Simpson Case Reverberated in Society, Legal System

On this much--and probably only this much--everyone who followed the trials of O.J. Simpson can agree: An injustice was done.

Either an innocent man was ordered to pay millions of dollars for the wrongful deaths of his ex-wife and her friend, or a murderer is out playing golf while glibly pretending to search for the “real killers.” Either way, even with a few years’ distance, it’s hard to be happy about the outcome.

It’s not hard, however, to remember the intensity.

Every name conjures up another mini-story within the Simpson drama: Rosa Lopez and her repetitious “no me recuerdo” testimony; Kato Kaelin, briefly the world’s most famous freeloader; Denise Brown, the dark-haired mirror image of her murdered sister; Fred Goldman, the father of the murdered young man, teetering from anguish to fury throughout the ordeal.

But the consequences reached far beyond those people. Trial judges across the country used the Simpson proceedings as an excuse to shut down their courtrooms to the press and public. Never mind that most of those judges never showed how the media excesses around the Simpson case ever affected the trial; in fact, Judge Lance Ito, widely mocked by his peers, produced a solid trial record of mostly fair rulings despite enormous distractions and pressures.

It was as though much of the nation’s judiciary seized on the Simpson trial as an opportunity to shut the doors and get about the business of dispensing private justice.

Ironically, one Los Angeles judge went so far in that regard, severely limiting access to a trial involving Clint Eastwood, that he paved the way for a landmark appellate ruling that opened civil courts across the state. Today, at least as a matter of law if not always practice, the public has more access to more of the court system than it did before Simpson was charged with murder. History’s ironies are often rich--and occasionally delicious.

The police came in for their own share of trouble, of course. When Mark Fuhrman took the stand in the Simpson trial and was asked whether he had ever used the word “n-----,” he took the 5th. No one was more offended than his colleagues, Dets. Tom Lange and Philip Vannatter, whose jaws dropped as one. Months later, Lange told me that day was the worst of his entire police career.

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As with many things associated with the Simpson case, however, Fuhrman’s actions and those of his suspect came to be wound together, each distorting the other. People who thought Simpson guilty often saw Fuhrman as wrongly vilified. People who believed Simpson innocent believed that Fuhrman, who never served time for his perjury, got off easy. Very few ventured the opinion that perhaps both were guilty and that both deserved to be punished.

Opinion similarly split on the opposing teams of lawyers whose work was paraded across television screens and newspaper headlines. You either liked Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. or you hated him. You either found Marcia Clark incisive or she rubbed you the wrong way. Either Chris Darden was a good man in a hard job or a sell-out who turned on a brother. You either appreciated Bob Shapiro’s distance from the Dream Team as an act of conscience or guffawed at a lawyer who would turn on his own client.

What you didn’t do, at least what very few did, was have no opinion about any of this. Who went to a dinner party in late 1994 or early 1995 and managed to avoid the Simpson topic altogether?

Sophisticates on both coasts tried to. They bemoaned the trial as a distasteful national descent into sensationalism. That’s probably true, at least in part. And yet, there was something awfully fun about listening to the nation, not just its political and press corps, passionately exclaim over the exclusionary rule, the death penalty, racial justice and police misconduct. The same judges who want the public out of their courtrooms undoubtedly were perturbed, but wild, unruly public discourse is nothing if not American. And after all, those same sophisticates who tried not to talk about Simpson ended up talking about why everyone was talking about it.

If history should recall anything, though, it is that all of this, for good or bad, happened on the margins of the real event.

Day in, day out, Simpson’s fate was weighed in an average courtroom in the undistinguished Los Angeles County Criminal Courts Building. Month after month, it was painful and plain, outrageous and predictable.

I was there the morning the jurors freed O.J. Simpson, when he clenched his hands and mouthed the words “Thank you” to the men and women who concluded that the prosecution had not proved its case beyond a reasonable doubt. One juror raised a fist at Simpson in solidarity.

Five seats away, Fred Goldman stared at the ceiling in disbelief, his sobbing wife on one arm, sobbing daughter on the other. Judge Ito had warned against outbursts, so Goldman’s muttered comment was barely audible.

“Murderer,” he said.