Judge’s Ruling Favors Families Suing Simpson

O.J. Simpson’s lawyers will be forced to preview their defense strategy by explaining precisely how they believe evidence against their client was planted, fabricated or contaminated, a judge ruled Tuesday during a hard-fought court hearing.

In a victory for the families pressing a wrongful-death suit against Simpson, Superior Court Judge Alan B. Haber ruled that defense attorneys will have to answer hundreds of questions probing their specific contentions about key pieces of evidence, ranging from the bloody socks found in Simpson’s bedroom to hairs collected at the crime scene.

The queries, all in written form, are posed as a series of “requests for admission.” Defense lawyers will be asked, for example, if they admit that murder victim Ronald Goldman’s blood was found in Simpson’s Ford Bronco. If they deny it, they will be required to explain why--to describe their reasons for believing that the blood was planted or that DNA analysts botched genetic tests.

Simpson’s defense team had fought hard to keep from answering the fat stacks of questions. “We do not have to prepare the plaintiffs’ case for them,” Simpson lawyer Melissa S. Bluestein told the Santa Monica court. Her colleague, senior defense lawyer Robert C. Baker, added: “The strategies we want to employ [at trial] are in our minds, and we don’t want to disclose them.”

But Judge Haber dismissed their arguments that the questions violated their right to prepare a defense in confidential consultations with their client and their experts, instead calling the questions a “good-faith effort to attempt to narrow the issues to be litigated at trial.”

Goldman family attorney Daniel M. Petrocelli has said that he prepared the questions to force the defense to produce concrete facts to back up its assertions that “something’s wrong” with the evidence against Simpson. Instead of just announcing that tampering occurred in the Los Angeles Police Department crime lab, Petrocelli said, the defense should be compelled to produce any facts, witnesses, or documents that would bolster its conspiracy theory.

The judge agreed, and ordered the defense to draft answers within 30 days.

Those answers could well determine the scope of the civil trial.

If all the defense can come up with is innuendo or inference--arguing, for example, that because former LAPD Det. Mark Fuhrman was a racist officer, he probably planted a bloody glove on Simpson’s estate--the plaintiffs can ask the judge to declare that line of reasoning too flimsy to be presented to jurors.

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“The point is to really pin them into a corner, to say, ‘This is all [the proof] you got? You sure? You sure?’ and then go to the judge and say they should be prevented from arguing certain theories because they’re based on speculation,” veteran civil attorney Brian Lysaght said.

Yet another danger for the defense is what Judge Haber called the “ultimate sanction.” Under California’s Code of Civil Procedure, if a lawyer denies a fact later proved true during trial, he can be forced to pay the other side for the cost of haggling over the issue in court.

For instance, O.J. Simpson’s lawyers might not want to admit--as the plaintiffs have asked them to--that their client has a certain blood type with specific genetic characteristics. But if they cannot back up their denials in court, they may have to pay for the plaintiffs’ expense of finding experts and preparing testimony to prove Simpson’s blood type.

Pronouncing the ruling a major boost for his team, plaintiff lawyer Michael Brewer said he was pleased that “O.J. Simpson can no longer hide behind unsubstantiated assertions. He’s going to be forced to answer questions.”

To avoid providing the plaintiffs with useful information, the defense team may seek to answer the written questions by referring to testimony from the nine-month criminal trial--which, after all, raised the conspiracy theory compellingly enough to win Simpson speedy acquittals.

“They will use their 30 days to provide all kinds of public information [from transcripts and depositions] that the plaintiffs already know,” civil lawyer Doug Mirell predicted. “They are not going to provide the kind of information the plaintiffs would love to have.”

Still, Mirell noted that answering the 500-plus questions in writing will take considerable time--and cost Simpson money. “Coming at this stage of the proceedings, it will divert some measure of attorney time and attention away from preparing for trial, and that has some tactical advantage [for the plaintiffs], obviously,” he said.

Haber handed the murder victims’ families an additional victory when he ordered Simpson to submit to another half-day of questioning under oath.

The defense team had strenuously opposed that idea, arguing that Simpson had already endured 10 days of grilling. Yet Haber granted the plaintiffs’ attorneys a few more hours with Simpson on the grounds that new evidence had surfaced and that Simpson had improperly refused to answer some questions.

The judge did, however, strictly limit the topics lawyers can raise in the brief deposition.

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For example, Simpson must answer a general question about whether he was faithful to his slain ex-wife during their marriage--but he need not give details if he confesses to adultery, Haber ruled. Similarly, Simpson must describe his efforts to find the real killers of Nicole Brown Simpson and Goldman, but he does not have to go into details of investigations he is conducting with his defense team.

Simpson will also have to answer questions about a tabloid photo purporting to show him wearing Bruno Magli shoes--the rare, expensive brand that matches footprints found at the murder scene. And he will have to talk about a document that his longtime assistant, Cathy Randa, produced earlier this month describing three incidents in which Simpson says his wife beat him.

But Simpson will not be forced to discuss his jailhouse conversation with football star-turned-minister Rosey Grier, his conversations with spousal abuse expert Lenore Walker, or his thoughts on whether the LAPD framed him, Haber ruled. In other decisions Tuesday, Haber permitted plaintiffs’ attorneys to question two therapists who treated both O.J. and Nicole Simpson. He also issued an arrest warrant for Ron Fishman, a friend of the Simpsons who took a videotape of O.J. Simpson at his daughter’s dance recital hours before the murders--but has ignored summons from plaintiffs’ attorneys to be questioned under oath in a pretrial deposition.

The judge also ruled that Dominique and Denise Brown will have to answer questions from Simpson’s lawyers about whether they made money selling interviews or photos after their sister’s murder on June 12, 1994.

Haber will hear arguments today at 10:30 a.m. about whether Simpson’s friend Al Cowlings should be forced to respond to queries about his actions and conversations in the five days between the murders and Simpson’s arrest. The civil trial is scheduled to start Sept. 9 in the Santa Monica courthouse.