Prosecutors Detail Every Goldman Wound

Determined not to overlook any detail, a prosecutor in the murder trial of O.J. Simpson on Tuesday reviewed each and every wound suffered by Ronald Lyle Goldman, a methodical presentation that at first seemed to lose the interest of jurors but then forced a brief interruption when one panelist became too disturbed to continue.

The interruption came as the county coroner, Dr. Lakshmanan Sathyavagiswaran, described a deep wound to Goldman’s chest, a stabbing injury that went through one rib, punctured his right lung and struck another rib as well. Combined with another chest wound, that injury would have caused Goldman to bleed heavily and would have interrupted his breathing.

Eventually, the coroner said, it would have killed the 25-year-old waiter.

“You can expect death in a very short time after the injury,” Sathyavagiswaran said. As he spoke, Goldman’s father, Fred Goldman, recoiled, and a 24-year-old receptionist on the jury signaled that she needed a break. Before her was a full-body picture of Goldman, his clothes soaked in blood.

Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., Simpson’s lead trial lawyer, saw the juror signal and motioned to Superior Court Judge Lance A. Ito. As she hurried from the room, Ito ordered a short recess. When the trial resumed a few minutes later, Fred Goldman and the juror both were in their seats, their composure restored.

Ito reminded the panelists that they should feel free to ask for a break at any time. But the rest of the day proceeded without incident, and by the end of the session, jurors had seen the last of the autopsy photographs whose grim presence has kept the courtroom atmosphere tense and unsettled since early this month.

Simpson, who has pleaded not guilty to the June 12, 1994, murders of Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson, sat impassively through the testimony about the attack on Goldman. Although Simpson had occasionally seemed overcome during the description of the ferocious attack that killed his ex-wife, his reaction to the testimony about Goldman--a man whom Simpson’s lawyers say he never met--has been far more subdued.

Although Simpson sits just a few feet from the Goldman family, he almost never makes eye contact with them. Instead, Simpson spent most of the court day Tuesday taking notes or whispering to his attorneys. During one break, he smiled and shared a quiet laugh with his lawyers, drawing angry stares from Kim Goldman, the sister of the young man murdered a year ago this week.

Heading Off Challenges

Ever since Simpson’s lawyers launched aggressive attacks on early prosecution witnesses, deputy district attorneys handling the Simpson prosecution have spent much of their time attempting to preempt defense challenges to their witnesses. But even by the standards of the Simpson case, the questioning of Sathyavagiswaran has been notable: He has spent seven days undergoing direct examination, the longest of any witness, and he has detailed dozens of mistakes by one of his subordinates.

On Tuesday, he described the work of his office on the Simpson case as “an adequate job. . . . But my opinion is no longer that it was a very good job.”

Although much of the testimony has been gripping, at other times it has been dry and repetitive, so much so that Simpson attorney Robert L. Shapiro referred to it Tuesday as “an unprecedented marathon.”

“I think it’s time for Your Honor to step in and say, ‘The jury has enough evidence on the real issues at hand,” Shapiro told Ito before the jury was brought back in for the morning session. “Limit the issues. Limit the testimony.”

On Monday, Deputy Dist. Atty. Brian Kelberg announced that prosecutors would not be calling Dr. Irwin Golden, the deputy medical examiner who performed the autopsies, but instead would rely on Sathyavagiswaran’s testimony regarding the coroner’s evidence.

Shapiro responded by saying that the defense would call Golden to the stand, and on Tuesday, before the jury was brought into the courtroom, he baited Kelberg by suggesting that the prosecution was intentionally trying to avoid exposing the jury to the deputy medical examiner. Golden’s testimony during Simpson’s preliminary hearing was widely dismissed as ineffective, at best.

“If the purpose is to get to the truth,” Shapiro said Tuesday, “call the person who did the autopsy.”

Outside court, Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti defended the decision not to call the deputy medical examiner, saying that the extensive testimony by Sathyavagiswaran rendered Golden “a useless witness right now.”

In court, Ito has generally given the lawyers a long leash in conducting their questioning of witnesses, and he declined to intervene to speed the testimony along despite Shapiro’s urging. Instead, he tried to cajole Kelberg into moving more quickly, urging him in front of the jury to “conclude” his examination.

Kelberg said he got the court’s hint, but he did not finish by the end of the day, so his direct examination of the coroner will continue today.

Cautious Testimony

As a result, Sathyavagiswaran’s testimony continued to follow its cautious, painstaking course as the mild-mannered coroner described dozens of injuries, most of them relatively insignificant wounds to Goldman’s hands. That testimony did not appear to attract much interest from the jury, whose members fidgeted restlessly.

Describing a set of puncture wounds to Goldman’s face, however, Sathyavagiswaran offered a grim hypothesis for what could have caused them.

“I have no way of knowing exactly why they were done,” he said. “It could have been inflicted to determine whether he was still alive or not. That would be one conclusion I would draw.”

And Sathyavagiswaran’s testimony also doled out new details about how prosecutors contend that the fight between Goldman and his attacker unfolded. The coroner testified, for instance, that the stab wounds to Goldman’s chest could have been inflicted by a right-handed attacker standing behind his victim.

Sathyavagiswaran demonstrated that motion by standing behind the prosecutor and wielding a short ruler as if it were a knife. A few feet away, Goldman’s family watched, their faces drawn and pale. At one point, Goldman’s sister, Kim, caught sight of one of the autopsy photographs of her murdered brother; she caught her breath sharply, raised her hand to her mouth and lowered her head.

The chest wounds, like every other identifiable knife injury that Sathyavagiswaran has described, were inflicted by a single-edged knife, the coroner said. That is an essential element of the prosecution case because authorities contend that a single attacker, armed with a single knife, caused all the injuries to Goldman and Nicole Simpson.

And Sathyavagiswaran testified that Goldman had no evidence of alcohol or drugs in his system at the time of his death--by itself, not especially significant testimony, but combined with the absence of any drugs in Nicole Simpson’s system, a potentially helpful bit of information for prosecutors trying to rebut the suggestion that the killings could have been drug-related.

During his questioning of a Los Angeles police detective earlier in the trial, defense attorney Cochran suggested that the murders could have been carried out by drug dealers, and he compared the victims’ slashed throats to a so-called “Colombian necktie” or “Colombian necklace.” On Tuesday, the coroner said he had never seen such a murder during his three years in the Los Angeles County coroner’s office.

Prosecution Case Ending

Outside the jury’s presence Tuesday, lead prosecutor Marcia Clark for the first time laid out the remainder of the prosecution case, telling the judge that she and her team of attorneys have just a few more sections of evidence to present before resting.

“We [are] closer to the end than we thought we were,” she said, adding that the next set of witnesses will describe the shoes and gloves believed to be connected to the crime.

After that, Clark said prosecutors intend to call a statistician to discuss DNA test results, and at least one more witness to tell about tests run on blood samples to determine whether any of them showed evidence of a preservative. If so, that would bolster the defense argument that reference samples of the blood from O.J. Simpson and his ex-wife were used to stain evidence. But sources have long said that the prosecution tests on those samples, which were conducted by the FBI, did not reveal evidence of the preservative and thus undercut that conspiracy theory.

Once that testimony is delivered, Clark said she expects more witnesses to describe the alleged history of domestic violence between O.J. Simpson and his ex-wife. At least one witness will testify about Simpson’s cellular phone records--calls he made on the night of the murders and possibly the following day--and one or more witnesses will present the hair and other trace evidence found at the scene of the crimes and at Simpson’s home and car.

That accounting of the prosecution’s remaining witness list debunks persistent tabloid reports that the government lawyers intended to produce a surprise eyewitness to the crimes, but also suggests that the government case probably will tail into next month because there appear to be nearly a dozen witnesses left to testify.

Garcetti agreed with that assessment, saying he now expects the prosecution to rest in mid-July, a date that has shifted throughout the presentation of evidence and is far later than the government team had originally predicted.

Jury Update

Dropping the deputy medical examiner from the witness list will speed the trial, Garcetti added, a notion that has special appeal given the scant number of alternate jurors who remain.

With only two alternates, many legal experts have predicted that the trial will run out of jurors before it runs out of testimony. At least for now, however, the panel appears stable. Sources told The Times last week that all juror investigations have been concluded and no more changes in the jury composition appear imminent.

New allegations and investigations have dogged the panel from the start, however, and both sides already are jockeying for strategic advantage in the event that the number of jurors drops below 12. Defense attorneys, who once said they would ask to go forward with fewer than 12, now are hedging on that promise, saying they will wait and see.

That has long been Garcetti’s position, and the district attorney on Tuesday vehemently denied a published report that his office had already decided to go forward with fewer than 12 jurors if the panel was reduced to that.

“I’m not wasting my energy now considering this,” Garcetti said.