Simpson Had Strength to Kill, Doctor Testifies : Trial: Physician also describes defendant’s ailments and says he appeared under great stress after the slayings.

Testifying about the medical conditions that he said plagued O.J. Simpson in the days after Simpson’s ex-wife and her friend were murdered, a Beverly Hills doctor said Monday that his patient appeared devastated by the murders, but acknowledged that Simpson was strong enough to have carried them out.

Although not Simpson’s regular doctor, Robert Huizenga saw the former football star twice in the week after the murders at the request of defense attorney Robert L. Shapiro. In those sessions, Simpson appeared under enormous stress, the doctor said, noting that the defendant had appeared sleep-deprived.

“The tack I took was to address his mental status problems and his insomnia and his difficulty handling this incredible, incredible stress that maybe no other human being short of Job has endured,” said Huizenga, in a bit of biblical hyperbole that Deputy Dist. Atty. Brian Kelberg pounced on.

“If he had murdered two human beings, Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman, would that be the kind of thing that would cause a great weight to be on a man’s shoulders?” Kelberg asked, his voice hard and accusing.

Shapiro, whose client has pleaded not guilty to the killings, objected, but he was overruled. The doctor responded: “If someone hypothetically killed someone, they certainly would have a great weight on their shoulders.”

That exchange came as Kelberg spent the day moving from the crime scene to Simpson’s storied NFL career and back again, part of a wide-ranging attempt to undercut Huizenga’s testimony last week regarding the ailments that afflicted Simpson. For the most part, the doctor was a congenial, easygoing witness, but his composure appeared rattled when Kelberg showed him a series of autopsy photographs of Goldman.

Huizenga was a few feet in front of the jury box when the photographs were displayed to him for the first time, and he took half a step backward. After taking a deep breath, he listened to a long, hypothetical question from Kelberg: If Goldman had suffered hand injuries while backing away from his assailant, would that explain why Simpson had no bruises from being punched?

“Yes,” the doctor replied softly.

As the day ended, jurors got a close look at Simpson’s physical condition less than three weeks before the murders. In late May, 1994, Simpson participated in an exercise videotape, and jurors watched with interest Monday as the tape, featuring Simpson performing a series of aerobic exercises, was played for them.

Simpson also watched, smiling and chuckling as his own image flashed across the screen. On the tape, Simpson participates but is clearly limited in his movements. He also refers several times to his injured knees, and each time he could be heard on the tape complaining about his knees, Simpson pointed to the screen and gestured toward his lead trial lawyer, Johnnie L. Cochran Jr.

Jurors watched in apparent puzzlement, as prosecutors were playing the tape, but it appeared to suggest that Simpson was limited by his old injuries--an issue the defense long has tried to emphasize in court. Outside the courtroom, Simpson’s attorneys said they believe the tape will help them.

“When you see this and you see how he’s obviously injured, I think it’s clear to everyone why we want to play the whole thing,” said Carl E. Douglas, one of Simpson’s lawyers. “The more the jury sees, the better for us.”

Shapiro agreed: “When I watched that video for the first time, all I could think of was my 83-year-old father and the fact that he could do those exercises better. . . . I play basketball with Tommy Lasorda, and he can do better than O.J., and he’s not in great shape.”

Scenario of Killings

Huizenga, a young-looking, 42-year-old doctor who had never testified in court before this case, has told the jury that Simpson suffered from arthritis and limited range of motion in one wrist and one shoulder. He acknowledged Monday, however, that those problems would not have prevented Simpson from carrying out the scenario that prosecutors--backed by the county coroner--have sketched for the killings.

“Doctor,” Kelberg asked, “did Mr. Simpson have sufficient strength in your opinion to grab the hair of his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and yank her head back to fully expose her neck?”

Huizenga gave a long response that did not answer the question, so Kelberg returned again, this time with a dash of sarcasm.

“So my question, which still has not been answered, doctor, is could he with his left hand have grabbed the hair of his ex-wife and pulled her hair back?” Kelberg asked.

“In a stationary situation,” the witness answered, “yes.”

After one more exchange, Kelberg asked: “And not only could he do that, doctor, in your opinion could he then, with his right hand holding a knife, slit her throat? Did he have the strength in his hand to do that?”

“Given a stationary hypothetical as you have said,” Huizenga responded, “yes, I believe that would be possible.”

Huizenga did not, however, suggest that Simpson was perfectly fit, stressing that his football injuries had left him less physically adept than he appears. “I wouldn’t hire him to back me up in a bar fight,” he said at one point.

Doctor’s Letters

Throughout his cross-examination, Kelberg repeatedly suggested that the doctor had gone beyond treating Simpson’s ailments to helping his legal team build its defense. To bolster that contention, Kelberg presented letters that Huizenga had written to Shapiro and his associate in which the doctor suggested elements of Simpson’s physical condition that might be helpful to presenting a defense in court.

The doctor conceded that in at least one of those letters he was not strictly limiting himself to Simpson’s medical care, but said he had merely answered questions posed to him by the legal team. Huizenga insisted that he was not shading any aspect of his testimony to favor Simpson’s defense.

“I think that is maybe going to come as a shock to you, but I was asked to see him because of acute anxiety situational problems and to evaluate to make sure that medically he was OK,” he testified. “I did not ask him the time [that Simpson suffered cuts and scratches on his hands]. I didn’t ask him whether or not he committed these crimes. I didn’t go into those items. That was for different people. He had a whole different set of people evaluating those things.”

But the prosecutor showed the jury a photograph of Huizenga examining Simpson along with an expert hired by his lawyers. The suggestion was that Huizenga had worked closely with the defense effort, but Huizenga said he was merely pointing out to the expert the injuries he had noted on Simpson’s hands during two visits in the week after the murders.

Huizenga also defended his examinations against Kelberg’s suggestion that he had overlooked certain details or been duped by his patient. Among other things, Huizenga said, Simpson had walked with a noticeable limp when the doctor saw him June 15, three days after the murders.

But witnesses called by the defense have said that Simpson was not limping on the night of the killings or the next day, when he returned to Los Angeles from Chicago, where police had reached him to tell him of Nicole Simpson’s death.

The doctor defended his observation, however, saying that Simpson’s limp was so pronounced that there was no mistaking it. Although Kelberg asked him to demonstrate for the jury, the doctor said it would be hard to recall exactly how Simpson was limping, and Judge Lance A. Ito sustained a defense objection to the demonstration.

Playing Through Pain

Kelberg’s cross-examination, which occupied the entire day despite Ito’s urging that he move more quickly, followed the prosecutor’s by now familiar methodical style. Kelberg specializes in complex medical testimony, and he grilled Huizenga in sometimes excruciating detail about his observations of Simpson.

Moreover, Kelberg tried to weave together the medical testimony with Huizenga’s personal history; the doctor worked for the Los Angeles Raiders from 1983 to 1990, and later wrote a deeply critical book about football executives taking advantage of their players.

Drawing on that football background, Kelberg asked whether professional athletes such as Simpson learn to marshal energy into aggressive bursts and then regain their composure just as quickly. In addition, Kelberg quoted from the doctor’s book in which he wrote about the remarkable ability of some athletes to play while in pain, a quote that Huizenga listened to with a half-smile and then acknowledged was his writing.

Huizenga accepted much of Kelberg’s reasoning about the performance of athletes, but near the end of the morning session, he turned one of the prosecutor’s analogies on the attorney.

“In your experience you have found, have you not,” Kelberg asked, “that players who have harnessed their energies and gone at each other, for lack of a better term, hammer and tong, throughout the game can thereafter control those same urges and act in a perfectly normal and cordial fashion with each other afterward?”

Smiling mischievously, Huizenga answered: “I think NFL football players are probably no different than lawyers in terms of attacking opponents and then, after the event, shaking hands and going back to a civil, normal life.”

Audience members laughed warmly at that, and Ito, who sometimes crossly interrupts such outbursts, allowed the response to go unpunished. Kelberg also smiled.

By the time he was through, Huizenga had offered both sides important points, becoming the latest defense witness whose testimony some observers believe has helped prosecutors at least as much as the side that called him.

“I don’t see what any of these witnesses--other than the family members--have added to their case,” said Gigi Gordon, a Santa Monica attorney who has closely followed the case, citing several defense witnesses whose testimony she said had fallen flat.

“And now,” she added, “the doctor . . . says no one since Job has endured as much as O.J. That was an outrageous statement. The doctor should talk to some of the people on Death Row. They got arrested, taken out of their homes, put on trial, and they didn’t have the Dream Team or someone politely coming to their house to examine them or to ask them to come to the police station. The defense is saving the prosecution. They’ve added fuel to the fire and opened themselves up to rebuttal.”

Simpson himself seemed displeased with some aspects of the doctor’s cross-examination.

As Kelberg fired questions to the doctor about Nicole Simpson’s throat being slashed, Simpson grimaced angrily, staring at the prosecutor and complaining to his lawyers. Jurors seemed less affected, watching the witness and lawyer carefully but not taking extensive notes and sometimes appearing nonplussed by the testimony.

Kelberg’s cross-examination continues today, and jurors will see more of the exercise videotape as well as a tape of the defendant delivering a motivational seminar in March, 1994. In that appearance, Simpson told a group that he once had suffered from debilitating arthritis, but had experienced enormous improvement after taking a product that he was promoting at the time.

Once the doctor’s testimony is complete, Simpson’s lawyers expect to call a Los Angeles Police Department officer who handcuffed the defendant the day after the murders and a woman who used to cut Simpson’s hair.

The officer is expected to be questioned as part of the defense team’s charge that authorities rushed to assume Simpson’s guilt, while the hair stylist is likely to be questioned about whether Simpson had dandruff, since hairs with characteristics resembling his at the murder scene did not show evidence of that scalp condition. The barber is expected to say that while some of the hairs recovered at the crime scene were tinted, Simpson does not color his hair.

Times legal affairs writer Henry Weinstein contributed to this article.