Tape Issue Looms Over Trial as Clark and Witness Clash

With both sides in the O.J. Simpson murder trial now in possession of what may turn out to be a powerful body of audiotape evidence, jurors returned to work Monday to hear the conclusion of testimony from a defense witness who traded insults for most of the day with Deputy Dist. Atty. Marcia Clark.

The testimony came on a day marked by a late start for the jury and frequent interruptions for sidebar conferences and long legal debates. As a result, less than half of the court day was devoted to testimony in front of the jury.

Outside the panel’s presence, Superior Court Judge Lance A. Ito denied a defense request to introduce information about news leaks, Simpson’s lawyers signaled that they will oppose a tour of the crime scene scheduled for Sunday, and sources revealed new details about a series of tapes of a professor and screenwriter interviewing LAPD Detective Mark Fuhrman.

The witness, Frederic Rieders, spent much of the session trying to defend his work in a previous case, a line of questioning that drew his ire and ultimately Ito’s. Clark’s repetitive cross-examination and the expert’s dismissive treatment of her--at one point she interrupted him while he was reading a document, and he archly informed her that he would let her know when he was ready--prompted Ito to intervene several times.

“All right,” he cautioned Rieders when the scientist upbraided Clark for interrupting him. “Let’s stop that.”

Ito himself grew impatient with Clark’s questions about the old case, however, and repeatedly urged her to move along. One alternate juror mirrored that frustration, grumbling audibly and thrusting down his notebook as Clark’s cross-examination probed the minute details of the other case--an investigation of a death in which another expert examined tissue from the same body that Rieders examined but came to different conclusions.

When Clark persisted in the line of questioning despite his warnings, Ito intervened.

“Let’s try the Simpson case sometime today,” he said. Clark tried one last time to reopen the topic, and then Ito had enough.

“This is the end of this inquiry,” the judge said. “It’s completely irrelevant at this point. Move on.”

Still, Clark returned yet again to the topic late in the court day, again frustrating Ito, who complained about the amount of time consumed by the issue. Robert Blasier, one of Simpson’s lawyers, also griped about Clark’s focus, urging Ito to cut off the inquiry once and for all.

Ito allowed Clark room for a few more questions, but denied her the chance to air a videotape and complained that the issue was so remote that it was nearly incomprehensible.

The wrangling between the prosecutor and witness continued most of the day, with Rieders at one point saying that another expert had complained of being “pestered by the prosecution from hell to breakfast.”

The animosity was so pronounced that when it was defense attorney Blasier’s turn to question Rieders in the afternoon, the lawyer asked him how he was feeling. Rieders, who spent part of the lunch break slumped against a pillar in the courthouse hallway catching a brief nap, conceded that he was suffering from bronchitis and added: “I’m afraid I’m terribly irritable.”

Rieders was called by the defense last month as part of the Simpson team’s effort to show that some bloodstains in the case showed evidence of a preservative known as EDTA. That preservative is present in test tubes used to hold the blood of suspects and victims, and the defense team maintains that if it can be found in samples recovered from the crime scene and from a sock discovered in Simpson’s bedroom, that would bolster the defense contention that those bloodstains were planted by police.

Simpson has pleaded not guilty to the June 12, 1994, murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman. His lawyers have said a combination of police bungling and evidence-planting is responsible for much of the evidence against their client, a contention that prosecutors and police have long dismissed as absurd.

Rieders told the jury last month that tests run by the FBI suggested the presence of EDTA in the blood samples found on a back gate and on one of the socks from Simpson’s bedroom. The FBI agent who ran the tests said Rieders’ conclusions were incorrect, but Rieders reiterated his opinions Monday under questioning from Blasier and stood by his findings.

Fuhrman Tapes Cause Stir

Rieders’ testimony occupied the morning jury session, but major developments in the case are building outside the jury’s presence, as the newly acquired tapes of a screenwriter interviewing Fuhrman are rapidly overtaking all other issues in the trial.

Both sides now have acquired copies, and sources say the material includes a range of potential trouble for Fuhrman: The detective utters racial slurs, discusses improper police conduct during the investigation of a police shooting--conduct that included death threats and beating suspects--and even disparages a former boss who happens to be Ito’s wife.

The two sides met in chambers Monday morning, in part, sources said, to hash out the potential conflicts raised by Fuhrman’s derision of Capt. Margaret York, who is married to the judge. According to sources, Fuhrman made disparaging remarks about York’s character and physical appearance.

Clark requested the private meeting with Ito, and afterward neither side spelled out what was said. Ito did obliquely refer to it, however, noting in open court that “the conflict issue . . . has been raised by counsel.”

He did not say how he would handle any potential conflict raised by Fuhrman’s disparagement of his wife, the highest-ranking woman at the LAPD and head of its Internal Affairs Division.

Fuhrman’s attorney, Robert H. Tourtelot, has said his client’s comments were made in the context of helping a screenwriter develop a character for a fictional work. As such, the remarks should not be taken as Fuhrman’s personal views, said Tourtelot, who has not yet heard the tapes but whose associates are seeking access to them.

The comments about York could prove embarrassing to Fuhrman, but of far greater significance are remarks in which sources say he used racial epithets and boasted of evidence-tampering and brutal police tactics.

On the witness stand earlier this year, Fuhrman was asked by Simpson attorney F. Lee Bailey whether he had ever “spoken about black people as niggers in the past 10 years.”

Fuhrman denied that he had.

In the tapes, however, Fuhrman does in fact use the word, according to sources and to an index of some of the tapes’ contents prepared by the lawyer for professor and screenwriter Laura Hart McKinny. That index does not reflect a review of every tape, but points out 27 examples of potentially troubling comments by Fuhrman; in some, he uses racial epithets, and in one he refers to evidence-tampering by police officers.

Moreover, sources say that in another interview Fuhrman discussed threatening to kill a person he interviewed to extract information on who was responsible for a shooting in which two police officers were hit. Fuhrman, the sources added, also said that officers beat up potential suspects during the investigation of that shooting.

According to the sources, Fuhrman did not specify what shooting that was, but said it involved two police officers and that it occurred in the early 1980s. There were several possible incidents that might fit some of the details provided by Fuhrman--a Dec. 20, 1984, shooting in Chinatown that left one officer dead and another shooting in the LAPD’s Hollenbeck Division are among those that might be consistent with the detective’s account.

The tapes form what could be the most powerful defense evidence suggesting that at least one police officer was not entirely truthful in his testimony to the jury hearing the Simpson case. As such, they have occupied an increasingly significant amount of court time and attention.

Monday, Fuhrman’s lawyers asked in court for their own copies of the tapes, saying that their client had a proprietary interest in the recorded interviews. Lead Simpson trial lawyer Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., who has tangled with Fuhrman’s attorneys for months, said they were not entitled to get anything from the defense and sarcastically thanked them for confirming that it was indeed Fuhrman’s voice on the tapes.

“We’re not going to cooperate with them,” he told Ito. “They can talk to their client if they want to know what he said.”

Ito agreed that he could not force the defense to share its material with Fuhrman or his lawyers, but added that McKinny could volunteer the information herself. Ito’s clerk contacted McKinny’s attorneys on behalf of Fuhrman’s lawyers to determine whether they would cooperate with him as they had with prosecutors, who received their copies of the tapes over the weekend.

Jury Tour in Doubt

The defense case entered its sixth week Monday; Simpson’s lawyers had estimated that they would be finished by this week but now expect to go longer.

Ito and two lawyers for each side visited the crime scene Sunday to lay plans for a possible second jury tour of the site this weekend. Ito announced in court that he was accompanied by defense lawyers Carl Douglas and Barry Scheck and prosecutors William Hodgman and Alan Yochelson on that visit, but Cochran then said the Simpson team was planning to object to the tour, which prosecutors requested. As with the previous jury tour, Ito meticulously has laid plans for this visit, attempting to secure the area and to duplicate the conditions that existed on the night of the killings as closely as possible.

Cochran, however, told the judge that the defense will argue that such a tour is unnecessary and too costly. Rather than hear argument immediately on that topic, Ito asked the defense to submit its objections in writing; he added that he wants to settle the dispute by Wednesday, presumably so that final plans can be put in place.

Monday also marked what may have been the defense’s last stand in its attempts to prove a portion of its case through the use of news reports. After losing their bid to introduce a false report that aired on KNBC-TV, the defense tried another tack on Monday, seeking to present to the jury an article that appeared in The Times on Sept. 15.

That article disclosed the results of DNA tests performed by a private Maryland lab, and Simpson’s defense team noted that it accurately revealed those results before the lab report had been forwarded either to the prosecution or the defense. That, according to defense attorney Peter Neufeld, was evidence of lax security given to material in the Simpson case.

“I believe we can show that the security was a farce,” Neufeld said.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Hank Goldberg, arguing for the fifth time in response to a defense effort to introduce evidence gleaned from news reports, responded that leaks did not cast light on the evidence itself and had no bearing on Simpson’s guilt or innocence.

After first entertaining the defense proposal, Ito shot it down. He ruled that evidence about the story was irrelevant to the trial.

Ito’s decision to curtail the news leak topic made it unnecessary to call some witnesses, possibly shortening the trial. But those witnesses were relatively minor ones, and new issues--most notably the Fuhrman matter--have continued to crop up with striking regularity, prolonging the trial beyond all initial estimates. Jurors originally were told to expect about six months of sequestration; as of this week, they will have been sequestered for eight months, with another one or two still possible.

The case’s long duration has taken an emotional toll on the parties and on some of the hundreds of reporters and photographers gathered in Los Angeles for it. One reporter, Robin Clark of the Philadelphia Inquirer, was killed in a car accident, and another popular member of the press corps, Vanity Fair’s Dominick Dunne, suffered a scare when his son disappeared in Arizona.

His son was found late last week, however, and Monday marked Dunne’s first return to court since the incident.

“Welcome back, Mr. Dunne,” Ito said from the bench, a greeting that Dunne acknowledged appreciatively.

Outside, Clark signaled her best wishes for the journalist. As she entered the courtroom, the prosecutor folded both hands over her heart and mouthed the words: “Thank God.”

Near the end of the court day, LAPD lab director Michele Kestler took the witness stand, testifying briefly about her role in the Simpson case and tangling with Neufeld over her precise responsibilities and her recollections about various meetings. She is expected to return to the witness stand this morning.