Prosecutors Opt Not to Include Simpson Chase : Courts: They win OK to enter new DNA evidence, but lose on fibers. Garcetti denounces Ito over fining of office.

Scrambling to conclude their rebuttal case, prosecutors in the murder trial of O.J. Simpson dropped plans Wednesday to introduce evidence about Simpson’s failure to surrender to police, lost a battle to tell the jury that fibers on a bloody glove probably came from a Ford Bronco such as Simpson’s and got fined for showing up to court late.

They won the right to introduce new DNA evidence, however, and presented it to the jury through a witness who said bloodstains in Simpson’s vehicle contained genetic markers matching those of the defendant and murder victim Ronald Lyle Goldman.

The witness, state Department of Justice analyst Gary Sims, testified that he combined DNA from three bloodstains found on the console of Simpson’s Bronco. Once he had done that, there was enough DNA to conduct an RFLP test, a very precise analysis that yielded the results suggesting a mixture of the blood of the defendant and a victim with whom Simpson had had no known contact.

“The finding of that pattern on the console,” Sims said, “is consistent with the mixture and the banding pattern of the defendant, Mr. Simpson, and also the contribution of Mr. Goldman.”

Under cross-examination, Sims acknowledged that he could not account for the handling of the car during the months after police towed it from Simpson’s home to a police garage. During that period, a number of unauthorized people entered the vehicle, and Simpson’s lawyers have suggested that they could have compromised any evidence later taken from it.

Sims’ testimony was part of yet another tumultuous day in the Simpson case, which has grown more frantic as it has wound toward conclusion.

Prosecutors danced on the edge of a contempt-of-court charge, and Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti, in a furious denunciation of the judge, threatened to appeal the fine that Judge Lance A. Ito imposed on them.

And in a decision anticipated by most legal analysts, a state appellate court later Wednesday rejected a critical defense appeal aimed at forcing former LAPD Detective Mark Fuhrman back on the witness stand, a move that had been spurned earlier by Ito.

Meanwhile, Simpson’s lawyers publicly launched their campaign to put the FBI crime laboratory on trial by disclosing that they are attempting to secure the testimony of an FBI agent to prove that the bureau routinely encourages agents to slant testimony to aid prosecutors.

Defense lawyers want that agent, Frederic Whitehurst, to testify in the Simpson case because he has accused a colleague of falsifying reports and fabricating evidence in other cases. The accused agent is Roger Martz, an analyst who was called by the defense during the Simpson trial but whose account regarding scientific tests favored prosecutors. On Wednesday, prosecutors said they would fight the effort to call Whitehurst, arguing that his testimony is irrelevant to Simpson’s guilt or innocence.

The defense’s proposed attack on Martz parallels its assault on Fuhrman, who testified that he found a bloody glove at Simpson’s Brentwood estate that was the mate of one found at the murder scene.

Wednesday’s ruling by the state Court of Appeal in Los Angeles dealt another setback to the defense’s effort to further discredit Fuhrman in front of the jury. Simpson’s lawyers had argued in their appeal that denying them the right to cross-examine him about his racist remarks could lead to a reversal if Simpson is convicted. Last week, Fuhrman invoked his 5th Amendment protection against self-incrimination at a hearing and Ito said he did not have to appear before the jury again.

In the appeals court ruling, Justices Paul Turner and Orville Armstrong wrote that issues raised by the defense--such as striking part of Fuhrman’s testimony--were inappropriate for appellate intervention. They said that if Simpson is convicted, his lawyers can raise the matters on appeal.

Simpson has pleaded not guilty to the murders of Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson.

With a host of issues swirling around the case, jurors were privy only to a small portion of it. Most of their day Wednesday was occupied by the testimony of Sims, a respected DNA analyst who performed a battery of tests in the case and who presented his latest findings with characteristic calm.

Jurors followed Wednesday morning’s session with apparent interest, watching carefully as Sims testified but not taking extensive notes. Some of their interest seemed to wane as the hearing stretched into the afternoon, however, with note-taking gradually dropping off.

One juror, an older white woman whom Ito offered to help out Tuesday when she told him of financial troubles, smiled broadly at Ito as she entered the courtroom. He returned the smile, but did not address her specifically in front of the other panelists. Defense attorneys have protested Ito’s offer to help that woman and have asked him to excuse her.

Outside the jury’s presence, Simpson attorney Peter Neufeld observed that members of the panel struck him as increasingly irritated with the lawyers, who have caused frequent delays in recent days with their jockeying for strategic advantage.

“It looks to me,” Neufeld said, “like whoever has any more witnesses gets cold stares from the jury.”

Ito Fines, Garcetti Explodes

Mindful of the jury’s restlessness, Ito had scheduled an early morning session to hear legal arguments on the admissibility of the evidence relating to Simpson’s actions on June 17, the day he was scheduled to surrender to police.

To avoid delaying further testimony in the trial, Ito directed attorneys for both sides to be in his courtroom at 8:30 a.m. to argue the issue.

Defense lawyers showed up as scheduled, but prosecutors did not, and it was a testy Ito who demanded an explanation from Clark. She apologized and said that a member of the government team had an emergency--prosecutors later acknowledged that the deputy district attorney, who was not named, had merely overslept. Ito fined the district attorney’s office $250 for failing to appear or to notify him.

“Excuse me, Your Honor,” Clark responded with obvious pique. “May I remind the court that [defense attorney] Mr. [Robert L.] Shapiro kept the court waiting for 20 minutes--showing up at 20 after 9 when it was his witness on the stand--and suffered no sanction.”

Ito glowered back and said: “Thank you. The sanction will be $1,000.”

Although prosecutors have generally prevailed in arguments before Ito, that sanction enraged members of the district attorney’s office, including Garcetti.

“What the judge did today was outrageous,” Garcetti said during a news conference, leveling an extraordinary blast at Ito. “It was vindictive, it was petty, it was uncalled-for. I’ve told my people I do not want them to pay that fine. This office will not pay this fine.”

Garcetti visited Ito’s courtroom later that afternoon. As he left, he said he had paid the unexpected visit to his deputies because there were a “a couple of things I needed to get clear with” Clark and fellow prosecutor Christopher A. Darden.

The district attorney declined to describe the substance of their conversation, but left little doubt the topic was Ito’s sanction.

“I am sick and tired,” he said, “of this judge not treating the prosecution fairly. The defense gets away with murder; we get hit. This is not about just one thing. But in this instance there just isn’t any legal basis for what he did to Marcia. He overstepped all legal grounds when he increased his sanction without warning, simply because she stood up.

“You could say,” Garcetti added, “that this was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

Rather than filing a motion for reconsideration with Ito, prosecutors immediately sought relief from the Court of Appeal. Garcetti said he hoped that Ito “would take the time to reflect” and withdraw the sanction.

But, he added: “I don’t really care at this point. The way the prosecution has been treated in this case is simply unacceptable.”

Later, the Court of Appeal denied Garcetti’s request for an emergency stay of the $1,000 fine.

Ito did not refer to Garcetti’s news conference or his emergency appeal of the fine in open court, but he continued to spar with Clark. After a frustrating debate over the editing of videotaped testimony by a Police Department nurse, Ito threatened to hold her in contempt.

“You’re warned in no uncertain terms,” he said, after sending a laughing group of jurors out of the room. “Do you understand me?”

“I do,” a chastened Clark answered.

Ito later did agree to back off the $1,000 fine, however. Faced with a prosecution request that he at least return to the original fine, Ito paused, took a deep breath, and then agreed to lower it back to $250.

Shapiro, who has been fined by Superior Court Judge James Bascue for allegedly granting interviews in a courthouse hallway, nodded toward the prosecutor who argued that motion and chimed in: “Could he represent me before Judge Bascue?”

Prosecutors Drop Pursuit Evidence

Before testimony began Wednesday, Ito rejected the latest prosecution effort to tell the jury that fibers from a glove found at Simpson’s Rockingham Avenue estate matched samples taken from Simpson’s Bronco and that those fibers only were used in an extremely small number of vehicles.

But the FBI agent who gathered that evidence had failed to comply with evidence-sharing rules when he testified earlier in the trial, and Ito found that the failure continued to justify the suppression of the evidence.

On the issue of the June 17 chase evidence, which had been the source of widespread commentary, Clark merely announced to Ito that prosecutors would no longer be pursuing that area of inquiry.

She did not explain why the prosecution was backing off its determination to introduce evidence of Simpson’s activities on the day of his arrest, when he failed to surrender as promised and later was arrested after he and his friend Al Cowlings led police on a slow-speed pursuit across Southern California. Just last week, Clark had said government lawyers would call two witnesses to describe Simpson’s behavior shortly before he disappeared and two others to say that they had withdrawn a large sum of cash that same day.

Garcetti declined to comment on why the prosecution would not introduce the evidence of Simpson’s activities that day except to say his team is eager to turn over the case to the jury as soon as possible.

“We believe the evidence that has been presented to the jury by both sides is sufficient,” Garcetti said. “We’re paring this rebuttal evidence down to the absolute minimum.”

Some analysts have faulted the prosecution for failing to use that evidence during its main case, but others said that on balance it seemed a smart move to avoid the entire area.

“There are so many elements of that chase that are heroic,” said Harland W. Braun, a criminal defense lawyer and former prosecutor. “There’s the suicide note. I think that’s incriminating, but I’m not sure that to this jury it would seem incriminating.”

Moreover, the witnesses whom prosecutors intended to call all are people close to Simpson--two of them experts working for him and the others his lawyer and personal assistant.

“It’s very difficult to present this kind of evidence through unfriendly witnesses,” Braun said. “You have no idea what they are going to say” on cross-examination.

Witness Challenged by Defense

Although prosecutors backed off that element of their rebuttal case, they did move ahead in two other areas: the new DNA evidence and evidence suggesting that a Police Department nurse was mistaken when he said he had withdrawn eight cubic centimeters of blood from Simpson.

Ito ruled against defense attorneys who argued that the DNA tests should be kept out of evidence because of delays in conducting the analysis. The delay, Ito concluded, was not deliberate and not intended to gain strategic advantage, as Simpson’s lawyers had maintained.

Prosecutors also prevailed in their response to the defense’s latest novel notion, a proposal made late Tuesday to end the jury’s sequestration.

“The conditions which caused the court [to] issue its original order to fully sequester the jury have continued and intensified,” Ito ruled early Wednesday, ending that effort, which legal analysts had joined with prosecutors in deriding.

Sims’ testimony highlighted the ever-shrinking portion of the court day devoted to testimony, but near the end of the session, an investigator from the district attorney’s office was called to lay the foundation for playing a videotaped interview of Police Department nurse Thano Peratis.

Stephen Oppler, who was present for the interview, testified briefly for the prosecution, essentially about how the session was conducted. But Oppler then was subjected to a surprisingly pointed cross-examination in which Simpson attorney Peter Neufeld accused him of helping Peratis to rehearse answers.

Neufeld jumped on a gap in the videotape, which was halted at one point and then restarted after 14 minutes, according to a time stamp on the tape.

“Is it your testimony, sir, during the 14 minutes after the first portion of the tape ended that all that was said was: ‘Oop, there was something I forgot to bring up or . . . another question I wanted to ask you,’ ” Neufeld asked. “Is that what you’re now saying, sir?”

“To the best of my recollection,” he answered, “that’s all that happened.”

Oppler seemed surprised by the intensity of Neufeld’s questioning, and Clark broached the subject directly during her redirect examination. What, Clark asked, did Oppler anticipate when he came to court Wednesday?

“I was expecting to come here and introduce the videotape and basically be done,” he said, adding that he had not even expected to be cross-examined, much less to be subjected to Neufeld’s brusque treatment.

Speaking softly, her tone contrasting with Neufeld’s, Clark asked whether Oppler had helped coach Peratis for his testimony or provided him with any materials to guide him.

“No,” he responded each time.

Oppler’s testimony was backed up at the end of the day by Teresa Ramirez, a photographer from the district attorney’s office who shot the videotape. Ramirez said that no one coached Peratis during the 14-minute break.

Times staff writers Tim Rutten and Henry Weinstein contributed to this story.