Judgment Day

I once had the opportunity to invite a friend of mine, a Kennedy assassination buff, to have dinner with Jim Garrison, the onetime New Orleans district attorney who propounded a famous conspiracy theory about John F. Kennedy’s death. The next day, my friend prevailed on me to debrief one of his fellow buffs over lunch. As we were introduced, the stranger spoke these words of greeting: “So, do you love the assassination, too?”

The question struck me as ineffably goofy at the time, but that was before the O.J. Simpson trials. When the slow-speed Bronco chase ran the NBA finals off into a corner of the nation’s TV screens, I became part of that large group of people for whom this drama became as gripping as Watergate, as addictive as crack. It’s hard to “love” a double murder, but hard not to be alternately amazed, amused and revolted by the circus of characters, and character flaws, to which we were treated during the subsequent half-decade. I even talked my way into a press pass in order to attend the civil trial in Santa Monica; no ban on cameras would keep me from seeing Act Two.

Daniel Petrocelli, lead attorney for Fred Goldman in pursuing that wrongful death action against Simpson, has co-written a book that’s not as good as attending the trial but far better than the alternative: to have only the TV images of the first proceedings and the sporadic press reporting of the second as one’s mental legacy of the protracted saga. “Triumph of Justice” starts with Goldman interviewing Petrocelli as a possible attorney, a lawyer’s audition. It ends with the victory celebration at the Santa Monica Doubletree Hotel following the verdict announcement that shoved the State of the Union address into a corner of the nation’s TV screens. It is just possible that this may be the last of the towering pile of Simpson books, at least until O.J. confesses.

Yes, I believe the second jury was correct in its verdict that Simpson was responsible for the killings of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson. With the advantage of having attended that second trial, I came to believe the first jury was correct, too, that Gil Garcetti’s finest didn’t prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt. Petrocelli did enjoy certain advantages in his turn at bat--the defendant could not refuse to testify, 31 pictures of O.J. wearing “ugly-ass” Bruno Magli shoes suddenly surfaced and Mark Fuhrman had decamped to Idaho, out of subpoena range. One thing this book will do for anyone not fortunate enough to have wintered at the Ocean Avenue courthouse, “O.J. by the Sea,” is to demonstrate what a superior job of lawyering looks like from the inside.

The prose style is conversational, perhaps dictated, and in 600-plus pages there are some repetitions that read more like reminders for readers, whose attention may have strayed, than editing errors. The latter are present, too, perhaps evidence of publishing-house downsizing; but there’s great stuff in here: damning testimony and evidence that couldn’t make it into the court record because of hearsay problems; a scene in which one of Simpson’s attorneys invites Petrocelli over to hang at Rockingham; the coaxing and coaching of Kato Kaelin into becoming a reasonably articulate witness, instead of the long-haired airhead we saw on TV; an account of the deposition process as detailed as that of the trial itself. You not only see the house, you get to see how the bricks were laid.

There are fine scenes that did not make it into any contemporaneous reporting, particularly the debate among Petrocelli’s law partners over whether they should call Simpson to testify in the plaintiffs’ case. In the wake of that devastating examination, a startlingly tense and dramatic two days that left the defendant’s credibility more tattered than a Big Mac in an InSinkErator, this argument seems preposterous. But Petrocelli effectively presents the case of the doubters in his firm; at the time, it was anything but an easy call.

“Triumph of Justice” makes no pretense at the objective or omniscient tone that marks “American Tragedy”-style reportage. This is one man’s recollection of the most memorable year and a half of his life. The work of his partners is sketched out with much appreciation, but one of the pivotal moments of the second trial--when defense pathology expert Dr. Michael Baden is forced, by a relentlessly brilliant cross-examination by Ed Medvene, to reduce radically his estimate of the time the murders must have taken--sails by more quickly than a “Rivera Live” promo. This doesn’t read like egotism, just like an intensely personal memoir.

Nor is this account of the case dry and lawyerly. Petrocelli hates Simpson, despises him, and he’s not overly fond of the witnesses he feels lied to protect the killer, either. “Simpson,” he writes, “had pulled off the biggest fraud on the American public ever seen in a court of law.” The Colombian drug lord theory of the murders, wafted by Johnnie Cochran in the criminal trial, he dismisses as “laughably absurd baloney.” Petrocelli views the criminal trial defense as “one of the most disgraceful, cynical and socially irresponsible defenses ever used to set a guilty man free.” This book also gives Petrocelli the opportunity to publicly interject sarcastic ripostes to pro-Simpson testimony and attorney arguments that would have earned him a collection of contempt citations from the impatient Judge Hiroshi Fujisaki had he voiced them in court.

On the other hand, Petrocelli is easier on colleagues and on the now-retired judge than one might assume he was in his after-hours cigars-and-drinks sessions with reporters at the Doubletree Hotel bar. He reports having “mixed” opinions on Fujisaki when Simpson’s lawyer “dinged” the original judge in the case. Maybe he doesn’t know the local attorney who called me from his car to insist that the newly appointed Fujisaki was the dumbest [expletive deleted] judge I’ve ever appeared before.” As the trial proceeds, he praises the jurist as the “anti-Ito” but is kind enough not to speculate on the span of Fujisaki’s afternoon wakefulness.

He reports the most egregious question asked at the trial, when Michael Brewer, attorney for Ron Goldman’s birth mother (long divorced from Fred), asked Simpson, “You write in your suicide note of the ‘real O.J.’ Who is the real O.J.?,” but he neglects to report what he felt after a draining two days of beating Simpson to a pulp, at seeing the door opened wide for the defendant to expound upon his greeting-card humanitarian image. Petrocelli does share with us his moments of self-doubt--understandable when this corporate litigator found himself in the middle of a legal-media-racial minefield--as well as his profound lack of doubt that the man he was suing was a loathsome, duplicitous butcher.

“Triumph of Justice” confirms what the trial displayed: The plaintiffs followed a “less is more” philosophy that presented the jury with only the strongest evidence. We also learn the strategies that kept what Petrocelli regards as irrelevant distractions--Fuhrman’s perjury conviction on his “N-word” testimony, unsupported allegations of tampering or contamination--excluded from the jury’s ken. Although he doesn’t quite say it, he hints that the first trial shouldn’t have been televised. Yet, as he details Simpson’s “pitiful” responses to his questioning, he adds that “if the world had seen Simpson rocking, puffing and blinking as he told his litany of lies, there would be no doubt in anyone’s mind about the depth of his guilt.”

There were unforgettable characters in the civil trial: Robert Groden, the defense “expert” who testified the shoe photos were phonies then went back to his day job--narrating re-creations of the Kennedy killing inside a limo crawling through Dealey Plaza (does he love the assassination too?); renowned pathologist Werner Spitz, the plaintiffs’ surrogate for the hapless coroner and the overly loquacious coroner’s boss, who boomed his certainty about the duration of the death struggle and the means of demise with the same kind of stentorian, accented baritone that Edward Teller used to proclaim his convictions about nuclear conflict; Dan Leonard, F. Lee Bailey’s partner, who inherited impossible witnesses to examine because his better-known half was stewing in a Florida pokey. They all make cameo appearances in this narrative, but it remains one man’s story, one man’s crusade Daniel Petrocelli as the righteous (but not self-righteous) representative of Fred Goldman and of everyone who was stunned and outraged when Simpson walked. This is a book Johnnie Cochran may not enjoy.

The civil trial plaintiffs’ legal team was ready for the defense. The criminal trial prosecution, batting first and battered by time constraints, never was. Petrocelli cites chapter and verse of the prosecution’s rhetorical timorousness in the face of a celebrity defendant (Chris Darden in closing argument: “And if we didn’t present the best evidence, well, don’t hold that against us”), and he’s adamant in refusing to show his jury anything less than contempt for Simpson and determination that he be found responsible for two murders. There is a sense, as you read this book, that much as Karl Malone found Michael Jordan’s will stronger than his own, so O.J. Simpson, during those four months in Santa Monica, finally discovered in Daniel Petrocelli an adversary whose desire to win trumped his own.

Of course, the analogy fails. Daniel Petrocelli can’t dunk. And Karl Malone didn’t kill anyone.