned that they are so carefully done that the jurors are recognizable in them. According to a court spokeswoman, Ito also is angry that Robles has not submitted the drawings for prior review by him.

Robles, who has done work for The Times and CBS News, has not been sketching the jurors’ faces, and because of that he insisted that the drawings do not jeopardize the anonymity of the panelists. But a court spokeswoman said Ito is concerned that the other details--hair, clothing, stature and the like--are so precise that some people might recognize the panelists anyway.

A similar controversy engulfed Robles during Los Angeles’ last explosive criminal trial heard by an anonymous, sequestered jury. In that case, the 1993 civil rights trial of the police officers who beat Rodney G. King, U.S. District Judge John G. Davies called Robles in for a dressing down after the judge feared one of Robles’ drawings was too realistic.

Robles continued sketching that case and had no further run-ins with the judge after their meeting.

In ordering Robles to appear on Friday, Ito also demanded that he bring any of his jury drawings that have been published or broadcast.

“I’ve observed the rule against sketching the jurors’ facial features,” Robles said Tuesday. “I’m absolutely confident I’ve done nothing wrong.”