Jury Urged to Free Simpson as Act of Courage, Social Justice : Courts: Defense equates acquittal with defending the Constitution and poses 15 questions to the prosecution. Cochran asks panel to stop “cover-up” by authorities.

With emotions cresting inside and outside the courtroom, lawyers for O.J. Simpson made their final pitch to the jury Thursday, a multitiered closing argument that disparaged the prosecution’s evidence, compared Detective Mark Fuhrman to Adolf Hitler and derided him and another police officer as the “twin devils of deception.”

The defense capped its argument by posing 15 questions to the prosecution--queries probing government evidence and asking why detectives allegedly lied on the witness stand, among other things. Prosecutors did not respond Thursday but will present their rebuttal argument--the last word in the arduous trial--today.

The defense’s plea for acquittal brought long-simmering emotions in the trial to a shrieking crescendo: Police expressed concern about the growing crowds outside the courthouse; both sides reported receiving death threats, one faxed directly into the courtroom, and during a morning break in the trial, the father of murder victim Ronald Lyle Goldman held a stunning news conference in which he denounced Simpson’s lead trial lawyer, Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., as a racist unfit to live among decent people.

“This man is the worst kind of human being imaginable. . . . He’s a sick man. He ought to be put away,” Fred Goldman thundered, shrugging off his wife’s attempts to pull him back from the microphone. “He’s a disgusting human being.”

For more than nine months, Goldman and his family have steadfastly occupied their places on the hard court benches of Department 103 in the Downtown Criminal Courts Building, their faces often tight and pale, tears sometimes streaming down their cheeks. But always they have silently obeyed Superior Court Judge Lance A. Ito’s requirement that they refrain from outbursts.

Outside the courtroom is another story, however, and Goldman often has turned to the bully pulpit to convey his increasing dismay with the defense of the man he believes killed his son and Nicole Brown Simpson. On Thursday, his anger exploded in a screaming tirade against Cochran, who had just completed the first phase of his closing argument and whom Goldman accused of fanning racism in a desperate attempt to “set his murdering client free.”

Simpson has pleaded not guilty to the June 12, 1994, murders.

“This man ought to be ashamed of himself to walk among decent human beings,” Goldman said, his eyes growing wide with rage as he stared fiercely into a crowd of reporters. “This man is a disgrace to human beings.”

Cochran did not venture to the courthouse microphone to respond directly to Goldman’s comments. But the family of the defendant called its first news conference ever to denounce Goldman’s remarks, even as they expressed sympathy for his grief.

“It’s wrong,” said Shirley Baker, one of Simpson’s sisters, who was surrounded by his other sister, his mother, his brother-in-law and his two grown children. “Even when you’re hurting, it’s wrong for someone to get up and to personally attack our lawyers and say that they’re liars.”

Baker and the other members of the Simpson family noted that the defense team had only articulated what has long been the contention of the defendant and his supporters: that he did not commit the crimes and that the evidence against him is unreliable.

“We have said from Day 1 that the evidence was planted and the evidence was contaminated,” Baker said. “We’ve not changed our position from Day 1. So why is everybody shocked?”

The Simpson family’s afternoon news conference drew not only reporters but a large contingent of spectators. Some gathered around the family, while others watched from a balcony overhead. When Baker thanked the Nation of Islam for providing security to the defense team--a point that Goldman had specifically criticized--many spectators cheered.

Cochran did not attend the Simpson family news conference. Later, he declined the opportunity to respond to Goldman.

“I don’t want to comment on any of that,” he said during a break Thursday afternoon. “He is the victim’s father. I’m just here doing my job.”

Goldman did not return to the courtroom immediately after the news conference. But he and his family were back in their seats for the afternoon session.

They sat stiffly as defense lawyer Barry Scheck argued the scientific evidence until Scheck began to describe the murder of Ron Goldman. At that point, Kim Goldman, the young man’s sister, began to cry. Her father put an arm around his daughter and held her tightly as she wiped away tears from both cheeks.

‘A Test of Citizenship’

Goldman’s fury broke as Simpson’s lawyers were dramatically raising the stakes in the trial, calling upon jurors to stand in defense of the Constitution and to free Simpson not only based on the evidence but also as an act of courage and civic duty.

“It’s a test of citizenship,” Scheck argued in his portion of the defense summation to the jury.

His gritty, blustery analysis of the scientific evidence attempted to dismantle the core of the prosecution’s case, and was bracketed by Cochran’s closing statement--a meandering oration that borrowed heavily from the Bible and intertwined the evidence with exhortations to social and racial justice.

“Stop this cover-up!” Cochran demanded of the jurors, who sat three feet away and stared intently at the charismatic attorney. “Stop this cover-up! If you don’t stop it, then who? Do you think the Police Department is going to stop it? Do you think the D.A.’s office is going to stop it? Do you think we [the defense team] can stop it by ourselves? It has to be stopped by you.”

Cochran, who worked from notes contained in a black binder, touched on dozens of pieces of evidence in his summation, but he reserved his most passionate passages for his attempts to embolden the panel to act with courage in a case that the defense lawyer repeatedly said was “not for the timid.”

The jury’s job, Cochran intoned, was to be the community’s conscience and to protect society from wayward police. “You police the police,” he said. “You police them by your verdict.”

Jurors watched Cochran closely: When he directed their attention to boards or exhibits, their heads turned in unison. Midway through the morning, one juror asked to be excused to use the bathroom.

Cochran temporarily halted his presentation, and when he strode back to the lectern to resume, he brushed by Deputy Dist. Atty. Christopher A. Darden, whose closing argument the day before had directly challenged Cochran and had been widely praised by analysts.

“Nice tie, man,” Cochran muttered to the prosecutor as he passed.

Shortly before turning over the floor to Scheck, Cochran returned once more to the suggestion that the jury should ride herd on the police with its verdicts. This time, he made the point even more forcefully, metaphorically attempting to link the defense team and the jury in a single campaign to protect society from dishonest police officers.

“We then become the guardians of the Constitution, as I told you yesterday,” he said, “for if we as the people don’t continue to hold a mirror up to the face of America and say, ‘This is what you promised, this is what you delivered,’ if you don’t speak out, if you don’t stand up, if you don’t do what’s right, this kind of conduct will continue on forever.”

And if jurors shrink from that duty, Cochran said, “we will never have an ideal society, one that lives out the true meaning of the creed of the Constitution or of life, liberty and justice for all.”

‘Devils of Deception’

The combination of Cochran and Scheck gave jurors--as well as a nationwide television audience--a view of two vastly different attorneys, one from California, the other from Brooklyn, one steeped in oratory, the other in science.

Jurors had heard from Cochran the day before, but he both began and finished the defense presentation, appearing before and after Scheck. As he spoke Thursday, Cochran stepped up his already fierce attack on Fuhrman, whom he called the “personification of evil.”

As he had the night before, Cochran used Fuhrman as the linchpin of the defense conspiracy theory, and this time the lawyer compared the former detective to “another man not too long ago in the world who had those same views, who wanted to burn people.” That man, Cochran said, was Hitler, a comparison that drove Fred Goldman to grind his teeth and to begin talking softly to himself.

Kim Goldman bowed her head, her long red hair shielding her face from view.

But Cochran did not stop there. He maintained that the misconduct spread beyond Fuhrman and infected other Police Department employees as well. In particular, Cochran took aim at Detective Philip L. Vannatter, a respected veteran of the department’s Robbery-Homicide Division and one of the case’s two lead investigators.

Defense attorneys launched their attack on Vannatter only in the case’s final days, presenting a mob informer and an FBI agent who recounted conversations in which they said Vannatter told them he had considered Simpson a suspect a few hours after the killing, when detectives went to the defendant’s house on Rockingham Avenue. Vannatter denied making such comments--which would contradict his sworn testimony that he did not consider Simpson a suspect until later that day--but Cochran nevertheless paired Vannatter with Fuhrman as the primary targets of the defense effort.

At first, Cochran called them the “twins of deception.” By midmorning, he was calling them the “twin demons of deception.” And by the time he was through, Cochran had labeled them nothing less than “twin devils of deception.”

Their deceit--combined with the LAPD’s determination to compile evidence against Simpson to avoid yet another high-profile embarrassment--led the entire case askew, Cochran argued.

Outside court, Detective Tom Lange--Vannatter’s partner, the other lead investigator and one of the few officers to escape Cochran’s scathing criticisms--dismissed the defense attorney’s attack on Vannatter as beyond ridiculous.

“It’s bull----,” said the normally soft-spoken and easygoing Lange. Of Cochran, he added: “The preacher has turned into a snake-oil salesman.”

‘A Right Way . . . and a Wrong Way’

If Cochran’s argument was a call to social and racial justice, Scheck’s was a summons to the microscope, where he said cold scientific analysis would provide the basis for Simpson’s acquittal. Scheck’s argument both dovetailed with Cochran’s and departed from it, adopting some of his colleague’s rhetorical flourishes but adding a few of his own.

“The integrity of the system is at stake,” Scheck told the jury. “You cannot convict when the core of the prosecution’s case is built on perjurious testimony of police officers, unreliable forensic evidence and manufactured evidence. It is a cancer at the heart of this case and that is what this evidence shows.”

Scheck premised his argument not on a criticism of DNA technology--the method used to analyze blood drops from the scene of the crimes, from Simpson’s car and from his estate--but on a devastating critique of the analysts who collected and tested much of that evidence.

“You know,” said Scheck, “science is not better than the methods employed and the people who employed it. DNA is a sophisticated technology. It is a wonderful technology, but there is a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it.”

The right way, Scheck said, was the way employed by defense experts. The wrong way is the method adopted by the LAPD, which the defense lawyer labeled on a chart as the “black hole.”

Echoing the theme first sounded in Cochran’s opening statement nine months ago, Scheck highlighted examples of what he said was evidence being contaminated, compromised and corrupted. Each time, he reviewed the testimony that raised questions about a particular item of evidence; each time, he reiterated the words of Dr. Henry Lee, an eminent criminalist who testified for the defense.

“Something is wrong,” Scheck said over and over. “Something is terribly wrong.”

Together, the questions added up to reasonable doubt many times over, he said: Some of the blood drawn from Simpson’s arm cannot be accounted for; a Caucasian hair found on a glove at Simpson’s house was not compared to Fuhrman; an analyst’s testimony about initialing bindles of evidence is not supported by the bindles themselves. All those and other details raised deep, unanswerable questions about the prosecution case, Scheck said.

His argument was at least partly undercut by a mistake, however. During an afternoon break, Scheck was reminded that the Caucasian hair from the glove was in fact compared to Fuhrman, and that Fuhrman was eliminated as a possible donor. Chastened, Scheck admitted his mistake to the jury and asked the panel to disregard that portion of his argument.

But no aspect of the physical evidence drew more defense attention than the socks that police say they found in Simpson’s bedroom on the day after the murders. Scheck hammered on those socks, alleging that the evidence showed that blood on them was tainted with a preservative, suggesting that it was drawn from test tubes and planted, not splashed on them during a fight. The absence of dirt on the socks bolstered that contention, he added, as did the stains themselves.

Wielding a microscopic photograph of tiny bloodstains on one of those socks, Scheck strode up and back in front of the jury and bellowed: “Somebody played with this evidence. There’s no doubt about it.”

Scheck’s initial focus was on allegations of planted evidence, but as the afternoon session wore on, his presentation turned to the drier topic of contamination, an area that continued to hold the jurors’ interest even though it did not appear to keep them as raptly attentive as when Cochran had spoken earlier in the day.

Defense attorneys contend that contamination and planting worked hand-in-hand to produce some of the results. Under their theory, for instance, blood drops at the scene of the crime were allowed to decay because they were stored in plastic bags and kept in a warm truck all day.

That, they contend, allowed the DNA to degrade, and when blood allegedly was planted on those samples later, only the DNA on the planted blood turned up. Because they say that blood came from a test tube of Simpson’s, that is why the samples from the crime scene ultimately “matched” Simpson.

That is a key contention of the defense case--and the object of prosecution ridicule--but it also makes for rough going in terms of argument. Forced to grapple with it, Scheck spent the late afternoon revisiting the scientific issues one at a time, apologizing to the jury for the length of his remarks but insisting that he was forced to go on at length because the Police Department had “miserably botched” the crime scene.

At last finished, Scheck sat down and Cochran spoke to the jury one last time. His final comments summed up his earlier remarks and posed 15 questions to the prosecution, questions that he said raised significant doubts about its case and justified Simpson’s acquittal.

He passed a copy to Clark, then turned back to the jury.

“The truth is now out. It’s now up to you,” said Cochran. “You will do the right thing.”

At the defense table, Simpson shook hands with his lawyers, smiled thinly and took a long, deep breath. Outside the jury’s presence, members of Simpson’s family embraced Cochran and Scheck.

The end of Cochran’s statement--and the thought that they would soon “be passed the baton”--brought a variety of reactions from the jury. A young white woman sat motionless, her brow deeply furrowed. And several of the women on the jury smiled broadly and quietly exchanged quips.

Ito then recessed court for the day, promising jurors that prosecutors would complete their rebuttal argument today and would submit the case to the panel for its deliberations to begin this afternoon.

Times staff writer Andrea Ford contributed to this story.

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