Mazzola Denies Cover-Up After Credibility Attacked : Trial: Judge Ito reiterates determination to speed up Simpson case. He also tightens rules on lawyers’ conduct.

A lawyer for O.J. Simpson concluded all but one aspect of his cross-examination of a Police Department evidence-collector Wednesday with a sarcastic attack on her credibility, suggesting that she fabricated testimony to cover up her sloppy work and alleging that she pretended to forget certain details.

Finally given the chance to respond to those and other allegations, however, criminalist Andrea Mazzola denied that she was a part of any police conspiracy to frame Simpson for the June 12 murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Lyle Goldman, to which Simpson has pleaded not guilty.

In fact, Mazzola said she did not even know who the Hall of Fame football star-turned-actor was when she first became involved in the case early on the morning of June 13.

While collecting evidence at Simpson’s Brentwood mansion, Mazzola said she kept hearing her supervisor referring to “O.J.”

“I said, ‘O.J. who?’ ” she testified. “He said, ‘movies, sports,’ and it just did not ring a bell.”

Those comments came as Deputy Dist. Atty. Hank Goldberg began the process of rebuilding any confidence that the jury may have lost in Mazzola over the course of two days of cross-examination by defense lawyer Peter Neufeld. That questioning has focused on attempting to belittle Mazzola’s credentials, alleging that she bungled her tasks in collecting evidence and suggesting that she changed aspects of her testimony to support the prosecution’s case.

Superior Court Judge Lance A. Ito, who began cracking down on the attorneys Tuesday, opened Wednesday’s session with a reiteration of his resolve to move the trial along at a faster pace. After quickly ruling on a pair of issues, Ito sternly informed both sides that he had drafted a new order governing the attorneys’ courtroom conduct. Failure to abide by the stricter rules will result in excoriation in front of the jury, Ito said.

“I have probably sustained a thousand objections so far in this trial regarding argumentative questions,” Ito said before the jury was brought into the courtroom. “For counsel’s edification, if the question is a statement rather than a question to the witness, I’m going to sustain the objection. If I have to do that too many more times, I’m going to admonish counsel in front of the jury that that manner of questioning is improper.” Ito also took special note of Neufeld’s up-tempo style and Brooklyn accent, warning him that it was overwhelming court reporters and asking him to slow down.

Once the jury was brought back into the courtroom, Neufeld resumed his questioning, initially moving at a slightly slower pace but soon falling back into his rapid-fire style of firing queries at the witness.

Mazzola spent the session defending her work and that of her colleagues, particularly criminalist Dennis Fung, but Neufeld lobbed one accusation after another. Worn down by the persistent attack, Mazzola seemed to grow confused at some points and defensive at others.

Noting that Mazzola never spotted blood on a gate at the murder scene, Neufeld sarcastically asked whether she had been taught to keep her eyes open. “Yes,” she answered meekly.

When she described a blood smear in Simpson’s bathroom, Neufeld asked whether Mazzola or anyone in her family had ever cut themselves shaving. And when she acknowledged that she had changed one aspect of her testimony since an August hearing, Neufeld suggested that she was trying to cover up for evidence-tampering by her colleagues.

“I do not remember if there was a concern over tampering with the sample,” she responded.

Neufeld’s questioning raised again the dual defense specters of incompetence and frame-up, but Goldberg struck back directly with his first questions to the criminalist late Wednesday.

“Miss Mazzola, are you part of some kind of police conspiracy involving a number of people to frame the defendant in this case?” asked the prosecutor, a question that has been posed to other witnesses as well.

“No,” Mazzola responded, with a touch of indignation. “I’m not.”

After his next question drew an objection, Goldberg then asked: “Are you involved in any cover-up in this case, Miss Mazzola?”

“No,” she answered, shaking her head and smiling thinly.

Eyeglasses Presented

In the course of questioning Mazzola on Wednesday, Neufeld also presented for the first time the eyeglasses that were recovered near the bodies of the two victims.

Jurors watched with rapt attention as Mazzola unwrapped the glasses, which once belonged to Nicole Simpson’s mother and which Goldman was returning when he was killed.

Mazzola donned a pair of white latex gloves and cut open the plastic bag containing the envelope. Once she had the bag open, Mazzola took out the glasses, with both lenses missing, and laid them on paper towels spread on the witness stand.

She held up the bloody envelope for the jury to see. On it were scrawled the words: “Prescription glasses. Nicole Simpson. Will p.u. (pick up) Monday.”

Neufeld tried to suggest that Mazzola had mishandled that evidence by questioning her about her statement that she did not see anything wrong with the glasses at the time that she collected the bloody envelope from the crime scene. In fact, he said, the glasses were missing at least one lens at the time, and Neufeld suggested that Mazzola had overlooked that obvious fact.

She responded, however, by saying that she only had glanced inside the envelope and had not taken the time to carefully inspect the glasses.

Under questioning from prosecutor Goldberg, Mazzola stated that she had only looked through a small opening in the envelope and had not carefully inspected the contents. “I did not notice if they were intact,” Mazzola said of the glasses.

Lying Alleged

Faced with a barrage of often-hostile questions that have stretched over sessions this week and last, Mazzola sometimes has struggled to remember details. She has described her lapses as merely the natural consequence of trying to recall events now more than 10 months old, but Neufeld on Wednesday suggested more suspicious explanations.

In one area, for instance, Neufeld took aim at a set of blood drops that Fung said he collected from the gate at the murder scene. Detectives testified that they saw those drops on the morning after the murders, but Fung did not collect them until weeks later--a gap that the defense has used to suggest that the drops could have been planted, or at least that results of subsequent tests of those items should not be considered reliable.

When Mazzola responded to questions about those drops by saying she never saw the gate--much less the drops--on the day after the murders, Neufeld accused her and prosecutors of collaborating in a cover-up.

“Miss Mazzola, when you were prepped to testify in this case by the prosecutors, were you told that there was an issue in this case, that is the fact that blood drops or alleged blood drops were not recovered from the gate on June 13 but were recovered from the gate three weeks later?” Neufeld asked. “Were you told that?”

“I remember hearing something about that,” Mazzola answered.

“During the prep sessions?” the lawyer continued.

“I can’t recall if it was during the prep sessions or not,” she said.

“And were you told during those prep sessions, Miss Mazzola, that one way to deal with that particular problem would be to say that you never even saw the gate when you were there?” Neufeld then asked.

“No,” she responded, her voice hardening.

“Did you come up with that idea on your own, ma’am?” Neufeld then asked, ominously.

Goldberg objected to the question, calling it argumentative. Ito agreed and Neufeld then moved on.

But as Neufeld neared the end of his cross-examination, he once again accused Mazzola of making up testimony to strengthen the prosecution case. After saying during an August hearing that she never had wandered away from Fung during their evidence-collection, Mazzola testified during the trial that she had stepped away for at least a few moments to sit down in Simpson’s living room and shut her eyes, exhausted after more than 12 hours of work.

It was while Mazzola was in the other room with her eyes closed that prosecutors say her supervisor received a vial of Simpson’s blood from a detective. Defense lawyers have suggested that the detective did not turn over the blood that afternoon but, in fact, kept it overnight, giving him more opportunity to use it to stain items of evidence--an allegation that the defense has made without offering supporting evidence.

“Do you have an independent recollection of your eyes being closed while you were sitting on that living room couch?” Neufeld asked, his voice raised and his tone accusing.

“I believe they were closed for a partial period of the time,” she answered, haltingly.

“Miss Mazzola, did you invent this notion that your eyes were closed so that Mr. Fung could testify that he received the vial without you seeing it?” Neufeld then asked.

Again, prosecutors objected, and again, Ito sustained the objection. Neufeld then concluded his questioning, at least for the time being. He will be allowed to briefly reopen his cross-examination when prosecutors produce evidence that Neufeld said he needed to make certain points.

Focus on Meeting

As he questioned Mazzola, the defense attorney seemed to rattle her by posing a series of queries regarding a November meeting between her, her supervisor and investigators from the district attorney’s office. Neufeld asked Mazzola about the meeting, ostensibly to raise questions about whether she had ever discussed her testimony with her supervisor, Michelle Kestler.

Prosecutors complained, however, that the real effort was to suggest that Mazzola had come under investigation for her handling of the blood samples. Although both sides avoided discussing the issue in detail in front of the courtroom cameras, sources said later that a book outline submitted last fall to publisher Michael Viner raised questions about possible evidence tampering in the Los Angeles Police Department lab.

According to the sources, prosecutors became aware of the outline--which ran about 100 pages--and subpoenaed it from Viner’s publishing company, Dove Books.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Christopher A. Darden, who has long experience in prosecuting police officers and who was not a member of the Simpson team at the time, fielded the outline and gave it to Ito in early November. Darden then joined the Simpson prosecution team, but investigators from the district attorney’s office continued to probe the allegations.

Although Ito then passed along a copy of the outline to the defense team, Simpson’s attorneys already were familiar with some of the allegations contained within it because they had been speaking for months to the author, a Denver writer named Stephen Singular. Singular is the author of “Talked to Death: The Life and Murder of Alan Berg,” a Denver radio talk show host who was killed by white supremacists. He said he had acquired law enforcement sources through that book who provided him some information regarding the Simpson case.

Singular said in his outline that sources told him lab technicians or other LAPD personnel had mishandled samples in the Simpson case.

But the inquiry into those allegations was delicate, sources said, because the outline raised potential problems for both sides--detailing, for instance, theories of how evidence could have been planted and how police could have tainted some items with Simpson’s blood sample. At the same time, Singular said he spoke dozens of times to defense team members beginning last August, and his outline describes aspects of the defense strategy that he gleaned from those sessions.

On Nov. 22, 1994, two district attorney’s investigators interviewed Mazzola at a Downtown restaurant and soon thereafter determined that the allegations regarding misconduct by lab employees were unfounded. No misconduct allegation--either criminal or administrative--was brought against Mazzola, the sources said.

Hearings Scheduled

With Ito pushing to devote more time to testimony every day--and with several days during the past week devoted to resolving a slew of concerns about the jury--a number of legal issues in the case have backed up. Late Wednesday, Ito conferred with the lawyers to sort some of those out, setting some for hearings and resolving others.

He scheduled hearings for next week on defense charges of prosecutorial misconduct and on Simpson friend and lawyer Robert Kardashian’s attempt to resist a prosecution subpoena. Ito did not immediately schedule argument on a defense motion seeking to question police witnesses about their motives to lie on the witness stand. That motion particularly cites what it and other observers have referred to as a police “code of silence” and has suggested that police would lie to protect one another.

Police Chief Willie L. Williams has denounced those allegations, and on Wednesday, the union representing Los Angeles police officers filed a legal brief in support of its members.

“There is no foundation to show there is a ‘code of silence’ in the Los Angeles Police Department that is related to this or the police officer witnesses in this case,” according to the brief filed by the Los Angeles Police Protective League.

Ito also did not schedule argument yet for a defense request to replace the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department as the jury’s guardian. Prosecutors did file their response, however, calling the defense request “patently ludicrous.”

“The sheriffs are responsible for the physical safety and well-being of this jury, 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” the prosecutors said. “They are well-trained to do so. Unarmed, untrained civilian employees are powerless to protect the jury’s safety.”

Although Ito successfully has defused the jury uprising of last week, new problems continue to confront the panel. One juror, a 38-year-old white woman whose leadership role in the jury’s work-stoppage was first reported by The Times, has expressed concern about remaining on the panel because her husband is ill. Ito has not decided whether to let her leave, and sources said she may be able to keep her seat, maintaining the current size of the panel at 18 jurors and alternates.

Times legal affairs writer Henry Weinstein contributed to this story.