Simpson Defense Accuses Own Witness of Bias

Completing an about-face with their own witness, attorneys for O.J. Simpson on Wednesday accused an FBI agent of bias toward the prosecution, while government lawyers stood up for the agent’s credibility and used him in an attempt to undermine another defense witness.

Robert Blasier, normally a low-key member of the Simpson team, turned forcefully on Special Agent Roger M. Martz after receiving Superior Court Judge Lance A. Ito’s permission to treat the agent as an adverse witness even though it was the defense that called him to the stand.

Speaking in a loud voice and staring over the top of his reading glasses, Blasier opened his questioning of Martz by reminding the agent that his demeanor had changed markedly in the previous day’s testimony after a morning break. Before that recess, Martz had said one of his tests yielded a results consistent with the presence of a preservative in bloodstains found on a sock in Simpson’s bedroom and on a back gate near the scene of the crimes.

But after the break, a far more assertive Martz repeatedly emphasized to the jury that despite that one test result, his full analysis convinced him that the preservative was not present in those samples. The preservative known as EDTA is used in test tubes employed by the Los Angeles Police Department to collect blood, so if it were found in evidence samples it could bolster the defense’s allegations that police stained the socks and gate with blood to frame Simpson.

The former football star has pleaded not guilty to the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman.

After pointing out that Martz conferred regularly with prosecutors before and during his testimony, Blasier attempted to show that the agent’s change in demeanor was the staged act of an advocate, not the dispassionate testimony of an expert witness.

“Did you decide at the break that you needed to be . . . much more aggressive?” Blasier asked.

“I think I decided that I had to be more truthful,” Martz replied. “I was not telling the whole truth with yes-and-no answers.”

“So,” Blasier continued accusingly, “you decided to change your demeanor?”

“Well,” Martz responded. “I decided that I wanted to tell the whole truth.”

Wednesday’s grilling of the agent marked only the second time in the Simpson case that attorneys who called a witness then turned against him and asked that he be declared an adverse, or “hostile” witness. Deputy Dist. Atty. Marcia Clark used the same tactic, which allows the questioning attorney to pose leading queries, with Simpson guest house tenant Brian (Kato) Kaelin.

When Blasier asked Ito’s permission to have Martz declared a hostile witness, Clark objected, but only halfheartedly. Clark said her counterpart had already been posing leading questions, so the formal designation would have little effect.

And as Blasier attacked Martz during the afternoon session, Clark objected infrequently. Instead, she sat a few feet away, shaking her head in amusement as the defense lawyer fired his questions.

Despite Blasier’s accusing tone and pointed inquiry--the agent acknowledged conferring with prosecutors and testifying almost exclusively for government attorneys--Martz never acknowledged any predisposition toward the prosecution.

His voice flat and unemotional, Martz insisted: “I have no bias whatsoever.”

The high-intensity questioning by Blasier sparked divergent reactions from the opposing lawyers after the court session. Simpson’s lead trial lawyer, Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., called Martz “one of the worst witnesses I have ever seen” and accused him of being biased against the defense.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Christopher A. Darden, however, strongly backed the agent’s credibility and reiterated the witness’ central conclusion.

“All I know,” Darden said, “is there is no EDTA. I think that they’ll try to beat this guy over the head with a baseball bat until he says what they want him to say. The way they treated that man is reprehensible. They know what those results are. Desperate men do desperate things.”

Agent Gives Explanation

Clark’s approach to Martz also reflected the benefits that his testimony had delivered to the prosecution even though he was called to the stand by the defense. In fact, defense attorneys might not have called him at all except for the fact that their expert, Fredric Rieders, relied on Martz’s experiments and was not allowed to testify unless the agent was put on the stand as well.

Given the chance to question the agent in front of the jury, Clark sought to make the most of it, eliciting his criticisms of the defense expert and trying to erase any impression that he was slanting his testimony.

“When you were asked by the district attorney’s office to look at the bloodstains in this case to determine whether or not EDTA was present, did anyone from our office tell you what test to conduct?” Clark asked.

“No,” he said, “they did not.”

After another exchange, he added: “Generally I never really talk to the prosecutors. I just do the case. I work the case and give them the answers.”

Clark also used her questioning Wednesday to elicit Martz’s more complete explanation for the tests result that he told the jury was “consistent” with the presence of EDTA.

“When something is consistent with something else, it is not a positive identification,” Martz said. “It could be something else. With preliminary tests . . . there are a lot of chemicals that could be consistent, but in order to identify something, you have to have something unique associated with that chemical before you can positively identify it.”

Because of an unusual quirk in scheduling, Martz’s testimony comes in the middle of the account given by the defense’s primary expert, Rieders, who began testifying Monday and who is scheduled to return to the witness stand Friday.

Anticipating Rieders’ return, Clark attempted to lay the groundwork for it by probing the agent’s impressions of Rieders’ conclusions in the Simpson case and in a controversial Ventura County case several years ago.

Although rarely referring to Rieders by name, the FBI agent testified that his counterpart used the wrong testing method in the Ventura County case--one that ultimately ended in dismissal when another expert challenged Rieders’ conclusions and the prosecution agreed to drop the charges as a result.

But Blasier lobbed accusations of his own, deriding Martz’s credentials--unlike Rieders, the agent does not have an advanced degree--and even challenging his ability to do math. When Blasier asked the agent to compute the area of the circle, the agent struggled with one part of the calculation. He apologized for his confusion by explaining that he had not had to perform the calculation since high school.

Ito’s mastery of trivia has been on display in recent days with his recognition of a region in Germany and his recitation of the world’s best time in the marathon. He came to the rescue again Thursday, this time to supply the agent with the numerical value needed to complete the equation.

Despite those attacks on his credentials and competence, Martz concluded his time on the stand with a forceful defense of his ability to perform the tests and to interpret the results.

“I don’t think anyone, probably in the world, has more experience with identifying EDTA in forensic samples than I do,” he said with determination.

The jury had the morning off Wednesday while Ito, lawyers in the case and some of the judge’s staff attended a memorial service for Antranik Geuvjehizian, a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy who was killed last week when he confronted an intruder at his neighbor’s house.

When they returned for the afternoon session, jurors seemed in high spirits, talking animatedly as they took their seats. During one sidebar conference, five of the jurors shared a joke, whispering to one another and then bursting into laughter.

Their reaction to the testimony was more muted. Although the questioning was occasionally sharp Wednesday, the topics often were dry and the issues rehashed over and over. Jurors gradually seemed to take fewer and fewer notes, and one member of the panel struggled to stay awake, his chin drooping and his head nodding forward.

Case Unfolding Elsewhere

While testimony was unfolding in Ito’s courtroom, the case was moving ahead in other parts of the country as well. Simpson attorney F. Lee Bailey met with a county coroner in Upstate New York to discuss forensic issues, and Cochran was preparing to fly to North Carolina for a hearing Friday on a witness the defense hopes will provide material to undermine the credibility of Detective Mark Fuhrman of the Los Angeles Police Department.

Simpson’s lawyers believe that tapes in the possession of a professor at the North Carolina School of Arts could feature Fuhrman using racial epithets. The professor, Laura Hart McKinny, interviewed Furhman over a period of years for a book manuscript and screenplay, and she is fighting the defense’s efforts to put her on the stand.

On Wednesday, her lawyer said the tapes contain nothing that would clear Simpson of the murder charges he is facing.

“There is nothing in the transcripts nor in the audiotapes which prove that O.J. Simpson did not commit the crimes for which he has been charged,” said attorney Matthew Schwartz. “If that was the case, my client would have come forward voluntarily, immediately, and she would have tendered these materials to the prosecution and the defense knowing an innocent man’s life hung in the balance.”

Schwartz stopped short of saying that the tapes would not damage Fuhrman’s credibility, however. In fact, he would not even say whether his client had interviewed the detective, who denied on the witness stand that he had ever used a particular racial epithet any time during the past 10 years.

Court is expected to resume this morning with arguments on motions that could help define how long the defense’s case will go. One involves the anticipated testimony of witnesses who say Fuhrman used racial epithets in their presence.

Estimates of the remaining defense case have varied, but it could conclude sometime in the next two to three weeks. Asked whether the prosecution will present an extensive rebuttal case, Darden said outside court Wednesday that at least at this point government lawyers do not expect to.

“They haven’t laid a glove on us,” he said of the defense.

Times staff writer Tim Rutten contributed to this article.