THE SIMPSON TRIAL : It All Comes Down to One Question: Which Side of the Baton Are You On?

Not since Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Robert Philibosian ordered tunneling under the McMartin preschool in search of the “secret games cave” has anything so bizarre occurred as last week’s installment of the O.J. Simpson double-murder trial.

First, there was Deputy Dist. Attys. Brian Kelberg and Marcia Clark colliding with a wall of flak put up by two defense witnesses, pathologist Michael Baden and toxicologist Fredrick Reiders, respectively. And then, Det. Mark Fuhrman was apparently caught in the greatest taped debacle since Richard M. Nixon’s secretary, Rosemary Woods, sprained her back trying to explain how she accidentally might have erased 18 1/2 minutes on the Watergate tapes.

While memories fade, a court reporter’s transcript is forever. From the transcript of March 14, 1995, Clark speaking:

“Whatever anyone may ultimately decide about Mark Fuhrman’s personal life or personal views of the world has nothing to do with whether or not he is credible as an officer and with the issues that relate to his honesty and veracity, and that is a much more narrow parameter than counsel would have this court believe. But the court knows better. I know the court does, because the court has indicated what its rulings are based on, wisely so. We are talking about [Fuhrman’s] character for truth and veracity. We are talking about whether there is a propensity to fabricate evidence with respect to interracial couples. That is what we are talking about here, and let’s not forget that.”

Six months later, there was Clark telling Judge Lance A. Ito that he was biased against the prosecution and demanding that he disqualify himself from the case because the defense apparently has tapes of Fuhrman explaining, among other things, how to frame a suspect or fake probable cause. The mind boggles.

In an exquisite J’Accuse thrust, Clark pierced the core integrity of Judge Ito, whose wife is the highest-ranking woman in the Los Angeles Police Department and a reported target of Fuhrman’s taped ridicule. Then, after watching Ito struggle to retain his composure on national TV while describing the hurt he felt over Fuhrman’s barbs, Clark withdrew her blade the next morning. Now, she said, Ito was a terrific guy, top-drawer and all that--if he would just stop interfering with the prosecution.

That brings us to the remarks of Deputy Dist. Atty. Christopher A. Darden, in the record of August 16:

“[There has been a] yearlong extortion attempt by the defense to get you to allow as much racist and irrelevant and inflammatory incidents into trial as possible. They have known about Fuhrman . . .”

Apparently they did, and the prosecution did not. The question is not whether Fuhrman is a racist. Rather, it is whether Fuhrman expressed his racist vocabulary after denying it under oath, and, more important, whether the Fuhrman tapes reveal that he has “a propensity to fabricate evidence,” as Clark so nicely put it back in March.

But are the Fuhrman tapes a “distraction,” as the prosecution claims, or is the defense’s H-bomb about to explode under the prosecutors’ table?

The evidentiary reason that the tapes are important is not Fuhrman’s reported penchant for the “N-word” or any other objects of his wrath. Their importance is: The People’s case is built totally on circumstantial evidence. Fuhrman and other detectives collected that evidence. The question that defense lawyers Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., Robert L. Shapiro and company are asking is: “What if Fuhrman and other officers are lying?” Darden calls this the “race card.” But it is not the “race card”; it is the “quality-control card.” That is what defending is about.

The defense is asking: “Why should we believe the police?” And, apparently on tape, Fuhrman answers: “You shouldn’t.”

It’s the old question of who watches the watchers? Certainly, not LAPD Internal Affairs, nor the Police Commission, nor the district attorney, nor the judges. Defense attorneys watch the watchers. And, occasionally, they catch them doing dirty business. Prosecutors take it on faith that cops tell them the truth. Clark and Darden want the jury to believe their police officers, trust the results of their laboratories and accept scientific theories and evidence that support their position.

But what Fuhrman reportedly says on tape is that cops regularly lie and cheat in the course of gaining convictions against “bad guys.” In the Simpson case, this is the equivalent of a bad magician pulling the table cloth out from under the good china. Everything that rested on the table cloth comes crashing to the ground.

Officers faking evidence is not exactly news in the African American or Latino communities. Cocaine can mysteriously pop into a pocket, or a gun can mysteriously be found under a driver’s seat. Things happen, things that generally don’t happen in, say, Pacific Palisades.

In attempting to weigh “truth,” a jury is required to rely on experience, and the black “experience” with the LAPD and police, in general, is one of frequent fabrication, especially with respect to “probable cause.” For example, when another Heisman Trophy winner, Marcus Allen, joined the Raiders, he was stopped by police while driving his Ferrari, within the speed limit, in his upscale Los Angeles neighborhood. Allen, already an L.A. legend because of his USC football career, allegedly had the wrong registration plates on his car.

For that, police put a gun to his head.

Or, slightly to the north several years ago, the Harlem Globetrotters were playing a game in Santa Barbara. Police were looking for two “average-size” black men wanted in a jewelry-store robbery. They eventually arrested and handcuffed three Globetrotters, the shortest of whom was 6 feet, 8 inches.

Many African Americans believe that the government is completely capable of planting evidence, fabricating testimony and convicting a “target,” whether or not he or she is guilty. Tragically, this belief is based on reality.

Remember, Cochran has seen it from both sides. He was the assistant district attorney, the office’s third-highest official, under John Van de Kamp. But before that, he was Black Panther Geronimo Pratt’s lawyer. Pratt is widely believed to have done 25 years (so far) for a murder he didn’t commit. In the Pratt case, the FBI planted an informant in Cockran’s office to telegraph defense moves to the prosecution.

Who understands governmental power and its potential for abuse better? Simpson’s defense team is addressing a very small audience who have not been watching white comedians lampoon Simpson on television for the last six months.

It is this fact, coupled with Cochran’s aim at the prosecution’s instinctual blinders that police testimony should be accepted on faith, that enrages the police, the district attorney and much of white America.

What the defense team has done is creep underneath the “facts” presented by the People to pose a more fundamental question to a mostly African American jury: “Why should you believe the cops?” What Fuhrman inadvertently may have provided is a taped confession that they should not.

Clark misreads the critical jury issue. The question is not whether the evidence is “overwhelming,” as she contends, but whether it is “trustworthy” and comes from a competent and untainted source. She needs to prove to a group historically injured by the LAPD that its officers are honest, its investigations “straight” and its scientific work credible.

Once again, the problem is formed by perception: “Which end of the baton are you on?” To borrow from Jerry Garcia, “What a long strange trip it’s been . . . “*