Book ‘Em

Deputy Dist. Atty. Christopher A. Darden shouldered plenty of knocks during the double murder trial of O.J. Simpson. Critics charged that he made the prosecution team only because he is African American. Others called him an “Uncle Tom.”

But on Wednesday the critics were nowhere to be seen amid hundreds of adoring fans who lined up at a Westside bookstore to buy a copy of “In Contempt,” Darden’s caustic account of the “trial of the century.” Darden signed copies as he kicked off a nationwide tour to promote the 387-page book. In it, he admits his own errors in having Simpson try on the now-infamous leather gloves and tiptoes around his relationship with co-prosecutor Marcia Clark.

He also says he believed that the prosecution faced an uphill battle from what he called “one of the worst juries” he had ever seen.

“From the first day, I sensed that many of them were angry at the system for various insults and injuries--12 people lined up at the grinder with big axes,” Darden wrote.

Well-wishers came to commiserate with the 39-year-old prosecutor over the not guilty verdicts. They wanted to say that he did an extraordinary job against a defense team that played the race card throughout the trial.

But mostly, they came to see the one person whom they believed emerged from the nine-month ordeal with his dignity intact.

“I think the city needs people like Christopher Darden--his honesty, his forthrightness,” Maryann Buric, 47, said as she stood in line at Barnes & Noble’s West Los Angeles outlet waiting to get her book autographed. “I liked him from Day 1, and I still like him.”

People showed up nearly three hours before Darden arrived. A line of fans snaked around a corner and down a full city block.

A few in the crowd brought greeting cards with handwritten messages wishing Darden well. Others wondered aloud what Darden might do next in his career. The veteran prosecutor, who received a reported $1.3-million advance to write his book, has said he may not return to the district attorney’s office because the Simpson case--in which the former football star was acquitted of killing his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Lyle Goldman--shook his faith in the criminal justice system.

“I think he’s a brilliant prosecutor, and I think he deserves our respect,” said Stephanie McDermott, 47, as she thumbed through her copy of Darden’s book. Goldman’s sister, Kim, also showed up and embraced Darden.

“I think it’s very truthful . . . very telling,” Goldman said of the book. “I’m very happy about it.”

In the book, Darden unflinchingly castigates many of the central personalities in the trial, including Judge Lance A. Ito, whom he accuses of failing to control the defense as it raised the ugly specter of race.

Darden angrily criticizes lead defense attorney Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. for questioning Darden’s place on the prosecution team.

“A few days after I formally entered the case, Cochran dealt the race card to me--suggesting that I was put on the case only because I was black,” Darden wrote. “I watched in disbelief. This was a man I considered a colleague. We had worked separately on many of the same cases . . . battles against racist cops and unnecessary police violence. Now he was accusing me of being a sellout. It was the equivalent of publicly being called a ‘nigger’ by a white lawyer.”

Darden also revealed the deep guilt and remorse he felt about what he considered his own failings during the case.

In hindsight, he said, he would not have had Simpson try on the gloves in front of the jury. During the trial, the defendant seemed to struggle as he tried on a pair of bloodstained gloves that prosecutors said he had used in the murders.

In the weeks after the glove incident, Darden writes, he was left out of major decisions involving the prosecution. “I ached with regret for what I might have done to the case,” he wrote.

Trial observers had continually wondered whether Darden and Clark had become romantically involved. Darden never fully answers that question, but he does give a window into the intense months they spent working on the case together.

“She and I were two passionate people thrown together in a trial that left us exhausted and lonely,” Darden writes. “We danced a few times and drank a few bottles of wine. In my mind, that is a relationship.”

Darden offers his own speculative account of how he thinks Simpson committed the murders.

“Through the window, you watched Nicole put away the dishes, didn’t you?” Darden wrote, as if addressing Simpson about the minutes before the attack--a killing in which no witnesses were found. “She finished and then she lit some candles and you watched her, the way you had watched her so many times before, on so many dry runs. She stopped suddenly and looked out the window. . . . All she could see was her own reflection and, for just a moment, you both stood staring at the same thing: her frightened face.”

After the verdict, Darden wrote, he left the courtroom alone. As he stood in the hallway, he pondered the nine months he had spent arguing his case inside Criminal Department 103.

“I never got a chance, of course, to cross-examine” Simpson, he wrote. “As I stood in the hallway, waiting for an elevator, I didn’t want to anymore. I just wanted to talk to him, make sure he knew that he hadn’t fooled all of us and that his ‘Dream Team’ hadn’t fooled most Americans.

“I wanted to tell him that there was another court that would hear his case one day . . . where there will be no need for DNA [or] gloves . . . and the only witnesses will be the eyewitnesses, Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown.”