SUPERIOR COURT OF THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA FOR THE COUNTY OF LOS ANGELES
HON. HIROSHI FUJISAKI, JUDGE
REPORTER'S DAILY TRANSCRIPT
JANUARY 23, 1997
VOLUME 48

(The following proceedings were held in open court outside the presence of the jury.)
THE COURT: Okay. I understand, Mr. Baker, you
informed my clerk that you have a change of plans.
MR. BAKER: Well, Your Honor, I wanted to make the Court aware that
we probably will go all day today. I know we sat down and tried to
consolidate this, but as this Court is aware, the plaintiffs went a
day and a half, and that would be a day and a half for us. I
apologize for not being able to do it quicker, but after 4 months, I
think, in my client's defense, the time that we need to put that
level of time in. Believe me, sir, we are not trying to filibuster,
we're just trying to get through the points. As you know, a lot of
evidence, an awful lot of witnesses, and serious allegations, and
so we would request the Court's indulgence in that regard.
THE COURT: Well, based upon our discussion yesterday evening that you
would go half a day today, and plaintiff would conclude in the
afternoon, and we would instruct this evening, the plans for
tomorrow's conferences were not changed by me. So that being the
case, we will allow you to argue all day, and then we'll resume
Monday and we'll be adjourned tomorrow. Bring in the jury.
MR. BAKER: Your Honor, I --
THE COURT: That was our understanding.
MR. BAKER: Well, I know -- I told you I'd do the best I could. I
didn't say I could confirm that I could do it. You know, I don't
think it's fair --
THE COURT: I'm satisfied that you informed me
that you would, and so I did nothing, and I don't think it's
appropriate under those circumstances to put the Court in that
position.
MR. BAKER: Well, on the flip side of that coin, Your Honor,
plaintiffs get up for a day and a half, and I have to get up and do
my final, and my rebuttal concurrently after a 20-minute break. Now,
what you're saying is that they can have three days to do their
rebuttal and to plan their rebuttal. I don't think that's fair to my
client. What you said at the sidebar is that it wasn't obligatory.
You didn't say you would cancel it. You didn't say it was
obligatory.
THE COURT: Mr. Baker, when Mr. Petrocelli started his
argument, he wanted to stop at 4 o'clock. At your insistence I made
him go to 4:30, disrupting his argument and his time line. I think
that you're not in the position to be too complaining under those
circumstances. Okay. Bring the jury.
THE BAILIFF: Jury walking.
(The following proceedings were held in open court in the presence
of the jury.)
(Jurors resume their respective seats.)
THE COURT: Morning, ladies
and gentlemen.
JURORS: Morning, Your Honor.
THE COURT: Yesterday I told you that we
were going to hear all of the argument today, and I would instruct
you later, possibly in the evening, and give you the case. I also
informed the attorneys that this Court was going to be dark
tomorrow.
THE COURT: Well, the Court made that representation to you
about finishing up the case and giving the case over to you today,
this evening, based upon what the attorneys had informed me about
their plans to complete the case today. I'm now informed that there
have been a change in plans and the case is not going to complete.
So based upon their representations yesterday the Court made no
changes in the Court's plan for tomorrow. So originally, the plan
was to instruct you on the case and then have you deliberating
tomorrow, but in as much as they're not going to finish today, and
the Court did not change the plans for tomorrow's conference, we're
going to just go to the end of today hearing what portion of the
argument that the attorneys complete, and then instead of resuming
tomorrow, we will resume Monday and hear the rest of the argument
Monday, and instruct you on the law, and give you the case over on
Monday, instead of tomorrow. So tomorrow we will be dark. All right.
I'm sorry if you are inconvenienced by this. I hope you aren't.
Okay. Thank you. Mr. Baker, you may resume.
MR. BAKER: Mr. Blasier will start this morning, with the Court's
permission.
CLOSING ARGUMENT
MR. BLASIER: Good morning, folks.
JURORS: Good morning.
MR. BLASIER: The last thing Mr. Baker intended to say before his
voice left him and now you're going to hear from Mr. Blasier about
some of the physical evidence. I first want to just make a couple of
personal comments. Let me be, hopefully, one of the last lawyers to
thank you for your attention. It's been a long trial. It's been a
lot of detailed testimony, and very difficult testimony to absorb.
But we've all noticed how many notes you've been taking, and that's
always a good sign that you're paying attention. Just so you kind of
know where I'm coming from here, I, back in May of last year, had
back surgery after the criminal trial ended, and had to have another
surgery at Christmans time. That's why I'm in this chair. I can
walk. This is not a gimmick or anything. But I'm just recovering
from some fairly serious surgery, so I'm going to be sitting down
during most of the time. I've been a trial lawyer for 27 years. I'm
kind of used to my cohorts here rambling around and engaged warriors
and trapped in exhibits and doing all that sort of thing. I possibly
won't be doing a whole lot of that. My colleagues are going to be
helping me in the back here. I had lots of screws and plates put
in my back. I've been told that the good news is I have $20.30 more
scrap value than I did before Christmas, so. . .
(Laughter) I also -- as you know, I missed a couple of weeks of
testimony after Christmas, and I've reviewed that testimony to the
best of my ability, and I will not intentionally misstate anything.
As you know, we have Gina, who's been here during the entire trial,
and she's the one -- she's the rule-keeper. She's the one who will
tell you what the witnesses really said. If you have any question
about anything that I say or any of the other attorneys say about a
piece of evidence, and you're not sure what the witness said, you
ask the Court Reporter, it's all down there on paper, and on
computer, actually, much easier to find it on computer. Let me tell
you what I view your role to be in this case. You are -- and the
Judge will tell you all this when he instructs you. You're the
judges of the facts; the sole judges of the facts. And there are
certain burdens, and I'm going to talk about some of the
instructions, briefly, that apply to you. They all apply to you, of
course. But there are some that I think are a little more
significant than others. The plaintiffs have the burden of proof in
this case. What that really means from your standpoint, I submit to
you, is that you're supposed to be like 12 people from Missouri; and
by that I mean you're supposed to be sitting there with your arms
crossed, figuratively, saying, show me, show me, before they're
entitled to your verdict. You have to be convinced to the burden of
proof that the Judge will tell you. I am also not going to -- well,
let me not get ahead of myself here. Now, you have heard a lot of
witnesses. You already have a sense of the credibility of some of
these witnesses, particularly the law enforcement witnesses. And I'm
not going to sit up here all day and talk about every piece of
evidence that came in and talk about every witness. You've heard all
of that. So I'm not going to sit here and repeat that. Hopefully,
I'll be relatively short. Comparatively. That's lawyer time now, so
I apologize in advance if I don't keep with that. Now, I want to do
a brief -- make a couple comments about Mr. Petrocelli's argument.
We've all been doing this for a long time. There are things that
come out in argument that may not be accurate; techniques that are
used that may mislead, or may appeal to passion, or whatever, and I
want -- and I just want to talk about some of those things. I'm not
suggesting anything volitional on Mr. Petrocelli's part at all. This
is a very intense case, as you know, and, you know, we're in the
heat of battle, and this is what we do, so -- but I think there are
some important things because this is -- you have a very difficult
job because you have to work your way through all of this. There's a
lot of stuff you've heard that is not something that you're supposed
to consider. All of the appeals to a motion, that's not -- you're
not to consider that.
MR. PETROCELLI: This is cumulative, Your Honor. I object. We heard
this yesterday.
THE COURT: I'll give certain latitude. You may
proceed.
MR. BLASIER: Thank you. We have an adversarial system; that's us
against them. And I want to show you first, and I'm going to try
when I talk to you, to -- to refer to transcript, page and line,
because I think that's only fair, because that's what the evidence
is, not what -- what I or someone says is a conclusory statement.
The first quote I would put up from Mr. Petrocelli's argument is he
argued the impossible one.
(Displayed on Elmo.)
MR. BLASIER: Mr. Petrocelli yesterday or -- I'm sorry, day before
yesterday, I think it was, made a comment at page 49, line 20:
(Mr. Blasier read a portion of Mr. Petrocelli's closing argument
from the civil trial transcript.) Well, they never proved that the
blankets had any head hairs of Mr. Simpson, or any fibers, or
anything regarding Mr. Simpson.
MR. BLASIER: Well, what we know is -- if you go to the bottom of
that slide, Phil -- is the blanket was left by the police on the
ground to be picked up. I think you saw pictures of the crime scene
with the tape down and the blanket just lying there, so it's --
obviously, we don't have that blanket. We don't have the ability to
prove something like that, even if that were a requirement of proof,
we don't. So there are a lot of times when the attorney might say,
they didn't prove this, they didn't prove that, or it's completely
impossible matters of proof to begin with. The next slide I put up
is argument not supported by evidence. Again, the heat of battle
statements are made that -- that may not really reflect the
evidence. And Mr. Petrocelli stated, in his closing argument, on
page 37:
(Mr. Blasier read a portion of Mr. Petrocelli's closing argument
from the civil trial transcript.)
These blood drops (indicating), of course, are on the left side of the shoe prints.
They're on the left side of the shoe prints indicating that the
person who dropped this blood was injured on his left side, such as
a left finger or left hand.
MR. BLASIER: Now, this is the myth of this case that got started way
back at the very beginning of the criminal case, that all of these
drops are to the left of the shoe prints. They aren't. Phil, you
want to put the bottom of the slide up. And we'll look at some of
the boards.
(Document displayed.)
MR. BLASIER: That simply is not a true fact. One or two of them
could be. But there aren't -- this is not a trail of blood that is
right to the left of the shoe prints, even though if you read
virtually every book about this case, that seems to be the myth. So
it's your job to work through all of that and look at the actual
evidence, and you make up your mind; are these blood drops to the
left of shoe prints or aren't they. Look at the diagrams and you
make up your own mind. Mr. Petrocelli also made some statements
during his closing that simply were inaccurate. He made conclusions
or told you what some of the evidence was that simply was not
accurate. Now, Phil, you want to put the cable misstatements up
there.
(Document displayed on Elmo.)
MR. BLASIER: He said on page 81 of the transcript, line 6, and this
is one of their big points, and we're going to talk about this more:

(Mr. Blasier read a portion of Mr. Petrocelli's closing argument
from the civil trial transcript.) We have blood on the cable from
the back wall behind Kato Kaelin's room. Now, you remember this is
Item No. 11 that Andrea Mazzola talked about doing a presumptive
test and getting a positive result on an area back near the back --
in the back walkway area where the Rockingham glove was found on
another piece of evidence other than the glove that was in that
area. And this is just a flat misstatement of the evidence. Put on
the next slide, please.
(Document displayed on Elmo.)
MR. BLASIER: The actual evidence on that was read to you. It's a
stipulation. That was read on the last day that we took testimony,
on January 16th. Reading from page 183, Mr. Baker -- Phil Baker read
the stipulation:
(Mr. Blasier read a stipulation from the civil trial transcript.)
All parties stipulate that criminalist Gary Simms of the California
Department of Justice, were he to return to testify in this trial,
would testify under oath that at the request of the prosecutors in
the criminal case, he performed a presumptive blood test on Item No.
11, a stain collected on the southern walkway of 360 North
Rockingham, and that test was negative for the presence of blood.
MR. BLASIER: There is no blood back there. That's a false statement.
You need to work through these things and figure out what are the
accurate statements. And one last before I move on to another topic.
And this one kind of irks me a little bit; admissions misstatement
on page 40. During his argument, and with much emotion and flare,
and doing things that lawyers do, told you the defense in this case,
and it's important you understand this, they don't contest these
results, they don't contest that these DNA test results matched Mr.
Simpson's blood. Do you remember when Mr. Lambert read to you
something called defendant's responses to requests for admissions? I
don't know if it was very exciting, but he sat here and read to
you -- those were the defense's admission to those blood tests
results and they're conclusive on this issue. Then he says and they
establish that those blood drops are Mr. Simpson's blood, and you
have to accept that they don't contest that. Folks, that's what this
whole trial is about. That's what this whole trial is about. Now,
these requests for admissions were a bunch of -- I think there were
a total of 1500 of them, or something. The purpose of this is to
say, look, can both sides agree that maybe there is something we can
agree on, and not disagree on everything, and save a little bit of
time. So we worked on these all summer to try and see if we could
reach some agreement on some of this evidence, and what we agreed to
do, and I want you to go to the --
MR. PETROCELLI: I object. This is completely outside the record,
misstates -- they were ordered -- there was no voluntary agreement.
MR. BLASIER: I'm going to read part of the request for admission,
which is part of record.
MR. PETROCELLI: They were ordered, Your Honor.
THE COURT: They were --
MR. PETROCELLI: I'd have the jury admonished there was -- he told
them there was an agreement. They were court ordered --
MR. BLASIER: Let me tell you, part of the request for admissions
that was read to you, and these are all kind of form questions, and
they all say the same -- I mean they have the same basic format.
Here's what was actually admitted. For instance, Request No. 208,
admit that the item identified at the criminal trial as LAPD
Evidence Item 508 contained human blood that had an ABO blood type
A. Defendant's response. Our response; we admitted that. This is
what we didn't admit. Admitting this request for admission, the
defense will adopt the plaintiffs' definition as communicated to the
defendant as that point in time whether an item was tested by an
outside laboratory as opposed to the time of the collection or any
other point in time. Now, that's kind of confusing. I'll grant you
that. A bunch of lawyers get together, work out a compromise. Maybe
it's not too clear. But what that tells you, you can't deny this, is
that we have maintained from the very beginning of this case that
you cannot rely on this physical evidence, that what was picked up
off the ground is not necessarily the same thing that went to a
lab, that went to a third lab. What we were willing to admit was
that when a piece of evidence, whatever it was, whatever had
happened to it, got to a particular lab such as DOJ or Cellmark, and
they did their tests on it, they got a particular result. That's
what we did admit. Not that it was what was actually picked up off
the ground, or that it was in the same condition. That's what this
whole case is about. Mr. Petrocelli's argument, much of it, was
conclusory statements of we proved everything. They proved nothing.
We proved everything to a certainty. Much of the argument was a
clear request for your emotional verdict, not a factual verdict.
Now, let me tell you what I'm going to do. Actually, let me tell you
what I'm not going to do. I'm not going to talk all day. Maybe I'll
even finish before lunch, if I'm lucky. I'm not going to talk about
every single piece of evidence. You've already had a sense of the
police conduct, as I mentioned before. You've seen that almost every
police witness in this case, almost every plaintiffs' witness, has
changed their testimony over time, over the years, over the two and
a half years since this crime occurred. That it always gets better.
Criminal cases are not like fine wine. It doesn't get better over
time. It's not supposed to. When people come in here and change
their testimony, and say, oh, gosh, I was wrong, you know, really
was worse for Mr. Simpson than I originally said, you're allowed to
take those inconsistencies and tell whether the witness was
incorrect, misrecollected. And you understand there's an instruction
-- lots of people suffer, or anybody -- all of us can suffer from
innocent misrecollection. For instance, as Mr. Baker mentioned
yesterday with Allan Park and some of his observations, it's not our
contention that he was lying, it's our contention that his
recollection is simply wrong. There's always going to be conflicts
in a case. It doesn't mean one party is lying to you. Sometimes, it
doesn't always mean that at all. We're human beings we; see things
differently. You can have a room full of people and have something
happen right in front of them, and if you all write down a statement
of what you saw, it's not going to be the same. I'm not going to
prove anything to you to an absolute certainty. Mr. Petrocelli said
he proved his case to an absolute certainty. I'm not going to
promise you that. Nobody can do that. Nobody can do that. Of course
the Judge is going to tell you that the burden is on them to prove
before they're entitled to any recovery of money in this case.
That's about money. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go over
some of the facts with you, some of them in some detail. Mr.
Petrocelli did not go over many of the facts and much of the
physical evidence in a lot of detail. I'm going to do that with a
number of items to give you now. My suggestion is that you should
look at some of this evidence and what you can infer, and conclude
from what you've heard and what you've seen in the last several
months. And again, I will try to give you transcript references
where I have those. Our defense in this case on the physical
evidence is very, very simple. You can't trust it. You can't trust
it because it's been compromised, it's been corrupted by the Los
Angeles Police Department, evidence has been tampered with, it's
been planted. Now, am I going to produce an eyewitness to you to
show that Mark Fuhrman picked up a glove at Bundy and took it over
and swiped it on the console of the Bronco and then put it in the
back walkway so he could get a search warrant? No. No.
MR. PETROCELLI: Objection, zero evidence of that in the record. Zero
evidence of that.
THE COURT: It's argument. Overruled.
MR. BLASIER: You don't have eyewitnesses to those kinds of things,
folks. I'm going to explain to you when I go over some of the
instructions in a minute, how those kinds of things can be proved
and what you're allowed to consider and what you should consider in
deciding, hey, is that likely what happened, could that have
happened, should I accept that or should I reject that? What I am
going to point out to you is the many facts that we have in this
case that show that this evidence is -- this physical evidence
cannot be trusted. I'm going to go through the DNA materials in some
detail to show you just how questionable this DNA evidence is. I
mean, this is supposedly the central part of their case. We talked
about DNA in some detail. I'm going to do it again. It's very
complicated stuff. I want you to understand it. I want you to
understand the important parts of it. That's very important. If all
you have is an expert coming in who knows more about DNA than you do
and tells you this is what it says, that's not good enough. That's
not good enough. It is our position that the way in which this
evidence was collected and kept at LAPD for, in some cases several
months, makes it not worthy of trust, that it should not be used as
proof in a case of this seriousness. Now, let me tell you a little
bit about how our system works and how a defense works and how we
try to convince you of things. Maybe this will give you a little
better idea of how our evidence comes out. Most of our evidence
comes out through cross-examination of their witnesses. So, in
essence, you're hearing really both sides of the case at the same
time to a certain extent. When the crime occurs, the police are
called. Okay. That's natural. The police get there first. The police
generally close off a crime scene like they did here. They
immediately put up yellow tape or do what they have to do to
surround the scene so that nobody else but the police can be there.
Policemen are human. Many of them are honest. Many of them are great
policemen. Some of them are dishonest. Maybe many of them are
incompetent. They make mistakes. They're the ones who talk to the
witnesses initially. They take the first statements and then they
write down at some later time what they recall the witness telling
them, which is not a particularly good way of memorializing what a
witness says that very first time, which is possibly the most
important time, before they've had a chance to have other things
influence their mind to change their perception of what they thought
they saw. The best thing to do would be to tape-record witnesses.
And that's usually not done by LAPD out in the field. You'd have too
accurate a statement. They decide at some point who's our suspect,
who we think did it, and in this case it's obvious, I submit to you,
that they decided that Mr. Simpson was guilty before they even went
to Rockingham for the first time. I think that's clear from the
evidence. Then what do they do? If they get a lead that looks like
it might point -- help their case, they'll go around the world.
And they did in this case. They went to Italy to make shoes. They
went to Scotland Yard. They have access to police agencies all over
the world. If there's any lead that comes in that's inconsistent
with their theory, what do they do? A lot of times they don't do
anything. Sometimes they'll check it out, try and neutralize it.
That's just the way the system works. Now, they have access to the
crime scene, for instance, at Bundy here, any time they want. They
just go there. They come back whenever they want. This was -- as you
know, this was a very emotional case and the tremendous amount of
publicity was just -- still is, it's just unreal, and it put some --
it's made your job a lot harder, quite frankly, because there's a
lot of what I'll call "schmaltz" out there, stuff that just is not
true and doesn't make sense, that you probably have been exposed to
in the last two and a half years, and you have a tough job putting
all that out of your mind. Anyway, when they're done with the crime
scene, they close it down and it's washed down, like this scene was,
and LAPD, as you've noticed, didn't even take a videotape of this
crime scene to preserve -- to help better preserve --
MR. PETROCELLI: It's all excluded by the Court's order. No evidence
about videotaping -- not videotaping.
THE COURT: Sustained.
MR. PETROCELLI: I don't know what we're doing.
MR. BLASIER: I'll talk about the videotape that they did do. They
took a videotape, a Willie Ford tape, that we're going to look at
later. The reason they do that, and the only reason we did that, was
in case someone said they broke a dish when they did break a dish.
That's for insurance purposes. That's what they did a video of, and
that's all. Now, when we get involved, they don't let us go over and
-- and be at the crime scene with them. Mechanically, it wouldn't
work well. I mean I'm not suggesting that that's a negative thing.
That's just the way it works. By the time the defense gets involved,
it's like the ballgame's over, the stadium's closed, the people have
gone home, and now you come in and see what you can find out, and
that's what we do, and we review whatever material is available.
Eventually we'll get reports from the police. We dig and we try to
gather information. That may involve going through thousands and
thousands of documents, like this case. This case involved a huge
amount of paper. We are subjected to such things as when -- Dr.
Baden told you that he went to the crime lab to look at certain
physical evidence, he wasn't allowed to touch it, he wasn't allowed
to take it out of the bag, he wasn't allowed to take a picture of
it. That was because of Detective Vannatter. Detective Vannatter is
the one who told him that. That is not a very satisfactory way of
gathering information. What you're going to see, and the facts that
I'm going to bring up to you, the evidence that we have put on
through cross-examination and through direct examination, when we
had to call back most of their witnesses, you will be able to draw
certain inferences from as to the value of this evidence. And we
submit to you that you will reject it. An analogy I can think of is
that we're trying to do one of those paint by the numbers pictures,
and the picture that we have that's our defense is that we have a
picture of corruption, of contamination, of planting, of tampering.
And we don't have all the paint. We're not going to be able to paint
you a complete picture of all of that. We're going to be able to
paint some of it, from which you're going to be able to infer, we
submit, that we can't trust this evidence. We can't go to the FBI
and go up to Bodziak and say, Bill, let's go have lunch and talk
about these shoes. We don't have access to that kind of information.
The picture that they're required to paint is different. They have
the burden of proof in the case, as I told you. It's up to them to
paint their picture. We will present our evidence to show that this
evidence cannot be trusted. There's a -- Dr. Henry Lee likes to make
the statement or used the statement, I don't know if he used it
here, but if you have a plate of spaghetti and you find a cockroach
in it, you don't have to really go and look for a second one to know
that you can discard the plate of spaghetti. All you need to do is
find the first one, and discard the rest of it. Now, let me tell you
a little bit about some of the instructions that are very important
here. You've all heard on television the term circumstantial
evidence. This is primarily a circumstantial evidence case. No
eyewitnesses. And you're going to be given an instruction that tells
you what circumstantial evidence is, and I'm going to read you a
little part of it here. "Evidence is either direct or
circumstantial. Direct evidence proves a fact without an inference,
and if true" -- and by the way, you don't need to write this down
because the Judge will give you this and you'll have access to this.
"Direct evidence proves a fact without an inference, and if true,
conclusively establishes that fact. "Circumstantial evidence proves
a fact from which an inference of the existence of another fact may
be drawn. The law makes no distinction between direct and
circumstantial evidence as to the degree of proof required. Each one
is a reasonable method of proof. Each is respected for such
convincing force as it may carry." That's a lot of legalese. And
I'll give you a real easy example. If you're walking down the street
in the fall, and you're on the East Coast and it's a fall day, and
you see smoke coming from your neighbor's backyard, that's
circumstantial evidence that something's going on in the backyard.
You can make some inferences that maybe they're barbecuing
something, maybe they're burning some leaves. There are several
things that could explain that. Those are all reasonable inferences
from the circumstantial evidence. And what the law allows you to
do is make those inferences and say, okay, that's logical, I know
this fact is logical that I know this second fact. On the other
hand, with circumstantial evidence you can oftentimes jump to the
wrong conclusion. I don't -- I think it was mentioned during voir
dire, and some of you may be aware, that I'm the only attorney from
the defense team that was in the criminal case as well, and because
of -- and you probably noticed when I was here before Christmas, and
now I have (indicating to chest) a brace on. You can see it when I bend over.
Several of the media outlets put 2 and 2 together and got 4, and
said, why is it that Mr. Blasier, who is the only attorney from the
criminal case, has to wear a bulletproof vest. That's what they
thought they saw. That's what they thought they saw. So that's an
example of how you can come to the wrong conclusion based on
circumstantial evidence. Weighing -- oh, here's a good one. "Failure
to produce available stronger evidence. If weaker and less
satisfactory evidence is offered by a party when it was within such
party's ability to produce stronger and more satisfactory evidence,
the evidence offered should be viewed with distrust." Now, we're
going to talk about EDTA and we're going to talk about items that
were tested and items that were not tested, and we're going to
suggest to you that the police department in this case had plenty of
opportunity to disprove any planting theory by testing a lot of this
evidence for EDTA, and they tested two pieces and they found EDTA,
and they stopped looking. We'll talk about that more. If you find
that a party willfully suppressed evidence in order to prevent its
being presented in this trial, you may consider that fact in
determining what inferences to draw from the evidence. It's up to
you. It's up to you. That's my cockroach instruction. If you find a
cockroach in your spaghetti, you're entitled to reject it all if you
want to. You don't have to. You're entitled to. We submit that you
should. "Failure to deny or explain adverse evidence in determining
what inferences to draw from the evidence. You may consider, among
other things, a party's failure to explain or deny such evidence."
We put on evidence about the Rokahr-Fuhrman pointing picture. And
we'll talk about that some more. That was not rebutted. We put on
evidence that --
MR. PETROCELLI: False, Your Honor.
THE COURT: It's argument.
MR. PETROCELLI: It's just misstating things.
MR. BLASIER: We put on evidence that some of the evidence at the
Bundy scene was tampered with, and when I say tampered with, I'm
referring to the envelope and the glove. And we'll look at that.
They have been changed. Their positions have been changed a lot of
times. You say, well, they were moved. We don't know if -- when you
have two pictures and it's in one position in one place, different
position in the second place, we don't know that it was just moved.
It could have been picked up, could have been taken somewhere,
something could have been done with it and replaced, so that -- no
one came in to tell you that, oh, this is how that happened. No one
came in to explain that. Now, how you decide who's telling you the
truth, there's a long instruction the Judge will give you. I'm not
going to read all of it. It's just a little bit about believability
of witnesses. And this says, in part, "In determining the
believability of a witness, you may consider any matter that has a
tendency and reason to prove or disprove the truthfulness of the
testimony of the witness, including, but not limited to." Then
there's a list of things that you'll get. The one that I want to
highlight to you is, "A statement previously made by the witness
that is consistent or inconsistent with the testimony of the
witness." And again, we heard that from witness after witness after
witness. And this instruction tells you that you're allowed to say
-- you're allowed to conclude, I don't believe that person, I'm
sorry, I don't believe that person, I've heard too many versions of
this. "Witness willfully false in one part" -- Mr. Petrocelli read
that to you. I'm not going to read it to you again. You're entitled
to reject the entirety of a witness's testimony if you think that
the person's lied to you. Makes sense. That's what the Judge will
tell you. Now, experts. We heard a lot of testimony from experts,
and there are a couple of instructions that tell you -- that give
you some guidance on how do we sift through all this stuff. The
experts are just human beings who have certain special knowledge.
I'm sure some of you have technical-type jobs that you know more
about than other people do, and that makes you an expert in that
particular area. And what the -- what the instruction says, in part,
"In determining what weight to give each and any such opinion, you
should consider the qualifications and believability of the
witness, the facts or materials upon which each opinion is based,
and the reasons for each opinion. "You are not bound by an opinion
if you give such opinion" -- I'm sorry -- "the weight to which you
find it deserves." Now, nothing in that instruction about money.
Nothing in there that says that if one expert gets $150 an hour and
another one gets $3,000 a day, that you're supposed to believe one
of them more. Nothing in there about that. Nothing in there about
that. We saw Dr. Popovich come in here and admit that the taxpayers
of Los Angeles County paid him $30,000 in the criminal case and he
never said a word in court. I'm not suggesting to you that that's
bad. I'm not suggesting to you at all that you make up your mind
about an expert based on money. In fact, it's just the opposite. I
don't really think that's that significant. Mr. Petrocelli made what
I consider very insulting comments about Dr. Baden in his comment,
well, the defense pays him $100,00 so he'll say something in their
favor. Dr. Baden told you that he, in the criminal case, was out
here 70 times -- or 70 days I think it was, and worked hundreds of
hours on this case and was paid around 100,000, as I recall. Well,
I want Mr. Petrocelli to tell you what one of their senior partners
would cost for 70 days and hundreds of hours. I can tell you it
would be a heck of a lot more than $100,000. I don't think that's
how you should judge the testimony. That's up to you. All right.
Couple more concepts before we get into some of the details here.
There's a term that I think came up in the computer industry called
GIGO, G-I-G-O. Can you put that slide up, Phil.
(Document displayed on the Elmo screen.) What it means is, garbage
in, garbage out. Very simple. Means you can't -- when you put
something into a system, what you get out of it is only as good as
what went into it. And that's what our position is on the physical
evidence in this case: No better than the way it was collected and
preserved and kept. A lot of times -- there are a lot of comments
from some of the experts about concordance; and that is the idea
that, geez, these things were tested by several different labs, and
they got the same results. Boy, that must means they must be
right. That's not really, necessarily, the meaning of concordance.
The idea of concordance is, you start fresh; you've got a piece of
evidence on the ground. And from that point, it is split up and sent
to different places, without being processed at one place first.
Then you truly have two separate tests on the same piece of evidence
that you can place much more reliance on. In this case, we have --
Put on the next slide, would you Phil, please.
(Mr. P. Baker complies.)
MR. BLASIER: We have basically three crime scenes: We have
Rockingham, Bundy, and the Bronco. And when the LAPD or the D.
A.'s office decided they needed outside help, and they went to the
Department of Justice, the FBI, and Cellmark. But what you need to
understand, and what's critical here, and was not talked about by
Mr. Petrocelli, is -- Put on the next slide, please.
(Mr. P. Baker complies.)
MR.BLASIER: Everything went through LAPD. Everything. There was
not a single FBI expert called to the scene, as I recall, to pick up
anything off the ground. It was all collected and went through LAPD.
And it ain't gonna get any better than it was when it was at LAPD.
Okay. Let's talk briefly about -- about the crime lab. You heard
some things about the LAPD crime lab -- and this is a big county,
big county. They don't even have a manual that tells them how to do
things. They've -- they've got a draft manual for years. Years.
They've had it. They don't even have a manual that tells their
people how to collect things. And you know enough about DNA now to
know how sensitive it is and how important it is to have controls
and to do things right. If you want to have any faith at all in
anything that you get out at the end, you got to do it right. No
uniform way to do things. They have terrible documentation in terms
of trying to reconstruct what they did, when. We've heard about them
preserving blood in a trash bag on the counter overnight. And we'll
talk more about that. We've seen them alter documents in respect to
the blood vial changing from 17 to 18, because it looked like it
might have been tampered with, because it was given a number after
the tennis shoes. We'll talk a little more about that later. The lab
is not accredited; they are not accountable to anyone. They are not
required to be monitored by anyone. We know that, in this case --
you know, it's funny, in the context of blood, they -- a number of
people were asked, do you keep track of how much blood you collect
when you collect blood as part of a case? Of course not. Of course
not. Good heavens. You realize -- you realize the importance of --
of the victim's blood and the suspect's blood in this case now. They
don't even consider that something that they should even think
about. We don't keep track of that. There's no accountability here.
There's no accountability here. We cannot trust it. Okay. I want to
go to the Rockingham -- Can we get the Rockingham board with the
blood drops in the driveway? Would you like to take a break, Judge?
THE COURT: It's only been 45 minutes.
MR. BLASIER: Okay.
THE COURT: If you need a break. . .
MR. BLASIER: I don't. We're just going to start getting some
exhibits, so . . .
MR. BAKER: Doesn't look like Rockingham.
MR. BLASIER: Doesn't look like Rockingham to me.
(Laughter.)
MR. BLASIER: I'm trying to keep kind of chronological order here a
little bit. This is where criminalists were first sent. We'll talk
about why that happened, while they're bringing that board out. Let
me preface my remarks by saying, you know, you remember we started
out in this case, the LAPD did, with Andrea Mazzola as the officer
in charge. Andrea Mazzola had only been to two crime scenes
previously. It is absolutely ludicrous, in a crime this serious,
that their procedure would allow for a criminalist of so little
experience to be the officer in charge. Now, they claim they changed
that designation, I believe, on the way to Rockingham, even though
the paperwork still shows her as the officer in charge. And at
Rockingham, they still made her basically do all of the work.
(Counsel displays board entitled Blood Drops at 360 North Rockingham
Avenue, June 13, 1994.)
MR. BLASIER: The least experienced person there, doing all the work.
Now, Mr. Baker's going to talk more about the police going over the
wall and those aspects, so I'm not going to go into that in any
detail at all. But think about this: They've got a crime scene at
Bundy, with two people who are -- who have bled to death. I mean,
that's what they think is the cause of death, the manner of death.
There's about six pints of blood in a body. Twelve pints of blood,
total, in this case. And the victims, in a very gory, very bloody
scene. And what do they call the criminalist for? They call the
criminalist to Rockingham because of a speck of something that may
be blood that's smaller than your fingernail. You tell me: Have they
made up their minds yet who's guilty? Have they made up their minds
yet? Of course they have. Of course they have. And they've got to
get into the house, so they call Fung and Mazzola to Rockingham
first, and they let everything sit at Bundy. Already been sitting
all night, where things at the crime scene change: Bodies change
over time. You lose evidence. It doesn't get better. You try to get
there fast. You try to get there and do your job first. Not what
happened here. We have Mazzola and Fung going to Rockingham first.
Now, we've had testimony about police officer after police officer
going back and forth from Bundy to Rockingham, Gonzalez playing with
the dog, goes back to Rockingham. I mean, come on, folks.
MR. PETROCELLI: Misstates the evidence. There's no evidence of
anyone playing with a dog.
THE COURT: Mr. Petrocelli, you're going
to have ample time to make your rebuttal. This is argument.
MR. BLASIER: My recollection is, that comes from a report from Ron
Phillips, who they're asking you to believe. In any event, you got
him going back and forth -- you got the detectives going back and
forth; you got people going from one scene to the other. What are
these folks thinking about? They're not thinking about trying to
preserve the integrity of each individual scene. They're police
officers out there, trying to catch the bad guy. They're not
thinking. We have a dog that's wandering around Rockingham. And I
-- when I asked that question, I didn't -- I thought it was -- I
thought it was the dog Kato. And I apologize to you. I found out it
was -- I was wrong; it wasn't the dog Kato. Doesn't matter it was
another dog. I think it might have been Chachi. You don't let a dog
run around your crime scene while you're trying to collect evidence.
Come on, folks. This is common sense. This is common sense. It's
absolutely silly. This is a disaster. These crime scenes, these are
disasters in the way these were processed. Now, Mr. Petrocelli gave
his theory yesterday of how this happened -- the day before
yesterday. I keep forgetting. Page 116. Do you have that?
MR. P. BAKER: Yep.
(Document displayed on the Elmo screen.)
MR. BLASIER: This, I believe, was his -- if I recall, what was his
only explanation for how Mr. Simpson supposedly got into the house
-- that Mr. Park and Kato Kaelin -- O.J. Simpson gets on his
property at 10:51, bumps into or crashes into, or runs into this
wall, where it's extremely dark and no light, drops a glove, comes
back up the alley to where his car is parked in the driveway, puts
a bag there -- a bag never again seen to this day, presumably
because it's got murder weapon and murder clothes -- I assume that's
what he was trying to get you to infer -- and he makes a bee-line
inside his front door. And that's when Allan Park sees him for the
first time. And that's 10:55. And so we know he's home around 10:51,
and he's actually seen at 10:55. Trying to get my arms around that
last night. Trying to figure out could this work, I mean, could this
really work this way? And I started thinking about, okay, here's the
theory: We've got blood; we've got -- we've got five drops of blood
at Bundy. Somebody, presumably walking out the back, dropped five
drops of blood. At Rockingham, there are one, two, three, four,
five, six, seven, eight -- and I think three in the foyer -- 11 --
maybe got 11 drops of blood at Rockingham. Now, we all know that
when you cut yourself, you bleed the most first -- you bleed the
most first, and then the cut stops bleeding. So why do we have five
drops at Bundy and 11 or 12 at Rockingham, which supposedly is
sometime after the murders have been committed? Period of time after
that. Now, can I have the right-handed glove over there, please.
I'm just using this for illustrative purposes.
(Counsel places right glove on his own hand.)
MR. BLASIER: You have to make some sense out of this before you're
entitled to give any money for this. Okay. We've got -- we've got --
the killer there starts out with two gloves and ends up with one
glove. Now, if I'm a killer and I'm going to kill somebody, I'm
going have my fists like this
(indicating closed fist). Nobody is going to be able to pull a glove
off me. Let's say it did. The glove comes off. As I recall the
testimony, there was not much blood -- or a lot less blood on the --
the Bundy glove as the Rockingham glove. And their theory is that
the glove comes off, presumably early; then Mr. Simpson cuts his
finger and does the rest of the killing with his bare hand. Of
course, you don't see any of his blood around the bodies or on the
bodies. The coroner washed the bodies, so we'll never know whose
blood might have been on the bodies. They didn't think there to
preserve much of the blood around where the bodies were. Can't prove
that theory. So anyway, you've got -- you've got a right-hand glove
now, and you've got a left hand that's bleeding. What do you do with
it if you want to stop the bleeding? You do this
(indicating). You hold it. If you do that, you're going to find Mr.
Simpson's blood in the palm. There is none. There is none. What
blood -- what very small amounts of blood that were consistent with
Mr. Simpson's DQ Alpha are down around the wrist area? And we'll
talk again in a little bit about Mr. Yamauchi handling the glove
right after the reference vial -- right after he opens the reference
vial. We'll talk about that later. So I don't have any blood at all
where you would expect it, in the palm. Now, how do I drive my car?
My hand, supposedly, is still bleeding, because it's still bleeding
at Rockingham, bleeding worse at Rockingham. Takes, four, five
minutes to drive between the two places. There's going to be 10, 20
drops of blood in the Bronco if I drive like this.
(Indicating.) There aren't. There aren't. You could see the
pictures. There's some blood in the Bronco. We'll talk about that,
not a lot. And as you know, there was only one sample that they
could do an RFLP test on, which is the one that requires a little
more blood. That was, they had to put three stains together. All the
blood in the Bronco was a very, very small amount. In any event, so
what am I doing when I'm driving from Bundy to Rockingham with this
scenario? How am I avoiding getting blood from my left hand onto the
glove? What am I doing with the glove? Now --
MR. PETROCELLI: May I see that, please?
MR. BLASIER: Sure.
MR. PETROCELLI: How many of these pair do you have?
MR. BLASIER: There were several pair produced in the criminal case
by Aris Isotoner. That's what this is. Is there something wrong with
that? Excuse me. Where was I? Oh, how do I get this off? How do I
get this off? I do this.
(Mr. Blasier pulls glove off from fingers.) Mr. Simpson's blood
would be up here in the fingers, not there, not there
(indicating). That's how I take the gloves off. You don't take the
gloves off from the wrist; you don't do this
(indicating). And if he had done it that way, there would be a heck
of a lot more blood down here in this area that could be
attributable to Mr. Simpson, believe me, especially if he's still
bleeding -- bleeding more now than when he was at Bundy. So this
doesn't work, either. Now, he somehow gets back to the back of -- by
the air conditioner, presumably, and drops the glove. Now, you
remember Mr. Petrocelli says he then drops the bag by the Bentley?
Well, what is he trying to tell you there? He's trying to tell that
you Mr. Simpson has already cleaned up; and another inference that I
drew from it, that he's already cleaned up, and that the murder
weapon and the clothing are inside this bag. Well, what the heck is
he doing with the glove? If he's already cleaned up, why is the
glove someplace where it could fall on the ground by the air
conditioner? And there is no evidence that anything happened back by
that air conditioner. None whatsoever. Just a glove. Just a glove.
Your Honor, could we take a break at this point?
THE COURT: Okay.
Ten minutes, ladies and gentlemen. Don't talk about the case. Don't
form or express any opinions.
(Recess.)
(Jurors resume their respective seats.)
THE COURT: You may proceed.
MR. BLASIER: Thank you, Your Honor.
CLOSING ARGUMENT (continued)
BY MR. BLASIER: Okay. Where were we? We got this right-hand glove just
dropping out of something. Now, here's another question. If O.J.
Simpson changed his clothes after the killings, but before he went
home, and put them in this bag, what did he change into? Because his
left finger is still bleeding. Look at all the blood on the
driveway. Where's the second set of bloody clothing that you would
have if he had changed earlier. Where is it? Where is it? Now, and
again, you remember the -- The glove was found way back. And, Dan,
could you just hold up that other chart just for a minute. I want to
demonstrate the scale of that. The distance -- that's not the one
with the distance on it. I think -- it was my recollection it was
220 feet. 220, 280 feet. I'm not sure. Something like that.
(The board entitled 360 North Rockingham Avenue and blood drops 360
North Rockingham Avenue, June 13, 1994 is displayed.)
MR. BLASIER: Long distance from that grate where that blood was
found. And there was nothing from the garage back to where the glove
was found. And glove was sitting there with no dirt on it, still
moist, described as appeared moist in the morning, no evidence of
insect activity, no cobwebs, just sitting there, no evidence of any
blood drops along that pathway that would be consistent if Mr.
Simpson was still bleeding. Where are the blood drops over there?
You can take that down, Dan. The blood that's there appears to be
going from the Bronco area to the front door, or the other way
around. You can't -- I mean, you can't tell which way that's going.
It could be going both ways. Who knows. But it has -- it's not going
toward the garage, which is where the significant area is. And how
about this one. How does Mr. Simpson leave all of these blood drops
while Mark and Kato are right there. Remember now, according to Mr.
Petrocelli's theory, this all happens -- the blood here at
Rockingham gets there while they're there. Yet they don't see a cut.
They don't see him bleeding. It just doesn't work that way. Put that
theory back up there, Phil.
(Document displayed on Elmo.)
MR. BLASIER: Actually, I guess I can. How does he get -- he's still
bleeding as profusely as they suggest after he gets back from the
killings, how did he stop that in the five or six-minute period,
whatever period of time it was from when he supposedly goes inside
and then comes out to leave in the limo, how does he stop the
bleeding? How does he stop the bleeding? And where's the blood on
the inside? There is no blood on the carpet going upstairs, there
is no blood on the switch plates, there is no blood on the door, no
blood upstairs, there is no blood in the bedroom. We'll talk about
the socks later. Now, there was one described as, I believe, one
drop of blood in the bathroom on the floor, not drops like Mr.
Petrocelli said in his opening. And I don't recall if there was any
testimony at all about whether that was fresh or not; if that looked
fresh or not. I don't believe there was. But, you know, your notes
are -- you should follow your notes. Having a man's blood in his own
bathroom is not something particularly unusual, by the way. In any
event, where is all the blood? I mean, we got all this blood out in
the driveway. Where is it in the house? Now, if he hasn't changed
clothes, and he is still wearing the bloody clothing, and he's got
these Bruno Magli's on, and he gets by Park and Kato bleeding
profusely, although they don't see any of that, there's going to be
blood in the carpeting going upstairs from his shoes, plush
carpeting, you heard that there's going to be blood there. Wasn't
any. Wasn't any blood on the back door. If he's still bleeding, why
isn't there blood on the back door? Doesn't make sense. His theory
doesn't work. Well, he said there's blood in the sink. No. There's a
presumptive test that shows the possibility of blood in the sink. No
blood. They don't find blood. There was no confirmatory testing of
any such thing. And that's not unusual at all, to get a presumptive
test positive in a sink. Come on, folks, use your common sense. If
he's still bleeding there profusely by the time he gets back to
Rockingham, where's the blood on towels? If he cleaned up upstairs,
where are the towels and the hamper that's covered with blood? They
don't exist. There aren't any. Nothing was collected from the
bathroom because there was nothing there of any value. No second set
of clothes with blood on them. No towels with blood on them.
Nothing. Except the socks. We'll talk about the socks a lot. Okay.
Let's go to the Bundy board, with the drops around it.
(The board entitled Blood drops at Bundy -June 13, 1994.)
MR. LEONARD: Is that it?
MR. BLASIER: Yeah. I also want to see the envelope -- two envelope
pictures and the two glove pictures. Okay. Now, recall that we've
got -- Fung and Mazzola already were on their way to Bundy; I think
it was 10 o'clock when they got there. The coroner has finally been
called and is there. We've got all the evidence there, and what
happens? The coroners get in and take the bodies before or in the
middle of Fung and Mazzola trying to process the crime scene. And
you saw a couple of videos, they were from the media, that was --
you saw how many people were walking around that scene while it was
being processed. There were a lot of people. You saw Phil Vannatter
with his clipboard. There were a lot of detectives catching bad
guys. That's what they do; they go to crime scenes and get bad guys.
And they're all there mucking about and messing up the scene. Could
you hold up the two envelope pictures.
(Photographs of envelope displayed.
MR. BLASER: This is just to remind you that -- and we know this from
Mr. Rokahr's photographs. At some point -- and we don't know when,
we weren't there. At some point that envelope got moved or picked up
or taken somewhere. And you know what's interesting about that
envelope, it's never been fingerprinted. Wonder why. Wonder why.
Why? Cause they might find somebody's prints on it that would be
very embarrassing. Never been fingerprinted. Okay. Put that down.
Now, the glove. Same thing. That's it. You can see here that the
glove here on -- on my left has the label this way, going right
along the tile. And over here, right around the time it was
collected as No. 102, it's got the label someplace else, a different
orientation, it's obviously been moved, picked up, altered. I can't
tell you that. I can't tell you that. I wasn't there. But I can tell
you from those pictures, somebody did something to it, and they
haven't explained it, they have not told you how that happened.
And they have not brought a witness in to explain that. Maybe they
think it's not important, but you make up your own mind. This is
critical evidence at this crime scene, I'm telling you. And I think
-- if you look it, it may not be terribly clear, I think -- and you
can look at these pictures in your deliberations, I think the hat's
been moved, too. But I'll let you decide that. Okay. You can take
those down. Do we have the piece of paper pictures? While we're
gathering a couple more exhibits, I wanted to make a comment. Mr.
Baker, he alluded to the fact that this was OJ's dog, Kato, or that
OJ had purchased the dog for the family. The dog knew OJ, and I
would submit to you, that dogs, contrary to what we'd like to
believe in the Lassie and Timmy scenario, dogs are not particularly
smart, and I would submit to you that if OJ Simpson was the killer,
the dog would have followed him out the back, would have followed
him out the back and not gone out the front. In any event, what do
you have there for me? Oh, piece of paper. Do we have the one that
we can put on the Elmo, Phil? Okay. One thing before -- Dan, why
don't you move a little bit
(indicating to Elmo). Remember we looked at probability imprint
evidence on the pole to the right of the cap.
(indicating to Elmo) Now, I don't know if you can see it. Can you
get in?
(Indicating to Elmo.)
(Elmo is adjusted.) Again, you have to look at these things very
carefully over and over and over again. I'm not sure this is the one
that you can see it very well on, but you guys remember when we
looked at this and saw these parallel line imprints that appear to
be the same as the parallel line imprints on the envelope and this
piece of paper? Put the piece of paper on.
MR. P. BAKER: He has the board.
MR. BLASIER: I'm sorry. Oh, you have the board. Now, you have seen
this on the Elmo, so we won't put it on the Elmo. You can see it
better. But you got parallel line imprints, you got this piece of
paper that Detective Lange, by the way, just simply lied to you
about. It disappeared. It flat disappeared. He didn't examine
that. If he examined that, that would have been one of the first
things collected good heavens. It was right between the two bodies.
It was right between the two bodies, and it's got imprint evidence,
it's got blood evidence on it. Who knows what's written on the back?
Maybe what's written on the back, if there is something written on
the back, had something to do with why these killings occurred. Who
knows? We'll never know. We'll never know. Because somebody -- the
integrity of the scene was such that somebody could get it, make
that disappear, and nobody notices it until the defense in the
criminal case sees it in the picture. Where did this go? Detective
Lange. Oh, well, I picked it up and I looked at it, and it sure
didn't have any evidentiary value to me; no fiber evidence, nothing.
I can tell that. I'm Detective Lange. Come on, folks. That's
ridiculous. It was lost. It was lost because they cannot -- they
cannot show you that that crime scene has integrity in it. There's
so many people, the cops, walking all over the place. Mr. Petrocelli
made a comment in his closing, well, nothing was touched in the
house; no evidence of anything being touched in the house. How do we
know that? Well, we do know, of course, that there was no
ransacking. Give you that. Do you remember who the first person on
the scene was? Officer Riske. Officer Riske comes in, and what did
he do? What's the first thing he does? You got these horrible bodies
lying there, tremendously bloody crime scene, and you got the door
open and the lights on; and what does he do? He decides to go in.
And the first thing he does is ruin two clues; he picks up the phone
obliterating any fingerprints that might be on it, and he screws up
any redial capabilities, of pushing the redial button, to see who
was the last person that Nicole talked to. Maybe she talked to
somebody and maybe that would help solve this crime. So that's the
first thing he does. He's the first guy on the scene and he screws
up two things walking in the door. Now, is he going to tell you
there's no hair and fiber evidence on the inside of that
condominium? No. Of course, he's not. By the time they even start
thinking about processing the scene, with everybody inside the
condominium, it's no longer of any value, whatsoever, as a potential
crime scene. Fung and Mazzola. You can look at fiber evidence all
you want. Come on. You're not going to find it because the cops have
been going in and they've been using it as a command post, almost.
They've been using the phone. That's how they've been getting access
to the bodies. This entire crime scene should have been the entire
condominium, the entire condominium. Suppose we have Mr. Simpson's
left glove off, hand cut severely, bleeding a lot. No bloody
fingerprints. No bloody fingerprints at all, identifiable or
unidentifiable, on that -- on the -- I'm not positive about that,
but certainly none of Mr. Simpson's fingerprints there. I don't
think that he testified that any fingerprint was in blood. You sure
would expect it if their scenario is correct. Oh, the blanket. I'd
like to mention it a little bit -- mention it a little bit more. The
idea here of the blanket is when you bring it outside, and Detective
Lange did this to cover up the body, and I mean it's the
compassionate thing to do, okay, but when you spread the blanket,
however you do it, you create wind currents and that causes hair
and fiber evidence, if there is any of any value, to potentially
move from one thing to another. To move around. It compromises the
scene. Whether it did here, who knows? The fact that it may have
come from the dryer is even worse. You people who do your own
laundry, when you put something in the dryer with other things,
especially something like a blanket, you're going to pick up things.
So I can't -- I'm not going to sit here and tell you that that
ruined some evidence. I don't know. All I can tell you is that it
was a stupid thing to do. It shows you their ineptness. It shows you
their lack of care, their lack of understanding of the importance of
this stuff, and is relevant to the integrity of all of this
evidence. And, of course, they leave it there. And it's also put
over the body of Nicole Brown Simpson thus obliterating some of the
blood on her body that might have been from the perpetrator. That's
gone. They could have -- The coroner, of course, screwed it up; they
washed the bodies without preserving any blood that was on the
bodies that might have been from the perpetrator. But there very
well could have been a transfer onto that blanket. But they didn't
save the blanket either. Okay. Let's -- oh, can you get the chart
with the blood drops and the shoe prints?
MR. LEONARD: I'll try.
MR. BLASIER: Take a quick look at that. While he's he doing that --
Dan, I'm going to need that later, but --
MR. LEONARD: Okay.
MR. BLASIER: While he's doing that, let me remind you of some of the
other things that we were able to find in the video of Dennis Fung
bringing the Rockingham glove to the Bundy scene and stepping over
the body to take it to Detective Lange. Of course, Detective Lange
just lied about that. He said, no, that was the crime-scene truck I
remember it not like I think it was. He said, as I recall, that
happened at the crime-scene truck. I wouldn't -- I wouldn't have had
him bring it into the scene. We want to protect the scene. You saw
it on the video. You saw Fung carrying the Rockingham glove over the
bodies at Bundy. Now, can I prove to you that something -- that that
contaminated something? I can't. Can't prove that to you. But that's
a fact from which you can draw inferences, if you choose to. One
of many about the integrity of this evidence. Now, here we have the
diagram of the blood drops and the shoe prints. The first blood drop
-- let me see if I can get over here.
MR. LEONARD: Let me get you a pointer.
MR. BLASIER: All right. Okay. Clearly, we have number 52 out here --
or actually 52 is out in back
(indicating to board entitled "Shoe Prints at Bundy June 13, 1994").
52 out here is not to the left of any shoe prints. In fact, it's way
near the corner, indicating that the person's walking out. It
wouldn't be from their left side. It would be from more likely the
right side. This is very close to that wall. You can check the
pictures. It's very close to this -- this wall. This one's not near
any shoe prints. No shoe prints whatsoever. Can you pull it this way
a little bit?
MR. LEONARD: Towards you?
MR. BLASIER: Yeah. I'm just going to stand up and do this. It's --
we're -- All right. The first blood drop is found here, and that's
the one that I will grant you is in the vicinity of that shoe
print. I'll grant you that one. Here's a second one. We got some
shoe prints around it, but you can't tell -- you can't say that's to
the left of a shoe print. You just can't simply say that. Possible.
But you can't say that. You simply can't say that about that piece
of evidence. So, let's see, that's one, that's two. Three, look at
this one, it's to the right -- well, actually, I take that back. We
don't know about this one because I think this was one that Bodziak
said he couldn't tell which direction it was. So it could be. But it
sure isn't certain that that's to the left of the print. Could be to
the right. Could be to the right. And then we have the two at the
end that aren't near any shoe print. So I offer that to you just to
illustrate that just saying it doesn't make it so. I want to change
to a different subject. Talk about fingernails. You want to pass
this right down, please
(indicating to glove.)
(Mr. Gelblum hands glove back to defense counsel.)
MR. BLASIER: You can take that down. Can you get that EAP chart
ready, Phil. Remember that testimony about fingernail scrapings from
Nicole Brown Simpson? And they were tested by Greg Matheson, who I
submit to you is a very honest man and does a good job. And he
tested those, he tested the scrapings from the fingernails of Nicole
Brown Simpson and he found blood with an EAP type B. Let's talk a
little bit more about what that means. EAP is just another genetic
marker. We've been talking about them all for months now. It just
happens to be one of them. And it happens to be one where we have
some differences or we know that none of the people, none of the
victims, neither Nicole nor Ron Goldman, nor O.J. Simpson have an
EAP type B. So, if there is an EAP type B from the fingernail
scrapings of Nicole Brown Simpson, it came from somebody else. It
came from somebody else. Somebody other than Mr. Simpson, Ms.
Simpson or Ronald Goldman. And of course there was a brief bit of
testimony about EAP type B blood being found on the knife at some
point after the murders. Do we have -- do you have the serology
report? First let me show you what Greg Matheson did. And again,
this is the first set of serology notes that he did for the
conventional serology work that he did. And we've got a report here
that says, first of all, "Problem, no match to anyone."
(Document displayed on Elmo.)
MR. BLASIER: "Problem, no match to anyone." Got to do something
about that problem. Maybe Mr. Simpson didn't do it. "Problem, no
match to anyone." So we go down and we see at 84 and 85, you can
tell -- I'm sorry -- 84A, B, you can tell from our copy here that
that's been highlighted. That's what they're talking about,
"Problem, no match to anyone." And let's go to the results page of
Greg Matheson's report where he gives the types. There you go
(indicating to Elmo). Let's go down to 84A and B in the right -- why
don't you show the top of the document so we know that the
right-hand column is the EAP. There you go. There you go. So we go
down to 84A and B. Type B, that's his professional opinion when he
writes the report, that that's what it is. That that's what it is.
If that's correct, if he is right in his professional judgment, I
got a stranger -- we got a stranger submitting blood under Nicole
Brown Simpson's fingernails. Now, let me give you their answer to
it. Not going to mislead you. They tried to explain it. Got to come
up with an explanation. Doesn't fit our theory. This is -- this is
not the police department kind of working to find the truth. This is
adversarial. This is adversarial. This is the police department
against O.J. Simpson, okay. Don't lose that -- don't ever lose sight
of that. All right. So what their explanation is, well, let's see,
is there any way that we can say that that's something other than a
B. And Greg Matheson comes in and says, well, maybe, maybe that's a
BA, 'cause Nicole was a BA, maybe it's really her blood and somehow
it got from a BA to a B. Okay. So we -- we had some testimony about
that. Scientific testimony. Phil, why don't you put up the EAP
chart, and put up the red blood cell one. Now, let me give you one
of their responses. Go ahead and just zoom in on the blood cell
and the DNA. There you go. One of their explanations was, hey, we tested --
Cellmark, I think Dr. Cotton said, we tested it, we did DNA tests on
that, and it came back consistent with Nicole Brown Simpson. Well,
of course it did. Of course it did. When you take scrapings from
your fingernails, you're going to get your DNA. Not necessarily from
your blood. From skin, from cells. Remember,
every cell in the body except red blood cells has DNA.
So that doesn't answer it. That doesn't answer it at all. I'd be
surprised if they didn't find her DNA under there. So that's not the
answer. That doesn't say, oh, well, therefore this blood type B --
EAP B has to be hers. Doesn't help you at all. Because remember, the
EAP marker that we're looking at, we're looking at the red blood
cells that don't even have DNA. So it's apples and oranges.
It's apples and oranges. You can't --
you can't search a tomato truck and say there aren't any oranges on
that tomato truck when you're only looking at tomatoes. Okay. So
let's go to the next chart. So we clearly can have from Nicole
Simpson, DNA from her, as well as blood from somebody else, maybe a
very, very small amount, with a different type from anybody in the
case that we know of. How did that get there, if that's correct? So
Matheson says now, no, that's a degraded -- that's a degraded BA, I
think. My professional opinion, that's a degraded BA. So --
and I got to get into this science stuff with you folks, I
know it's technical, but I want you to understand it because you're
the ones that are going to decide this. I don't want you to decide
it based on some conclusory statements someone told you about. I
want you to have some understanding of what's going on here. So go
to the next slide. Okay. Greg Matheson and I went through this.
Nicole Brown Simpson's EAP type is a BA, which looks like the one on
the left with the four bands. The four bands. Called A1, A2, B1, B2
bands. You remember that? The unknown type found under her nails,
and this is Greg Matheson's professional opinion, looks like on
the right. Two bands in that are B, in the area B. You don't have to
understand how they get from sample to this -- this kind of a chart,
but all you need to understand is that what they found was a B
pattern that has two bands at the place where you would expect to
find a B. Let's go to the next one.
(Document displayed on Elmo.) Now, when I questioned Greg Matheson
about what is the -- what's your -- what's your authority for saying
that BA can degrade to a B, he said, well, you know, the literature
talks about that. And it does, the scientific literature talks a
little bit about that. But what did it tell you. It says that when a
BA degrades, what happens is you start losing bands from the top
down. Go to the next chart. So you have a BA.
It's gradually degrading now. One more point. Remember, I think
Greg Matheson said, you know, one of the reasons I think this is a
degraded BA is because Nicole Brown Simpson's fingernails were in
blood. They all weren't. Look at the pictures. One of them was. The
other wasn't. Okay. So we move down the column -- go down to the
next chart. If you follow the scientific literature that studied
this, you see that after your -- you got 4 bands, the next thing
you're going to get is 3 bands. That's still called a BA. It's
degrading but it's still a BA. Go to the next one, please.
Next you get two bands. Next you get
two bands. That's called a BA also. It's a degraded BA but it's a BA.
Go to the next one. Finally, you get a BA degrading at the very
far right and a one band to a B. And this is how it can happen. This
is how you can have a BA turn into a B. And the literature says this
and it describes that. Go to the next one. Not a two banded B
pattern. You can't have that. That's not what the literature says.
That's not how it works according to the scientists who have studied
this. Next slide. This is an EAP type B two banded. Not a degraded BA.
It's somebody else's. It's somebody else's. Next slide, please.
Whose is it? I can't tell you. Not my client's. It's not my
client's. That's exculpatory evidence. It's not my client's. You're
entitled to infer from that that she had somebody else's blood under
her fingernails from the struggle. Okay, let's go to hair and fiber.
I'm going to be fairly quick on this because hair and fiber is, as
you've been told, a very, very subjective area, and the kind of
judgments that are made by people like Douglas Deedrick, you can't
really -- you can't really -- it's very subjective, the
characteristics that they look at. Let me mention first why the idea
of hair and fiber evidence in this case is one of very little value.
We've got a place where O.J. Simpson hangs out at. We've got the
Bronco that goes back and forth. We've got Nicole -- Arnelle told
you that Nicole drove the Bronco. We've got Nicole and Arnelle --
we've got Arnelle driving the Bronco, and the kids back and forth
and the dogs back and forth. What you've got here is an environment
that has been frequented by people coming from the Bronco,
particularly O.J. Simpson. Okay. So you've already got a place where
you would expect to find carpet fibers, hair fibers. Not unusual
at all. And in fact they did collect a soil sample. It's called an
environmental study. It's the first step if you want to really check
this out, if you really want to find out what's the frequency with
which you're going to find that person's hair and fiber there anyway
is an environmental study. You collect it and then you analyze it.
Well, what do we have here? They collected it. They've never looked
at it. That might hurt their case. They've never been looked at.
Police never analyzed, scientific investigation division never
looked at it. They didn't care. Might have hurt their case. Now,
hair. Deedrick admits to you that he can't tell you -- all he can
say is, you know, I got this hair here and I got this hair here and
I looked at them under a microscope and I saw some things that
appear to be similar. And the characteristics that they're talking
about is the curl, things called cuticles, there's a lot -- a long
list of things about hair. They aren't unique at all. They are very
subjective. When you talk about ovoid bodies, I think was one of
them, you remember the strands of hair with kind of like footballs
in it. You never -- you never have an exact match between one hair
and another. Every hair is different. Every hair on your own head,
my head -- what I have left -- is different. All you can say is
that, you know, it could come from the same person. That's all you
can say. And that ain't much. 'Cause it could come from somebody
else, too. Okay. You could say it could come from him but it might
not. And he can't tell you how many other people it might have come
from, okay. No way to tell. This is not significant evidence, I'll
submit to you. And you remember Mr. Leonard when Deedrick put his
acetate over the chart and when he says it's a match -- by the way,
we're going to talk about terminology. Match -- when he says
something is a match, doesn't mean it's the same. I mean somebody
came up to me and said, you know, this matches that, I would -- my
common sense interpretation is that means that they're the same. Not
in forensic science. Not in forensic science. We don't like that
kind of precision. It's a match because it could be the same or
similar, could be similar, not even the same. And consider again how
they do this. They have two layers of whatever length, they blow it
up, magnify it 400 or 800 times I believe, and look along the hair
and see if they can find the spot that looks similar, and that's
what they take a picture of, is that little spot. They don't show
you the rest of it. The scale of the photos that you were seeing, if
you saw the entire hair, would be all around the hair. Okay.
Blue-black cotton fiber. The only significance of this is that there
was a blue-black cotton fiber that could have come from the same
source. Again, maybe not. I can't say. Found on several items. On
the sock -- I forget the other items. And the plaintiffs spent a
great deal of time trying to establish that Mr. Simpson had a
blue-black cotton sweatsuit. So what do we have? They bring in
Leslie Gardiner. She's their witness who's going to come in and say
that Mr. Simpson has a blue-black cotton sweatsuit, presumably. And
what happens? She comes in and she's asked what kind of material was
this material that Mr. Simpson wore in this video. Cashmere.
Cashmere isn't cotton, folks. Cashmere comes from some other animal.
I don't even know what it looks like. But it ain't cotton. So what
happens next? Well, the plaintiffs don't like this. She said the
wrong thing. So they bring her back. They bring her back. And the
second time, her testimony is different. She's been taken to the
woodshed. She now returns and says wait a minute, the cashmere --
let's forget the cashmere, that didn't fit, now I remember that, now
I remember that, it didn't fit. After she admits that what she told
Mr. Leonard in the hallway before her first testimony is that what
this item of clothing was, was a combination of cotton and polyester
fibers, which again, is not cotton. Cotton and polyester is cotton
and polyester together; it's not cotton, and it doesn't have any
white piping down the front of it. And it's not blue-black.
Absolutely worthless. Bronco carpet fiber. Do we have the Bronco
carpet chart, please.
(Board entitled Bronco Carpet, LAPD Item 33, was displayed.)
MR. BLASIER: Mr. Petrocelli told you in his argument that this piece
of carpeting was cut out of the Bronco on June 14 and was put away,
by itself, and sealed and/or frozen, and nothing was done to it
for some time -- I think he said until September, is my
recollection. Look at that. That is a large piece of carpet. That is
a good-size piece of carpet. If any one of you have cut carpet, you
know that the strands come off the sides; that's the nature of
carpeting. You cut a big piece of carpeting like that and do
anything to it, you're going to get carpet fibers. What does LAPD do
for a carpeting too big for that bag? They roll it up in a piece of
paper, a piece of butcher paper, try to tape it up, and they put it
in a relatively small box -- we had it in here, you remember --
with, I think it was, 43 other evidentiary items. 43 other items:
The glove, the hat, the other items that they were going to do
comparisons on. And lo and behold, when we get the knit cap to the
FBI in Washington, after it's been looked at several times from the
same box as that carpeting, they find debris that came out of the
knit cap, a Bronco fiber. Big deal. Big deal. That is not useful
evidence. That is not the way to store evidence. If you're going to
compare two things together, you keep them apart. It's common sense.
Okay. Real quickly, let's go to pathology. Do you have the chart
-- do we have the Spitz chart?
MR. P. BAKER: Yeah.
MR. BLASIER: I'm going to talk briefly about pathology. Oh. Oh,
okay. One more thing. And hair and fiber.
MR. LEONARD: Do you need the board?
MR. BLASIER: No. We have another chart that I meant to show you. And
this is what they didn't find in terms of hair and fiber on articles
and whatever. And this, we submit to you, is exculpatory evidence
that's in the Bronco. There was no hair consistent with Nicole in
the Bronco or with Ron Goldman. In the Bronco, there was no fiber
consistent with the glove, no fiber consistent with Mr. Goldman's
clothing. If Mr. Simpson had been in a violent struggle with Mr.
Goldman, he likely would have had fibers from his clothing on him.
And those, presumably, could have transferred to the Bronco. No such
thing. No fiber consistent with the dress that Nicole was wearing,
as well. Again, been in a violent struggle with her, with bodily
contact, might expect to find that. Doesn't exist. Next chart.
Both gloves no hair consistent with OJ Simpson on the Bundy glove,
no hair consistent with OJ Simpson on the Rockingham glove. Okay.
And, by the way, we're he not contesting that these are the murder
gloves, if anybody implied that to you. We certainly didn't. Both
gloves, no hair consistent with OJ Simpson -- on the Bundy glove; no
hair consistent with OJ Simpson on the Rockingham glove. The socks,
no hair consistent with Ronald Goldman, no hair consistent with
Nicole Brown Simpson. The socks fibers, no fiber consistent with
either glove, no fiber consistent with Mr. Goldman's clothing, no
fiber consistent with Nicole Brown Simpson. Okay. Dr. Spitz's
pathology here, I mean, there's no big secret as to how these people
died. They were stabbed and they bled to death. That was easy. That
part was easy. What do the pathologists here try to do for you?
They're trying to give you some information that might help you in
deciding some issues. Time of death. The coroner wasn't called for
hours. There's just no real help here in terms of the pathologist's
ability to tell you anything. The duration of struggle. That's one
thing that we talked about. The duration of the event, which is
another issue which we talked about, which we think is the more
important issue: Not the duration of the struggle, but the duration
of the whole event. How long was the perpetrator or perpetrators
there? Because that's significant to whether Mr. Simpson had time to
do this clean-up, to get home, stop his bleeding go to the airport.
So let's have the chart from Dr. Spitz. Dr. Spitz, you will recall,
was extremely combative on cross-examination. I submit to you that
that's evidence you can consider in deciding whether he is here as
an impartial expert or whether he has a bias. He has the answer to
how every blow was inflected in this case in virtually every order.
And he didn't write a single note -- didn't write a single piece of
paper down, nothing -- nothing to show his analysis. He just came in
he had all the answers. All the answers.
(Board displayed illustrates drawing of a body dissected in half.)

MR. BLASIER: I submit many of the scenarios that were shown with
left arm held under your chin, if that had been the way this
happened, the perpetrator would have struck himself in the arm. But
nevertheless, this stuff has limited value. Let me tell you folks,
it has limited value. It's up to you to decide how much you want to
put into this. There are only a few points here to talk about. One
point I would make is that you notice Mr. Petrocelli keeps talking
about this being a rage killing. That isn't what Dr. Spitz was
seemingly describing; he was describing something very professional,
very fast, knew what they were doing: Killed two people in one
minute, 15 seconds. That's it. Gone. And he says -- and the reason
he testifies that way is because they need to have a short -- a
short event, okay, in my opinion. Now, what does he do? He comes in
and he says that the cause of death for Ronald Goldman was the wound
to the aorta and -- that's abdominal wound in the lower back, with
the knife penetrating the aorta and the peritoneal sac -- and Mr.
Goldman bleeding to death through internal bleeding in the space
behind the retroperitoneal sac. Remember? Dr. Baden brought in the
plastic bag that is similar to the peritoneal sac, which is very
thin, cellophane-like, which contains the abdomen. And behind --
and the aorta runs right against it. And behind that is the
retroperitoneal space. In doctors' terms, like we have lawyers'
terms, we have a special language. And Dr. Spitz, his whole opinion
is based on the fact that there were, I think -- I thought he said a
quart, two quarts -- I forget the amount -- a lot of blood in the
retroperitoneal space. And his evidence for that was this tissue
picture. Do you have that handy?
(Displaying on Elmo.
MR. BLASIER: His only evidence for it was this piece of the aorta,
which is a very small piece of tissue, which he never looked at. By
the way, I don't believe all he had was this picture. This does not
demonstrate that there was massive amounts of blood in the area
where he described. And Dr. Golden, who was not brought here by the
plaintiffs, could have been, if he -- if he disagreed -- if he
agreed with Dr. Spitz, they could have bought Dr. Golden in here. In
fact, Dr. Golden agreed with Dr. Baden; he didn't see any massive
bleeding back there. His only evidence is this picture of tissue,
period. That's it. That's all he has. The autopsy report describes
that wound as one of the last wounds. In terms of sequence in their
report, that's important. That's important. And why is this -- why
is this important at all? It's important on the issue of the -- on
the length of this event. Now, Dr. Baden -- and this chart, by the
way, is exceedingly misleading, because where the knife area is,
penetrates the aorta, and then penetrates the -- there's a space
there. Would you point to that space down between the
retroperitoneal sac and the aorta? Yeah. There is no space there in
our body; it's right against it. It's right against it. So that when
you cut through the aorta, you're going to make the same size cut
into the abdomen.
(Mr. Leonard indicated to board.)
MR. BLASIER: There would be massive bleeding coming from that kind
of wound if there was a lot of blood pumping through a person's body
at the time that wound was made, and you would find a lot of blood
in the and abdomen. There wasn't. There was one to 200 cc's. That
was the whole point of that. There was not much blood in the
abdomen. And there's no evidence of massive bleeding in the space
behind that, as well. And what can you infer from that -- and Dr.
Baden, you know, changed his times a couple of times about how long
Mr. Goldman would be standing up. We can't tell. We don't have that.
I think Mr. Petrocelli conceded that yesterday. We really we can't
say. We can't say. All we can tell you is that there was a certain
period of time, which Dr. Baden estimates as five to ten -- I think
maybe he had gone up to -- appears five to ten minutes between the
first wound to Mr. Goldman's neck and the last wound to the aorta.
Could it be that the perpetrator or perpetrators, in a short
struggle, inflicted all the wounds, started to leave one of them,
come back, did the last wound? That's one inference you can draw
from that. The importance of that evidence is the time of the event,
not the time of the struggle. And we also note there's the issue
about blood on the perpetrators, perpetrator. We know that there was
blood transferred between the two victims. Remember? There were -- I
believe it was 16 different transfers of Nicole Brown Simpson's
blood getting on Ron Goldman's clothing and Ron Goldman's blood
getting on Nicole Brown Simpson's clothing. What does that tell you?
You can infer from that, that they had some contact; that they had
some contact. That's one thing I can infer from that reasonably
circumstantial evidence, that they had some contact during this
struggle. Why is there no more screaming? Can one person do this?
Can one person control these two people who, I submit to you, were
interacting, without somebody screaming more? I think not. I think
not. I think one of the persons had to have been restrained, or you
would have heard evidence of from Heidstra and other people of more
struggle.
THE COURT: Ladies and gentlemen, we'll give you a
ten-minute recess. Don't talk about the case. Don't form or express
any opinions.
(Recess.)
(Jurors resume their respective seats.)
MR. BLASIER: Thank you, Your Honor.
CLOSING ARGUMENT (continued)
MR. BLASIER: Okay. Let me just correct one misimpression I may have
given you. Obviously, there is significant controversy about the
Bundy glove. All that happened after -- while I was gone at
Christmas. We're not contesting that the right-hand glove, the
Rockingham glove, was part of the murder, but there's now
significant question whether what they brought here is the Bundy
glove.
MR. PETROCELLI: I object to that. He just said they weren't
contesting both gloves.
MR. BLASIER: I misspoke.
THE COURT: I agree with you.
MR. PETROCELLI: It's not a very good one.
MR. BAKER: I think his gratuitous comments ought to be stricken. His
opinions can be given to this jury when Mr. Petrocelli has an
opportunity.
MR. PETROCELLI: Talk about wood-shedding, Mr. Baker.
THE COURT: Mr.
Petrocelli --
MR. BAKER: I'm sick of his comments. Save those for rebuttal.
MR. BLASIER: Can we go on guys? Bring me my tinker toys. You're
going to guess what we're going to talk about next.
MR. PETROCELLI: None of this stuff is in evidence. I guess if
they're toys, I don't have any objection.
MR. BAKER: Do you feel compelled to make a comment every time, Mr.
Petrocelli?
MR. PETROCELLI: Not in evidence, Your Honor. I don't know what he's
doing.
MR. BLASIER: I told them before, Your Honor. He said these were
okay.
MR. PETROCELLI: I haven't seen these.
THE COURT: You may use them.
Go ahead.
MR. BLASIER: Okay. I'd like to talk about DN
A. And again, this is a very complicated topic. And I'm going to
cover it in some detail again, so that you understand exactly what's
involved here, and what these tests do, and what they don't do,
because they've been grossly oversold to you in terms of their
value, in terms of what they really mean. Now, you remember that we
talked with Dr. Cotton. DNA is really a fairly simple structured
compound that's made up of what are called base pairs. And a base
pair is simply two molecules that are attached together with, like,
a little rung. And in the DNA in all of our bodies there are only
four different kinds of these. And I've got green, yellow, blue,
and red to represent the fact that there are only four different
ones in the entire DNA chain. And this includes DNA from every
living thing. You open a piece of spinach, look at the DNA, same
four molecules. And they attach -- do you remember, we were talking
about how two of them always go together, and the other two always
go together, so the only pieces you can -- possible in a DNA, in
your DNA, throughout the entire DNA, are this one and this one.
That's it. These are the only two pieces
(referring to demonstrative objects). We talked about how you
inherit from each parent your DNA, and that the DNA has a structure
of a ladder. If it's uncoiled -- and you remember it's all coiled up
in what are called chromosomes, and it has the structure of a
ladder, when you uncoil it -- and I've got two -- my wife and I, my
lovely wife, who is in the courtroom, spent last night painting
these and making people here. So this is meant to represent two
pieces of DN
A. Okay. Do you remember that -- just to give you an idea of the
scale of what we're talking about, the example that I used with Dr.
Cotton was if you had a ladder that had the rungs a half an inch
apart, the DNA that you inherit from one parent would go around the
world once. Okay. These are about 6 inches, so that's about 12
times. So that the DNA that this scale that you inherit from each
parent will go around the world 12 times. 12 times. Now, for one
person's DNA to match a crime scene DNA, you have to have every one
of these absolutely identical, all 3 billion. Actually, 6 billion. 3
billion from each parent have to be exactly the same. If I do this
and turn this around on one base pair, it is a different person.
These are not the same people anymore. Okay. Different. Any
difference, if I take this off of here, different person 'cause now
it's a little different length, okay. And this is very important
because unlike fingerprints where all you need is to look at the
fingers and you can establish identity uniquely, the only way to
establish identity uniquely -- I mean your DNA has to match. If
you're a suspect, and the evidence, and you match it, to be the same
DNA, it's got to have all 6 billion of these base pairs exactly the
same. Now, in the DNA testing that we've heard about that they refer
to the forensic community they don't look at all. And I will point
out to you that there is testimony that in humans, from one human to
another, I think it was 95, 98, 99 percent of our DNA is the same to
begin with, so it has no value for purposes of trying to identify
somebody. But that's still leaves a lot -- a large amount of DNA
where there will be some differences from one person to another, and
so they've decided, let's see, can we use this in some fashion to
identify people. What a great tool for the forensic community if we
could figure out some way to look at DNA in a way that allows us to
try and identify people in some fashion. Well, you have been told
that they can't do it yet. I mean, they can't do it in the sense
they can't look at all the DNA; it's simply not practical. So
they've designed some tests, and the first test I'm going to talk
about is the RFLP test. That's the one that looks at pieces of
repeating DN
A. Repeating identical DNA. Make any chain back in here.
Do you remember Dr. Cotton told you
that there are areas in the DNA -- let's say in my analogy, let's
say on our ladder, and we're at the city limits of Pittsburgh, there
may be a piece of DNA like this that may have several base pairs
that repeat over and over and over again. In me, it might repeat 10
times. In you, it might repeat 20 times. And in somebody else it
might repeat 50 times or 100 times. So they use this idea that there
are parts of the DNA where you have repeating sections as a way of
identification. How do they do it? They've got to determine that,
again, evidence that's picked up at a crime scene, if it's going to
match a suspect, it has to be identical for all 6 billion base
pairs. They only look at a very small amount. Here, with a
five-probe match in the RFLP system, I think we were using an
example of like 10,000 of these per probe, which is not very much
when you consider a ladder going around the world 128 times.
Five-probe is about 50,000 rungs of the ladder. And that's all
they're able to look at. But are they able to measure that
precisely? Well, let's check on that. And again, the process that
they go through is they collect the DNA off the ground, and we'll
talk about -- a little bit about Andrea Mazzola and how she -- her
collection techniques, and Dennis Fung's collection techniques. And
it's put through a many-step process, and it's cut into pieces, and
they try to measure those areas that I told you where there's
repeating lengths, repeating sections of DNA.
Now, here's what they don't tell you. Dan or Phil, the match
window first slide up, please.
(Document displayed on Elmo.)
MR. BLASIER: Okay. Okay. Let's -- if they find DNA at a crime scene,
and they find this particular section again, and they're able to do
that -- they're able to do that, they're able to locate the piece of
DNA on the borderline of Pittsburgh, or whatever, for my analogy,
they do a measurement and they come up with the evidence at the
scene measures 10,000 base pairs. So they have 10,000 rungs of the
pattern. That's what their machinery -- that's what their test tells
them is in the evidence. So the person who contributed that would
have to have identical DNA to that for there to be a true match.
Okay. So then what do they do next? They measure the suspects -- you
want to put up the next slide.
(Document displayed on Elmo.)
MR. BLASIER: Can you zoom out a little bit. Lo and behold, they
measure their suspect, and the suspect comes back with 9,500 base
pairs. Well, "Gee, Charlie, what are we going to do about that?"
This doesn't help us very well, doesn't look like the same person,
does it? What they do is they use what's called a match window. And
what they say is -- put up the next slide, please.
(Document displayed on Elmo.)
MR. BLASIER: Rather than learning how to measure better, we're just
going to say, let's give ourselves a plus or minus two and a half
percent slop factor, to call something a match -- to call two things
a match. And you can see from my chart -- and Dr. Cotton, I think
they said her match window was even a little bigger than that but
plus and a half -- plus and a half 2.5 percent is easy to work with
the numbers. So that if you have a 10,000 base pair section found at
the crime scene, and the suspect has any number of base pairs
between 10,500 and 9,500, roughly, little different statistically,
but that's close enough. Everybody in that range is going to be
called a match. Next slide.
(Document displayed on Elmo.)
MR. BLASIER: They all match. Again now, listen to the terminology.
Doesn't mean they're the same. They can't say that. They can't say
that because they can't measure it any better. Now, I just want to
make a couple points about this terminology again. We've heard lots
of different terms used. Some of the experts have said that -- you
know, is it possible that this could have happened? Well, yeah, it's
possible. Possible is not very helpful at all. That's not very
helpful when an expert says that something is possible or could have
happened. Gives you almost no information at all. Not very precise
work. And if experts are asked questions, is it possible, this or
that, you're not getting very much information about that. Now, the
next term, kind of on the ladder of terminology, if you will is, is
it consistent with. And again, that terminology -- and this is --
all this stuff is used in the forensic community all the time; is it
consistent with. All consistent with means is, yeah, it could have
come from the same place, but then again, it might not have. That's
all that means. It's no stronger than that. And we've heard a lot of
that. Next term on the ladder is probable. It's probable that this
happened. Now we're getting a little bit more quantitative, and a
little bit more precise, and now your expert's telling you that
something is probably more likely to be this way than not. Okay.
Then we go up to terminology like reasonable degree of medical or
forensic or scientific certainty. Again, that's a higher standard
that Dr. Baden talked about quite a bit, and that's like, I'm
reasonably certain as a medical expert, or whatever, that what I'm
telling you is accurate. Then there is, this is absolutely true.
Okay. You shouldn't hear an expert say it's absolutely true because
you can't prove anything absolutely, contrary to Mr. Petrocelli.
Now, we've gone this far. And we've got two pieces of DNA that
match, even though, again, we don't know if they're the same. What
do we do from that? That doesn't mean anything unless there's some
way of determining the people out in the world, what do they look
like. I mean, what do we match this to? How do we come up with some
way of assigning a number to it so it has some meaning? And the way
they go about doing that is with statistics. And statistics there's
a phrase, "There's lies, damn lies and statistics." And you can do
just about anything you want with statistics. And what they do is
they get together what's called a data base of people. And they're
going to take some samples of those people, and then they're going
to try and expand and extrapolate from that to the entire world so
that they can come up with some estimate of what the heck does it
mean that two pieces of DNA appear to at least be within, you know,
plus or minus 5 percent of each other. And they don't -- we can't --
we don't have a data bank of everybody's DNA.
Frighteningly, that's been suggested in some law enforcement
circles. But we don't have everybody's DNA on file somewhere that we
can use to compare it to. So they pick people. And do they pick
people at random? Absolutely not. The FBI Caucasian data base is
made up of 200 white FBI agents. From that they extrapolate to
every Caucasian in the world. Statisticians say they do this -- we
can do statistics -- we can do anything with statistics. So in order
to put any meaning on this, we use this formula, and I'm not going
to go into anymore detail about this, where she -- they start
multiplying numbers together and wind up with these horrendous
numbers like 1 in 150 million or trillion, or whatever. All that
means is that they plug these numbers into a formula, and they've
come up with what they consider to be an estimate of how rare
something is. And do you have the data base slide, please.
(Document displayed on Elmo.)
MR. BLASIER: I asked Dr. Cotton about this, about the data bases
from which they find these huge numbers. I asked her on November 14,
okay.
(Mr. Blasier read a portion of the transcript of Dr. Robin Cotton's
civil trial testimony.) Doctor, now for Item No. 12 -- now,
remember Diagram 12 is the blood from the foyer where you gave us a
number 1, 1 in 1.2 billion, was that the African American data base,
or do you know?
MR. BLASIER: And she said: I don't believe so. Would you like me to
just pull the report? Sure. No, it's not.
MR. BLASIER: So I said okay, for African persons -- and again the
reason why they have to do different races is because people are
different. We aren't the same. You can't take 200 of us and
extrapolate to the whole world. Try to do it. But they know they can
prove very easily that there's so much difference between races that
they have to do each race separately. I asked her:
(Mr. Blasier read a portion of the transcript of Dr. Robin Cotton's
civil trial testimony.) For the African persons, what's the
frequency of No. 12? 1 in 170 million.
MR. BLASIER: And then I asked her:
(Mr. Blasier read a portion of the transcript of Dr. Robin Cotton's
civil trial testimony.) So that figure of 1 in 170 million is based
on -- on how many people that you tested?
A. About 200.
Q. 200?
A. Yes.
MR. BLASIER: Now, I asked her about -- they did a five-probe match.
That means that they looked at five different sections of the DNA
for Item No. 12 I said, how many people did you look at to come up
with the number 1 in 170 million? How many people did you examine
all five of the same probes for? In other words, examine the same
parts of the DNA as your evidence and your suspect here. And it is
two people. Two people. This is statistics. Okay. Now, let me make
another point here about concordance. Mr. Petrocelli talked to you
about how all the labs came in and said, gee, we all got the same
results and that's wonderful and that means we all did everything
right and it's okay. But there was -- going through the testimony,
you have to be careful about some of the things that are said. Put
up the amount of DNA found on Bundy drop 47 slide. Remember Bundy
drop 47? It's one of the Bundy drops. And I asked Dr. Cotton about
that. One of the things that they do with DNA during the testing
process is what's called a slot blot analysis. You don't have to
understand what that is. Basically all it is is a way of measuring,
do we have any good human DNA here or not, is this going to be
useful for us? It's kind of a way of giving you an advance look
before you do all the rest of the testing so you don't have to waste
time. I asked her about number 47.
(Reading:) "
Q. And you do that by a -- you do that by means of a test called a
slot blot? "
A. That's right. "
Q. We don't have to understand how that works. That's just a way of
measuring quantities, correct? "
A. That's a way of -- "
Q. Estimate. "
A. -- estimating how much DNA you have present." Then I asked her:
And you did that for item 47, which was the first Bundy drop, and
you didn't find any human DNA, did you? "
(Pause for the witness to review documents.) "
A. You just asked me about 47? "Correct. "That's right, we did not.
On that slot blot test, we're not detecting any DNA at all." Did she
tell you that on direct? Did she tell that you on direct? No. Gary
Sims -- look at the bottom. Gary Sims testified about the same item.
"What's the frequency, Mr. Sims, in 47? You say you got the same
results as Cellmark got. "Frequency's the same. It's 1 in 240,000 to
1 in 2.2 million." Now, that's not the same. That's not the same.
I'm going to tell you what they will tell you. They'll tell you --
they'll come back and they'll say, yeah, you know what happened here
is our slot blot, we didn't get any, we went ahead and did a test
on another part of it and we got a test result. But they don't tell
you that part. They don't tell you the part that doesn't work. It
has to be dug out of thousands and thousands of pages. That's an
indication of how much you can trust this stuff when it's told to
you the way it is. Now, Dr. Popovich was called as their expert to
talk about the same things that Dr. Gerdes talked about. And my
colleague, young colleague, Phil Baker, did a fine job in
cross-examining Dr. Popovich. I want to go over some of his
testimony and just make some points to you. Put on the first slide,
page 93.
(Slide displayed on Elmo.)
MR. BLASIER: We're talking about 117, which is the back gate stain.
We'll talk about that in more detail in a minute. But he was asked
about 117 and he was asked if he knew that the crime scene had been
washed down after June 13 and before 117 was collected on July 3,
three weeks later. And he said at the very bottom -- and he
admitted, no, he didn't know that. "Again, that's not something that
was fundamental to my part of this investigation." Well, I
understood that his purpose was to come here and tell you that
this evidence was hunky-dory. I like hunky-dory. It's much better
than match, consistent with. Mr. Baker used it. Makes sense to me.
That was Dr. Popovich's purpose in coming here, was to tell you that
all this evidence is okay. He doesn't know the fact that that area
had been washed down. Next slide.
(Document is displayed on Elmo.)
MR. BLASIER: Dr. Popovich.
(Reading:) "
Q. Now, did the plaintiff show you the demonstration that Andrea
Mazzola did of her best collection technique? "
A. I've never seen any collection techniques of Andrea Mazzola. "
Q. They never showed you -- they never showed you the videotape that
Andrea Mazzola presented at prosecution about what was her best
collection technique? "
A. I haven't seen that. I'm not -- I have never seen that, no."
Now, going down to the bottom finally, he was asked: "And do you --
you have no independent knowledge as you sit here today how Andrea
Mazzola collected the swatch at the crime scene, correct? "
A. Personal knowledge? "
Q. Yeah. "
A. Well, I read the transcript." Now, he's the one that's here to
tell you that this was done properly. And they don't show him the
Mazzola tape. The Mazzola tape, this is LAPD at their supposed best.
This is LAPD showing you how they properly collect DNA evidence. Do
you remember Andrea Mazzola with her knee on the ground and her hand
on the ground and transferring one thing from here to there and --
good heavens. Good heavens. That's not good collection technique.
That's terrible. And allows for cross-contamination. It's terrible.
Why wasn't he shown that? Maybe his opinion would have been affected
by it. Maybe. And another curious point, Los Angeles Police
Department -- actually, the taxpayers paid him $30,000, the D.A.'s office,
in the criminal case, to assist them on DNA.
Why didn't he know about this demonstration tape that they made?
Why doesn't he know about it if he's their expert, if he's the one
that's coming here to tell you whether they did it right or not?
Maybe he did know about it and is too ashamed of how it came out to
admit it. I don't know. You can draw your own inferences. Now, he
was asked about contamination, too, and he acknowledged that he has
observed reagent contamination at the LAPD crime lab. "
Q. You have never said to anyone that you were concerned about
reagents contamination at the LAPD crime lab? "
A. Have I observed reagents contamination? "
Q. At the LAPD crime lab? "
A. I have." Now, let's go to the next one, talking about item 52. Do
we have the chart on 52 back there? Remember -- item 52 is the Bundy
drop, the last one out in the driveway that's almost up against the
wall or the side of the driveway.
MR. LEONARD: Is that it?
MR. BLASIER: Yeah.
(Board entitled "Bundy Blood Drop LAPD Item 52 DOJ Typing is
displayed.)
MR. BLASIER: Now, remember they were -- they ran a test on item 52
LAPD and they got a dot show up -- and again, this is the PCR kind
of test and I'm not going to go through explaining what PCR is, you
know what that involves, technique, very, very small amounts of DNA
and amplifying it. And they get a sign of something that's not
supposed to be there. A 1.3 dot. They know what that -- I mean,
that's inconsistent with their theory. Now, there's another theory,
and that is that that 1.3 is a residual of the perpetrator's blood,
because the way the blood was collected at Bundy, it was allowed --
it was put in plastic, it was put in the back of the crime scene
truck in the heat of the day all day long, it was allowed to cook
and incubate and degrade. So one argument is that you're seeing a
trace of what was -- what started out in those Bundy drops. But in
any event, he says, you know, they did exactly what one would do in
a situation where there was a question about the validity of this
particular piece of evidence. They repeated it. And they got the
result at the bottom. Well, let's look at the bottom. It's the same.
They still get a dot there. He's right about repeating. But this
doesn't solve anything. He's still got the dot there. This is how
they manipulate that stuff to try and convince you that it has more
value than it really does. Can you bring out 30 and 31? Leave that
one out, too. Actually, let's go to the next slide, Phil. Dr.
Popovich admitted that he had never -- he wasn't aware of anything
about the EDTA issue, which is perhaps the most important issue in
the case, that he wasn't told anything about that. He's here to tell
you the evidence is okay, but he wasn't even told about that issue.
Or at least didn't discuss it anyway or misstate that. Basically,
the opinion is worthless when he's not given all the information,
doesn't have all the information or doesn't consider it. Now, Dr.
Popovich -- do you remember item 30 and 31 and the quality control
strip of the positive control, they're all showing dots that aren't
supposed to be there if the tests were done properly. But do they
do those over? No. No. They don't do those over. Those are good
enough for them. Now -- next slide about reference point. Now, you
got to understand from being around this long now how important the
reference blood is. It's the key to the whole case. The blood from
the victim and the blood from the suspect, you got to keep those
things apart. If the blood from the reference vial contaminates
evidence, then it's worthless. Colin Yamauchi admitted that he
processed the glove right after he opened Mr. Simpson's reference
blood and made some -- what do you call the -- a Fitzco card of it
and got on the chemwipe with the chemwipe down on the -- on the
table. Right after that, he did the glove. Now, Mr. Popovich was
asked about that, and he said: "It's my understanding from personal
conversations with Colin Yamauchi and from his transcript that he
did not work with a reference vial of blood at the same place that
he worked with the samples on June 14." But then at the bottom,
let's see what Colin Yamauchi says about that on November 18.
(Reading:) "
Q. Now, after -- the first thing you did after you opened Mr.
Simpson's reference vial and started processing that, was process
the Rockingham glove, correct? "Yes." Finally, Dr. Popovich admits
again, it's a subjective science, true? It can be, yes. A subjective
science in the forensic community is a bad one. You have different
experts look at the same data and come up with different
conclusions. That's not good. If the operator who was doing the test
can manipulate the results by changing the development length, for
instance, let's leave it in there a little longer, maybe we'll see
some more dots, or let's leave it in there shorter and maybe we
won't see some dots where some contamination might be there, when
the operator can control the outcome and knows what the outcome is
supposed to be, that's bad. Okay. Reference blood. Blood board.
MR. LEONARD: Do you need this?
MR. BLASIER: I'm going to talk about that, yeah, next. One of the
most important aspects of this case is the analysis of the reference
blood. And again, that's the blood taken from both victims at
autopsy and from Mr. Simpson at the jail on the 13th. All three
samples of which passed through Phil Vannatter's hands. We'll talk
about that.
(Board entitled "Testing Results" is displayed.)
MR. BLASIER: Let's do a careful analysis of the reference samples.
How did they do with those? That's the best DNA in the case. It's
the highest quality. They got a lot of it. They ought to be able to
do that properly. Well, if you look at the typing sheets, there is
evidence of contamination from -- or cross-contamination. By that I
mean evidence consistent with Mr. Simpson's known blood and Nicole
Brown Simpson's blood and Ronald Goldman's blood, and it shows up in
typing sheets for all three labs, LAPD. You can see that Nicole
Brown Simpson, there's an end of a 1.2 allele, which of these three
people could only come from Mr. Simpson. With Mr. Goldman there's
also a possibility of a 1.2 and a very faint 1.1 that could only
have come from Mr. Simpson. Cellmark, in the polymarker system, a
faint B that could only come, in this case, from Mr. Simpson of the
three people. In Nicole Brown Simpson's blood, in Ronald Goldman's
blood, we see that one came out okay. In the DOJ typing sheets for
Nicole Brown Simpson, again we see a trace of a 1.2 which could only
have come from Mr. Simpson, and they share a 1.1 so that's okay. The
1.2 you've got a faint trace of a 1.3. What do they say about this?
They say, well, these are probably just artifacts, these are just
probably artifacts, we're not going to consider them real. You're
entitled to infer from this that there is contamination in this
system, that they have allowed Mr. Simpson's blood to get in places
it's not supposed to be for these tests to have any integrity at
all. Next we get to Bruce Weir. Do you have Bruce Weir's chart?
Remember him? Our statistician. He's the one that's going to tell us
these mixtures -- he's the one that's going to tell us, you know,
that -- how do you measure the significance of these mixtures. The
entire cross-examination was spent with him trying to explain all of
the errors that he's made in the criminal trial, and some of them,
you know, I have no idea where that number came from. Good heavens,
folks. That's what we did with Dr. Weir. Everything on there, he
made mistakes over and over and over again, and we caught him at it
and we caught him at it. And that's an indication of the value of
this evidence. One thing that they don't like to talk about is error
rates. 'Cause Dr. Gerdes told you, I think Dr. Gerdes, the error
rates in clinical labs are about one percent. That is, humans make
mistakes about one every hundred times. But that notion is more
important than these huge numbers, 1 and 2 trillion, or whatever.
How good a lab is in terms of how many errors they make is more
important when you're talking about numbers this big. Okay. Let's
talk about the Bronco.
MR. LEONARD: Shall I take this down?
MR. BLASIER: Yeah, you can take that in the back. And again the
Bronco these samples and bring the Bronco chart out. Incidentally,
you remember the mark on the carpeting in the Bronco? Again, another
mistake by Mr. Petrocelli yesterday. Bodziak did not testify that
he, in his opinion, that was a Bruno Magli shoe print in the Bronco;
he said he couldn't say. That's my recollection. PCR testing, which
is really what was done mostly in this occasion, is done where you
have very, very small amounts of blood -- and again, we're talking
about from the Bronco, here, the amount of blood. We've got this big
chart; we're not talking about very much blood. You can go over the
prints yourself. Okay. Do we have there -- well, maybe I don't need
it. All right. The Bronco, which you know, they say, gee, we
couldn't have gotten in; the Bronco was locked. That whole idea
about the Bronco being parked askew, when you see the pictures,
that's not part of an excuse. That Bronco's been moved. Mr. Baker
talked more about that. I won't go into that. But let's talk about
the inside of the Bronco. Again, we're talking about PCR testing.
And this is the first run-through, on June 14, at least the top
picture is, and you can tell by the lower numbers. Did they find any
results indicative of either victim being in the car? They say
yes. But let's look at that. Let's look at that. Let's look here to
see whether they're telling the truth, or whether there is question
about that. First of all, we have stains, stain 30 and 31. They say,
ah, we've got evidence there of blood from -- I believe, Mr.
Goldman. Let's put that 29, 30, chart up. Put it on top, or maybe
over here in front of the TV.
MR. LEONARD: Am I going to get overtime for this?
(Indicating to display of exhibits.)
(Laughter.)
MR. LEONARD: Your Honor, I'm sorry to be blocking.
THE COURT: Not at
all.
MR. BLASIER: 30 and 31, they claim that there are four stains in the
Bronco that were collected on the 14th that -- that show some
indication of blood consistent with the victims. 30, 31, 29, and 33,
are the carpeting. First of all, let's talk about 33, the carpeting.
You look at the testimony, 33. They didn't find any type in 33 --
that was the carpet sample that Collin Yamauchi took on the 14th --
they didn't find any blood type on that sample. They can't say that
this came from the victim. 30 and 31, we showed how the controls
didn't work on this test. The controls didn't work. You can see dots
on there that aren't supposed to be there. That aren't supposed to
be there. Yet, with the great subjectivity that's involved in this
stuff allows them to say, well, for 31, we've got to get one of the
victims in the car here. So that 1.3 dot, that very faint one,
that's how they claim they get Ron Goldman in the car. Okay. That's
how they claim. We're going to call this one real. We like this one;
this helps our case. This is real. If it hurts the case, it's not
real; it must have some sort of an artifact. So 30 and 31 have
failed, because the controls also did not -- they came up with
alleles that you're not supposed to see the dots lit up. That,
you're not supposed to see. The proper thing to do is to do it over.
They didn't. This is not a good test. They knew that. They knew that
after they got these preliminary results. They knew that, and they
knew that we knew it. The only remaining stain that they claim might
have come from a victim is number 29, which is on the steering
wheel.
MR. LEONARD: Do you still need this?
MR. BLASIER: You can put that one down.
(Indicating to board entitled Bronco Console Stains.)
MR. BLASIER: I will not finish by lunch. Okay. So we have item
number 29, which is, again, the only remaining one that they claim
belongs to a victim. By the way, as -- as far as Mr. Simpson's blood
being in his own car -- let me read you part of the transcript.
(Reading:)
Q. First of all, Doctor, would you find it surprising if there was
some DNA that shows up, generally, on the steering wheel in an
automobile?
A. No, I wouldn't be surprised to find that.
Q. Because someone else could have had a cut on their hand or be
perspiring and left DNA at some other time?
A. Sure. Want to know where that came from? Put it up, Phil, the
Robin Cotton slide.
(Mr. P. Baker complies.)
MR. BLASIER: Remember, 29 is the one that had a 4 allele -- no, but
-- no -- 1.3. Ronald Goldman was a 4, 1.3, 4. They should -- they
had a 4 show up. The testimony I just read to you came from Robin
Cotton. Of course, you can find the owner of a car, DNA in their car
from perspiring or had a cut on their hand. Interesting testimony
from their own experts. So, 29, how are they going to deal with 29?
They've got the 4 allele, but if they've got no 1.3, though, do they
-- how do they decide that this one is going to fit their scheme?
And how can we get this consistent with Ronald Goldman? Well, we'll
go to the bottom of the page here. Oh, what Dr. Cotton does, she
says -- and I'm asking her about this -- hey, there, that's a 4 that
you can see; it's very faint; it's below -- and this is her answer
-- it's below the control dot. That means there may be another
allele that you can't see. And that other allele that you can't see,
can't be any other allele than that tests for. Could be a 1.1, a
1.2, so on and so on and so on. And it could be a 1.3. You know what
she's telling you there? We'll call it, even if we don't see it,
because it fits our theory. We're going to say there's a dot there,
even though we admit there's no dot there; it probably disappeared.
But we're going to call it anyway, because it's consistent with our
theory. Well, they know that that's not going to wash if that does
not put any victim's blood in the car as of June 14. And we know
from what happened over the summer, that that car was not secure,
that people were in it, that they had to do an investigation.
Mulldorfer had to do an investigation about receipts being taken out
of it. It had no security, or certainly ineffective security -- and
we have a picture of it on August 10. Do we have that handy, Phil,
or am I going too fast for you?
(Photograph displayed.)
MR. BLASIER: There's no blood on the console, where they later find
more blood. More blood. And it's my understanding that Greg
Matheson came in here and admitted there's no blood there, where we
later found it.
MR. PETROCELLI: Misstates his testimony. Maybe he ought to point
that out at side bar, Your Honor.
MR. BLASIER: It's my understanding -- well, you look at the picture.
You're the judges of the facts. No blood there. So what do we have?
We have an August 29 I believe, a media show. We invite Time-Life
Magazine, as I recall --
MR. LAMBERT: None of this is in evidence.
THE COURT: Sustained.
MR. BLASIER: Anyway, on August 29, they go to the Bronco; and lo and
behold, we find more blood. We find 303, 304, and 305. Mazzola and
Fung never told anybody they left blood in that car. They're
supposed to collect all of it. This didn't collect all of it, the
blood. He didn't collect all of it. The blood that they got in
August wasn't there in June. So now we have 303, 304, 305, which
they mixed together and do an RFLP test. And now we have the
victims. I submit to you that this evidence is not worthy of belief,
given the history of this Bronco. And why did they wait over two
months? Why do they wait until August 29 to search for a second
time? Oh, and fine; they take another carpet sample. That's 293.
Remember? Greg Matheson takes that on September 1, I believe. And
now the carpet fiber tests consistent with Nicole Brown Simpson. You
had to be suspicious of evidence that doesn't turn up until this
late and is, all of a sudden, much better than what they started
with. You should not accept that. You should not accept that. Okay.
Let's talk about Mr. Rokahr. You can take that down
(indicating to board entitled Bronco Evidence). Do we have the
Fuhrman pointing picture? You recall there was testimony from the
detectives that this picture of Detective Mark Fuhrman pointing at
the Bundy glove was taken, I believe between 7:00 and 7:30 in the
morning, in daylight, after he had found the Rockingham glove.
That's what the police told you. And it was completely light. We had
already seen the glove at Rockingham. So send Fuhrman back to look
at the glove at Bundy, see if it's the same. And this picture,
supposedly, according to what they tried to sell, was taken after
the Rockingham glove had been found. Why would they lie about
that? I mean, Rokahr is the photographer. I forget how many years
experience. He testified by way of deposition that he's a
professional photographer. He was there. That picture was taken in
the middle of the night, or about, as I recall, 4 o'clock a.m. It
was not daylight. It was dark. It was nighttime. It was before these
detectives abandoned Bundy and went to Rockingham. Why? Why would
they take that picture? Why not take a picture of the hat? Why not
take a picture of the keys? Why not take a picture of the pager? Why
the glove? And why lie about it? Why lie about it? I submit to you
that you're entitled to infer from that, that that is significant
evidence with respect to the credibility of the Rockingham glove, if
he takes this picture beforehand, what's going on? Why are they
lying to us about this? Okay. Let's talk for a minute about Bundy
drops. Again, we've already mentioned Andrea Mazzola's collection
techniques. Mr. Petrocelli kept saying that, hey, it couldn't have
-- they couldn't have planted the Bundy drops because Mr. Simpson
hadn't given his blood when those were discovered. Well, that's
certainly true; they certainly -- that's true. But he's missing the

swatches? Mazzola and Fung are at the scene. They collect their
swatches, like they tried to demonstrate in their video, probably as
sloppily, if not more. They didn't count the swatches. These
swatches all look alike. They have variations of shades. It's not
the sort of thing that you're going to be able to take five swatches
an hour later, look at them and tell you they're the same five
swatches. These things are indistinguishable. There's no way to tell
them apart, unless you take a photograph or draw a diagram, but none
of that happened. So we have Fung and Mazzola collecting swatches
from the Bundy drops and collecting these substrate controls from
the -- from, supposedly, near the Bundy drops. So -- you saw how
well Andrea Mazzola checked substrate controls in her demonstration
tape. You saw her putting the water, and went right into the blood
stain. So, anyway, we have -- we have these now put in the
envelopes, into the plastic envelopes, put in the crime-scene
truck, kept there, and then take them to the lab that night. And
these swatches -- again, no idea how many of them for each drop, no
idea what they look like in terms of the size or shape of each
swatch. Nothing. So they then take the swatches out of the bindles
-- I'm sorry, out of the plastic bags, to dry overnight, because
they've got to dry this stuff in order to test it. It will continue
to degrade and ruin if you keep it wet. So they put in the drying
cabinets overnight. And, incidentally, this is the same room where
Mr. Simpson's blood is sitting in a trash bag all night. They put it
in this unlocked cabinet at night to dry. And by all information
that we have, overnight should be plenty of time for those swatches
to dry. The next morning -- again, they open them up the next
morning, and they're processed and they're put into bindles, and
they're supposed to go for testing at that point. Now, what do we
know about this? We know that Andrea Mazzola testified, under oath,
in August of 1994, that she put her initials on the bindles. And
again, this is in the morning, now, when the swatches are dry.
Again, they still haven't counted them. They still have not counted
them. They have no idea whether these are the same swatches that
they put in there the night before. They have no way of knowing.
They have no way of knowing whether those are the same swatches. And
they're all dry now, supposedly. They're put in bindles, and she
initials them, again, by way of identifying, a way of at least
giving some sort of identification to these bindles, and then
they're sent off for testing later. And what happens? The bindles
that get tested later don't have her initials on them. That's an
indication that they aren't the same bindles. You can infer from
that, that they are different swatches. And we will see, when we
talk about Mr. Simpson's missing blood, after lunch, that there was
plenty of his blood available to make those swatches for anyone who
wanted to do so. And it would only take one person. What else do we
see? We see in bindle number 47, when Dr. Lee examines it, evidence
of what he called a wet transfer. You open up the bindle and you see
that, hey, these swatches that are in here now, or ones that were
in here at some point, were wet -- were wet, because they've left
their mark. And I assume you saw Dr. Lee talk about this and showed
it on the chart, that there's evidence that swatches were put in
bindles, at least bindle 47, when they were wet. And that's not
consistent with any of Andrea Mazzola's testimony about how she did
this. That's consistent with somebody changing their swatches, but
putting them in the bindle while they're wet. And you can infer from
that, that those swatches that are ultimately tested later on, are
not the Bundy drops, are not what was picked up off of the ground.
Those are clues. That's information that we presented to you that
allows you to make that inference about that piece of evidence. As
Dr. Lee said, there's something wrong; there's something wrong with
this evidence. Look at the amounts of the DNA and the Bundy drops.
Very, very small. Very, very small. And after lunch, we'll talk
about 117, and we'll start comparing that. And, hopefully, we'll
wrap everything up pretty soon after lunch. Can we break now, Your
Honor?
THE COURT: Okay. 1:30, ladies and gentlemen. Don't talk
about the case. Don't form or express any opinions.
(At 11:55 a.m., a luncheon recess was taken until 1:30 p.m. of the
same day.)
SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA; THURSDAY, JANUARY 23, 1997
1:30 PM DEPARTMENT NO. WEQ HON. HIROSHI FUJISAKI, JUDGE

APPEARANCES:

(REGINA D. CHAVEZ, OFFICIAL REPORTER)
(Jurors resume their respective seats.)
THE COURT: You may resume.
MR. BLASIER: Thank you, Your Honor. Good afternoon, folks.
JURORS: Good afternoon.
MR. BLASIER: I trust you all had a good lunch.
JURORS: Yeah.
MR. BLASIER: The next thing I want to talk about is I just have a
few more topics that I want to ask you to pay an extra close
attention to because these are important topics. And the first one
that we're going to talk about deals with the missing blood issue.
As you know, it's our contention that blood disappeared from Mr.
Simpson's reference vial. And let me go through the chronology of
how that could have occurred. We start out with Mr. Simpson
voluntarily, of course, offering to give blood and giving blood at
the jail to Nurse Thano Peratis. I have checked his testimony. You
remember Nurse Peratis? He came in here with his syringes to show
you how he draws blood, and supposedly how he did it in this case.
But as you saw from cross-examination or from -- from his
examination, that's not the way he originally described it. The way
he originally described it under oath was different. And let's go
through that. This blood supposedly was taken on the afternoon of
the 13th, I believe at 2:30 or perhaps 3:30. Present were Vannatter
and Lange and OJ Simpson, and Thano Peratis, as I recall. There was
a suggestion yesterday that Mr. Simpson was hiding all these cuts on
his hand when he was looked at by all of these people. That's why
they weren't seen. I think that's ludicrous. In any event, let's go
to Thano Peratis at the Grand Jury. The Grand Jury was held right
after the murders. I think the exact date is in late June, or June
-- it's the week after the murders. And he testified -- he
acknowledged this at page 370. You have that, Phil? Start right here
on this one.
MR. P. BAKER: I got it.
MR. BLASIER: You got it?
MR. P. BAKER: Yep.
MR. BLASIER: Okay. Grand Jury.
(Mr. Blasier read a portion of the transcript of Thano Peratis'
Grand Jury testimony.)
Q. Can you describe for us what is the method by which you removed
blood from Mr. Simpson.
A. I put a tourniquet on his arm, cleaned the site with Aqueous
Zephrin, and put a 10 cc syringe with about a 20 cc needle, in the
arm and I withdrew about 8 cc's of blood. Then I put the blood into
a test tube that had a preservative called EDTA, and then handed it
to the officer -- to the detective, and then put a dressing on him,
meaning Mr. Simpson.
MR. BLASIER: That's his first assertion under oath of how much blood
that he drew from Mr. Simpson Then we go to the preliminary hearing
that occurred on July 7, 1994, Again, this was after the Grand Jury
hearing, less than about three weeks after the murder.
(Mr. Blasier read a portion of the transcript of Thano Peratis'
preliminary hearing testimony.)
Q. How much blood did you withdraw from Mr. Simpson?
A. Approximately 8 cc's.
MR. BLASIER: Okay. He's consistent. He's saying the same thing.
(Mr. Blasier read a portion of the transcript of Thano Peratis's
preliminary hearing testimony.)
Q. When you say approximately, you did not measure the amount?
A. Well, it could have been 7.9 or it could have been 8.1. I just
looked at the syringe and it looked at about 8 cc's. I withdrew the
needle from his arm.
MR. BLASIER: And so here -- here is a second time where he's giving
you an even more specific amount. And this is a trained nurse. This
man's been a nurse for, I think he said 40 years, if I recall
correctly. He knows quantity. He knows amounts. We have a syringe.
Do you have that back there?
MR. P. BAKER: Yeah.
MR. BLASIER: Just put the syringe on the Elmo.
(Syringe displayed on Elmo.)
MR. BLASIER: And you can see the calibrations on this thing. It's
easy. It's absolutely easy to see how much is in there. And he's a
nurse. He knows that. So, going back to the transcript: He says I
looked at the syringe and it looked at about 8 cc's. Could have been
7.9, could have been 8.1. Then we go to the next page, and he was
asked:
(Mr. Blasier read a portion of the transcript of Thano Peratis's
preliminary hearing testimony.) Did you record the amount of blood
you took? No. It's routinely, that's about the amount I usually
withdraw.
MR. BLASIER: And then I asked a question about whether he does this
on a regular basis. And he says, yes.
(Mr. Blasier read a portion of the transcript of Thano Peratis's
preliminary hearing testimony.) But do you take blood on a regular
basis?
A. Yes. And you take the same amount of blood?
A. Yes.
MR. BLASIER: All right. Now we come to the trial. Now, it's December
10 of 1996. A lot has happened obviously. Mr. Peratis acknowledges
-- well, we won't go -- we'll go into the testimony about what he
says about why he has changed his story. Again, this is another
witness -- this a real important law enforcement officer, a person
who starts out with testimony one way and then when it becomes
apparent that it hurts the police case against Mr. Simpson, changes
it. Changes it. Okay. So we're at the trial now, and he is asked at
page 134:
(Mr. Blasier read a portion of the transcript of Thano Peratis's
criminal trial testimony.) Now, when you drew Mr. Simpson's blood on
the 13th, isn't it accurate that you drew between 7.9 and 8.1 cc's
of blood?
A. At the time I drew the blood, that's what I thought I had drawn.
Q. And that was the state of your recollection when you testified
under oath about three weeks after drawing Mr. Simpson's blood,
correct?
A. At that time.
MR. BLASIER: So he's still acknowledging that his -- his best
recollection right after this happened is 8 cc's. Then we go to page
137. At the bottom:
(Mr. Blasier read a portion of the transcript of Thano Peratis's
criminal trial testimony.)
Q. All right. Now, at some point after your sworn testimony at the
Grand Jury and the preliminary hearing, you became aware of an issue
with respect to whether blood was missing from that vial, did you
not?
A. Yes.
Q. And that was about the time of the opening argument in the
criminal case, was it not?
A. Yes.
Q. And you found out that Mr. Cochran had stated in his opening
statement that there was about 1.50 to 2 cc's of blood missing from
Mr. Simpson's reference vial, correct?
A. Yes.
MR. BLASIER: Now, we'll get to where that those numbers came from in
a second, but here is Thano Peratis saying, my gosh, I hear from the
opening statements that there's blood missing. So what does he do?
(Mr. Blasier read a portion of the transcript of Thano Peratis's
criminal trial testimony.)
Q. After you found out that that was an important issue, you changed
your story, didn't you?
A. When I found out I was wrong I changed my story.
MR. BLASIER: Page 140.
(Mr. Blasier read a portion of the transcript of Thano Peratis's
criminal trial testimony.) So prior to learning from Mr. Cochran's
opening statement, you didn't tell anybody that you'd made a
mistake, did you? No. I didn't know I'd made a mistake.
MR. BLASIER: Now, think this through, folks. What he's saying is Mr.
Cochran told me I made a mistake. That's not what Mr. Cochran said.
Mr. Cochran said there's blood missing. And he's the first guy with
the blood. So he, an older gentleman, wonders, oh, my goodness, is
this my fault? Is the trial of the century going to be lost because
of little old me? So he says, well, I must have made a mistake. So
what did he do -- and he acknowledges, by the way, that he wasn't
even called by the prosecution in the criminal case. Now, we have
another event that happens with Mr. Peratis. He's okay now, but he
had a heart attack.
MR. PETROCELLI: Your Honor, I think that was a misstatement, called
by the prosecution. It's irrelevant. I ask that it be stricken.
THE
COURT: It's stricken.
MR. BLASIER: He has a heart attack. And he has the heart attack
sometime after he's testified about how much blood he drew several
times at the Grand Jury and at the preliminary hearing. And he
acknowledges that after having his heart attack, and this is fairly
common knowledge, I think, that heart attacks cause memory loss. You
have a heart attack -- people lose -- it affects people's memory and
he admits this, and he says on page 141, line 5:
(Mr. Blasier read a portion of the transcript of Thano Peratis's
civil trial testimony.)
Q. Now, after your heart attack, in June of '95 --
MR. BLASIER: Now, this is a year after he's drawn this blood.
(Mr. Blasier read a portion of the transcript of Thano Peratis's
civil trial testimony.) You experienced problems with memory loss,
didn't you?
A. Yes.
MR. BLASIER: Then he says, well, I remember drawing the blood,
that's the 8 cc's I know I was wrong I can't say that. I mean,
you've got me all confused now. You folks have to decide what is the
accurate information that you've gotten here. How much blood was
drawn? Are you just going to say, well, we'll let him change his
story? He's testified under oath a few times, but that's okay. He
must have made a mistake, Johnny Cochran told him he made a mistake.
I submit to you that that is not a reasonable interpretation of that
set of circumstances. So as of now, when he comes in here to you two
and a half years later, he tells you that he has a clear
recollection. Move to the bottom of that page, please, Phil. He
testified he remembers specifically the blood stopped coming into
the syringe, because it hit the vein. He recollects now that he
never looked at the syringe. He remembers that specifically. And
what he does is he describes this experiment that he did where he
was able to recreate a syringe which had the same amount of blood as
that drawn from Mr. Simpson's blood. And wouldn't you know, he
does his experiment and he says, well, this looks about as much as I
drew two and a half years ago with Mr. Simpson. Let's go measure it.
How much do you think he comes up with? One and a half cc's less.
No. Two, actually. He says six to six and a half, as I recall his
testimony. So he comes up with exactly the amount missing. Exactly
the amount that Mr. Cochran has told him is missing. Or at least
that the defense alleges is missing. So what do we have now? We have
this blood vial that he has taken from Mr. Simpson and it's put in
an envelope -- and, Phil, do you have a picture of the envelope up
there for me?
(Evidence envelope displayed.)
MR. BLASIER: Now, we know right away that they have not followed the
proper procedure at all in processing this. Blood is supposed to be
frozen. He told you that. Or refrigerated, excuse me. They, the
LAPD, have their envelope that tells them how they're supposed to
do this. And the reason they have these kinds of procedures are to
protect the integrity of the evidence. That's the reason why they
have all these procedures. So we have the officer requesting
withdrawal of the blood -- in the middle, Phil. Can you move to the
middle and can you zoom in a little bit.
(Elmo is adjusted.) First of all, it's supposed to completely fill
the vial that's -- the officer supposed to tell the nurse completely
fill the vial in your presence then initial complete below. And
finally when the affidavit is completed, sign below it as a
witnessing officer and seal the vial in this envelope. That's to
protect the integrity of the evidence. And you've seen some of the
evidence in this case brought in, and you see the tape around it,
and you see the seals, and the different colors of seals. These are
all things that are designed to protect the integrity of the
evidence. Why didn't they do it with this blood? That envelope was
left open. It was given to Detective Vannatter, who at that point
was two miles, as I recall, from the crime lab where he could have
turned it in; Parker Center, where he could have turned it in. I
think he's right at Parker Center or the jail's right in that
general area there. Where it could have easily been turned in and
booked and protected, protected from breakage, protected from
whatever. But what does he do with it? He decides let's take it to
the crime scene. And by the way, we also, if we look further at the
envelope, we see that Thano Peratis' name is there. And is dated
5/19/94. That's a month before this blood is drawn. Maybe he
miswrote the date. That's certainly possible. But maybe this
envelope was presigned or maybe it's not the envelope that was used.
In any event, this open envelope now is in Phil Vannatter's hands on
the way back to Rockingham. Actually, I think he testified that it
sat on his desk for a little while he had some coffee. I believe he
acknowledged that he had never taken blood back to a crime scene
before. He admitted it could have been -- it could have been booked
right there at Parker Center. Absolutely no reason in logic to take
that blood to Rockingham. And, of course, the envelope is unsealed
so if there's anything that happens to be removed from that vial,
one and a half cc's, for instance, who's going to know? They haven't
protected the integrity of this evidence. There's no -- the
envelope's not sealed. No way to tell. And, of course -- again, as I
mentioned before, what we asked these people about, do you keep
track of how much blood you collect. Of course not. As if that's not
important. Well, it's obviously important. Now, how do we know --
how do we get from what I've talked about to 1.5 cc's of blood
missing? It's really quite easy. Oh, let me -- before we get to the
calculation. Remember what happened, supposedly, at Rockingham with
this blood? Andrea Mazzola doesn't see anything. She takes a little
nap. As I recall, Fung and Vannatter are standing in the foyer area,
interestingly enough, right in the area where there were blood drops
later found by Dr. Lee and it's handed to Fung, supposedly. Fung
takes it, and again there's -- plenty of time now has passed from
which blood could have been taken out of that. No question about
that. Vannatter had his cup of coffee or whatever he did. But now
we have the blood at Rockingham. And what does Fung claim he does
with it? He puts it in a trash bag. A trash bag. Correct procedure?
Does this make any sense to you folks? He puts it in a trash bag and
gives it to Mazzola who doesn't know what's in it. Now, these are
folks who are trying to sell you on the idea that they did
everything right here. That everything was done correctly and
properly, and you can trust all this evidence. Not when you look at
it carefully, you can't. So Fung supposedly takes it back in the
trash bag, back to the crime lab, leaves it on a table overnight in
the same room with the drying swatches. The next morning when he
starts looking in some of it this stuff, actually, they started
looking in stuff the night before, they number items sequentially or
they try to. Wouldn't you know that the blood vial was given the
number 18. Item No. 18. Why does that make any difference? Makes a
difference because Item 17 is a pair of tennis shoes that Mr.
Simpson gave to Detective Lange. Detective Lange took them for
evidence, took them home. Not sure why. But took them home
overnight and didn't bring them into the lab until the morning of
the next day, the 14th. So we have the sneakers coming in; they're
given Item 17. The blood is given Item 18. And it obviously, at this
point, appears that the blood came in at after the sneakers. Well,
now we look at the paperwork. Eventually, they noticed that, and
they changed the numbers, and that's the only real significant item
where they say, oh, we better change this. So they change Item 18
and now it's Item 17 because if they leave it as Item 18, it looks
like maybe it was kept overnight by Vannatter. Okay. Now, how do we
get to blood missing? Very easy. Greg Matheson came in here and told
you that, first of all, one and a half -- well, let's start with --
go ahead and put that chart up, Phil.
(Document displayed on Elmo.)
MR. BLASIER: We start with the 8 cc's that Thano Peratis has
testified under oath several times he withdrew. There's testimony
from business records from Los Angeles Police Department and Colin
Yamauchi that on the morning of the 14th, right before he does the
glove and the rest of the Bundy drops, by the way, he takes 1 cc of
blood to determine Mr. Simpson's blood type and that was put on a
little round card. It's called a Fitzco card. And they're very
precise about that. They know it's 1 cc. And that's in the records.
Then we have a record of the Los Angeles Police Department
Scientific Investigation Division from the toxicology department,
the toxicologist who took this and tested it, and Flaherty was her
name, and Greg Matheson acknowledged that the records show that on
June 20, when it was sent to toxicology, there was 5.5 cc's in the
vial. We started with 8. Yamauchi took out 1. That means there
should have been 7. But by June 20, according to toxicology, there
is 5.5 cc's. Now, they keep telling you that, yeah, we don't count
this stuff. Come on, you're being too hard on us. We don't keep
track of reference blood. Not that important. Of course it's
important. We don't count this stuff. Did you see him bring in the
toxicologist to say, hey, that 5.5 cc's, that's just an estimate
that I put down on my paperwork? No. You didn't hear -- you didn't
hear from that person. Because they know there was 5.5 cc's when
there was supposed to be 7. As early as June 20, that is missing.
1.5 cc's of blood, which contains approximately, by all of the
experts you've heard, 30,000 nanograms of DNA. 30,000.
And we're talking stains here of 1, 2 nanograms, 40
nanograms, 50 nanograms. We're talking tiny amounts. 30,000
nanograms goes a long, long way. Now, the next day -- well, let me
not get ahead of myself. We know that stain 117, which I'll get to
in a minute, has about 150 nanograms, which is, by the way, much,
much more than the Bundy drops. We'll talk about that in a second.
Now, we also have reference blood from both victims which is
collected at autopsy I believe on the 14th as I recall, 14th or
15th, and for some reason, Vannatter picks that up, too. He says I
want that blood, too. So he picks up that blood now. We have no way
of knowing how much blood is gone from that vial, if any. There's no
accountability at all here, folks. This is how you take the measure
of the value of this stuff. There's no accountability. There's no
accountability. And you know when they draw these diagrams, these
crime scene diagrams, they draw them down to the 10th of an inch,
14th of an inch, 32nd of an inch. All this time, when it comes to
the blood from the victims and the suspect in the case, in this
particular case of course, we don't keep track of that stuff. All
right. Now, we have missing blood. Could be as early as the
afternoon. Could be right after it was taken. Now, let's go to the
back gate. Can you bring the big chart with blood drops around.
MR. P. BAKER: Dan, it should be somewhere -- right there.
(Board entitled "Blood Drops at Bundy June 13, 1994.")
MR. BLASIER: Now, you recognize this as the diagram -- I think it
was put in by the plaintiffs I believe -- of the Bundy scene with
the Bundy drops identified by their position and by their photo I.D.
numbers. And of course this blood on the back gate, at this point,
becomes a huge issue. But on the 13th, we have several officers who
say, hey, I saw blood on the back gate, and one or two of them, I
think, even wrote it down in their reports. Terrazas says he saw
blood. Rossi said he saw blood. Phillips claims to have seen blood
but does not describe any blood being on the mesh of the gate. I
think Lange claims to see it, too. So the criminalists finally
arrive. Fung and Mazzola finally arrive, according to Lange, I
believe Lange testified that he said he told Fung, very important
blood in the back gate, better collect it. May be wrong on that. But
Dennis Fung, he's supposed to be -- he and Andrea Mazzola are
supposed to be in charge of processing this crime scene, of locating
the evidence and processing it and collecting it so that things can
be done to it, it can be analyzed. What does Dennis Fung tell you?
What did he tell you here in November of 1996 about the gate?
(Reading:) "
Q. How many times did you walk in and out of the back gate while you
were processing that scene? "
A. Several. "
Q. And is it your testimony that you never looked at it? "
A. It's my testimony that I don't remember seeing or having been --
I don't remember being told about the blood on the back gate on that
day and I don't remember seeing blood on the back gate that day." So
he doesn't see any blood, if he looks. How about Andrea Mazzola?
Move down a little bit. She says: "To the best of my recollection, I
don't recall even seeing a gate." This is the way the killer got
away, through the back gate. Through the back gate. That's where you
look first. But they don't look there, according to their testimony.
Now, another fact, when they put these photo I.D. numbers down,
they're going in sequence about how they collect this stuff, they
told you, and the first Bundy drop is number 112, I believe. Down in
the lower right-hand corner. The one near the -- closest to the
bodies. Still not real close to the bodies, but closest to the
bodies. And that's number 112. Then they go to 113, which is west
of 112. Then they go to 114, which is again west of 113. Then they
go to 115, which is right at -- almost right at the back gate. Very
close to the back gate. That's 115. That's the photo's I.D. number.
Now, what do they do now? What's 116? Remember when I showed you
that picture. Turns out the photo I.D. number 116 is a stain from
the front gate. From the front gate. You can infer from that that
they were working their way back toward the back gate, that they
checked the back gate, didn't see anything and thought maybe they
meant the front gate, and went around, found some blood on the front
gate, collected that and then came back to make 117, the drop out
west of the gate. Okay. That's one certainly reasonable inference
you can draw from the sequence which they picked up that blood. Now,
how about the other officers who claimed to have seen it? Well,
maybe they did. Maybe they did. Maybe there was. Maybe there was.
But this crime scene was closed down and I believe around 3:30 in
the afternoon on the 13th it was washed down. Who knows what it was
subjected to from then until July 3. But we know from these officers
who come in here and swear under oath that they could tell you what
they saw -- let's take a look at Terrazas, what he came in and said.

(Document is displayed on Elmo.)
MR. BLASIER: Is that Terrazas?
MR. P. BAKER: Yes.
MR. BLASIER: So Terrazas has got -- of course he's shown a picture,
by the way, with these numbers right next to it, and so he circles
-- he circles 115 and 116. What about -- Rossi, I think, was the
other one.
MR. BAKER: Just a second.
(Mr. Baker and Mr. Blasier converse sotto voce.)
MR. BLASIER: All right. Okay. You can see here that 116 is the rust
area that's been circled and not any blood spot. Okay. Here's
Rossi. Rossi -- now, I think Rossi circled the rust. In any event,
they haven't got the blood right. They haven't got it where they
claim -- they haven't got it where they say it was later found on
July 3. It doesn't work that way. Now, how do they find 115 and 116
and 117? They have a D.
A. walk-through -- is there something funny, Mr. Petrocelli?
MR. PETROCELLI: You don't want an answer to that, Mr. Blasier.
MR. BLASIER: Okay. So we have -- by the way, we have all these guys,
all these cops going back after they've collected evidence. We've
got Lange and Vannatter, they're in charge, and do they check any of
the paperwork? Did you guys get that back gate blood that we told
you about that's so important? Did you collect that? Apparently
nobody checks, nobody checks, 'cause nothing is said, until the D.
A. wants to come out and do a walk-through on July 3, and that's
when they, oh, look at this, more blood, more blood. So we wind up
with 115, 116 and 117. 117 is a large drop of blood or a smear of
blood on the mesh that has 150 nanograms in it. 150 nanograms.
Compared to some of the Bundy drops in evidence, as little as 1 or
2, as I recall. And has been out there three weeks longer, been out
there in the elements three weeks longer than the Bundy drops
collected on the 13th, and they're trying to tell you that 117 was
there at the same time as the Bundy drops. It wasn't. And of course
by July 3, Vannatter has had his access to Mr. Simpson's blood. 150
nanograms is a small part of the 30,000 that we submit to you are
missing. Now, here's another motivation as to why they might do
this. They might know also that the Bundy drops are greatly
degraded. There's not much DNA, very little amounts of DN
A. They admit that -- they admit that they got to make their case
better at Bundy. So we wind up with 117. Now, let's see the picture
of the back gate that was taken on the 13th. Apparently nobody told
the photographer that there was important blood stains on the back
gate. There was only one picture of the back gate that shows any of
this area at all. And we can zoom in, and you can see there's one
spot there, but there is no spot that corresponds to 116. It's just
not there. Can you zoom that in.
MR. P. BAKER: It's zoomed in.
MR. BLASIER: I think we had a bigger one before that was zoomed in.
And what did the police tell you when they came in? We asked them.
What do they tell you? It's there. It's just not in the picture.
Trust us. Trust us. It's there. It's just not in the picture. That's
one of the mistakes they made. Okay. They put it in an area where
there had been at least one picture taken. They forgot that. All
right. Now I want to move to what I think is the most interesting
area of the case, and that's the EDT
A. Another thing they don't know, by the way. Phil Vannatter, I
doubt, knows that blood in a purple-top tube has more than just
blood in it. It has a chemical preservative called EDTA.
It's in there to keep the blood from coagulating, to keep it
preserved. It's a chemical. It can be easily identified. So, where
we arrive at is, allegations are made before the criminal trial,
during the criminal trial, of course, that this evidence and other
evidence was planted. Just like we're making to you those
allegations. The Los Angeles D.A.'s office, hey, we can disprove
this, we can disprove this, we
can show that none of this stuff was planted. And what do they do?
They have Rock Harmon, who's one of the Deputy D.A.'s,
one of their DNA experts, write a letter to the FBI, and he
says -- second page of the letter.
(Document is displayed.)
MR. BLASIER: "We would like you to test those items for the presence
or absence of EDTA in order to refute the possibility" -- not the
truth, but "to refute the possibility that the stain on the sock,
item 13, could have come from Nicole's reference sample. Similarly,
we would like you to test item 117 to refute" -- not to find the
truth -- "the possibility that it could have come from Simpson's
reference sample." They pick two samples, send it to the FBI.
They'll know there's no EDTA in this blood. They give it to Special
Agent Roger Martz, and Special Agent Roger Martz, as you know, tests
it, designs a test, and lo and behold, he comes up with EDTA. He comes up with EDT
A. He comes up with test results consistent with the presence of
EDTA, and he does it in a way that is designed to determine whether
it's present or absent. Not how much there is. Just present or
absent. And that's the test that he does. And Dr. Rieders described
it to you, and Dr. Lee admitted the same thing, this test that Martz
used was not designed to find out how much was there. Just whether
it was there. So Special Agent Martz finds EDTA.
What do we do now? Do we test the Bundy drops now? Do we test
some of the other evidence to see whether maybe there's EDTA in the
other evidence? No, please don't do that. They stop. We don't want
to do any more testing. They stop. So we now have EDTA on two key
pieces of evidence, and the sock, as we'll talk about in a minute,
has the big stain in the ankle that has blood consistent with Nicole
Brown Simpson. Both these stains now we have some EDTA.
Well, they got to come up with an explanation for that. And what
does Martz do? Martz, on his own, decides to test his own blood. And
he testifies in the criminal case that he tests his own blood, and
lo and behold, he finds EDTA. Must have it naturally in our
blood because of what we eat and
whatever, must have the same amount because of what we eat. Must be
there. That's our answer. That's our answer.
MR. LAMBERT: Your Honor, none of this is in evidence in this case.
THE COURT: Just a minute.
(Pause.)
THE COURT: Approach the bench.
(The following proceedings were held at the bench with the
reporter.)
MR. LAMBERT: Martz testified about this in the criminal trial.
MR. P. BAKER: Mr. Blasier can't hear.
MR. LAMBERT: Martz testified about this in the criminal trial. He
wasn't called on this trial. He didn't give this information at all.

MR. BLASIER: Dr. Lee also talked about it.
MR. LAMBERT: They didn't talk about this.
MR. P. BAKER: I found it. This is page 180 of the 12/10 -- 12/20,
page 108.
MR. LAMBERT: Of course, but I'm giving this explanation that Martz
gave at the criminal trial that it naturally appears in your own
blood. That didn't come into this case.
MR. P. BAKER: Terry Lee was examined about it. Terry Lee was
examined about it. In fact -- let me finish. In fact, charts were
made showing Roger Martz testing his own blood sample. This is all
an issue that was taken during Mr. Blasier's examination of Dr.
Rieders and during Mr. Baker's examination of Dr. Terry Lee.
MR. LAMBERT: They can talk about Martz testing his own blood and
what these other witnesses said about that. What we can't talk about
is what Martz said in the criminal case. That didn't come into
evidence in this case.
THE COURT: Sustained. Objection sustained.
You may not refer to testimony of Martz with regards to this
occurring in food, et cetera.
MR. BLASIER: Dr. Lee testified about that.
THE COURT: You said Martz.
MR. BLASIER: Okay. I'll talk about Lee.
MR. LAMBERT: I'll ask it be stricken.
MR. P. BAKER: And they talked about it as well.
MR. LAMBERT: I ask that it be stricken from the record.
(The following proceedings were held in open court, in the presence
of the jury.)
THE COURT: Okay. Ladies and gentlemen, the reference
with regard to Martz saying anything about it occurring naturally,
that portion is stricken. That was not received in this trial, by --
through witness Martz.
MR. BLASIER: Folks, we don't have the witness Martz. Mr. Petrocelli,
in his opening statement, said I'm going to bring him here for you;
Mr. Lambert said we're going to bring him here for you to explain
this. Never did. Never did. We'll Talk about that in a little bit.
So what do we have left? Forgetting Mr. Martz, now, for a second, we
have test results that Dr. Rieders tells you, has extensive
experience with this -- the EDTA in the back gate and the sock stain
-- and that, in his professional opinion, it is consistent -- the
only source consistent is the purple-top tube that blood is
preserved in, EDTA tubes. That's the only consistent source. Now,
what did the plaintiffs do? Instead of bringing out Agent Martz to
explain this, to explain his side, who did they bring? You got to
find another expert. So they find Dr. Terry Lee. Dr. Terry Lee has
never been an expert before, in the sense of working on a case,
testifying as an expert. This is his first time. What do we have to
tell us about his bias? What we have are his work notes. Phil, why
don't you put up page 1 of his work notes.
(Document displayed.) Incidentally, one of the things that Dr. Lee
does testify about is that, since the criminal case, there were
scientific studies done, showing that EDTA would not be naturally
occurring in the blood from food or anything else that we might take
into ourselves, too. That is not an explanation for the EDTA that
showed up in the evidence in this case. So we have Dr. Lee and we
have his handwritten notes. He sets out very -- they're good notes
here, detailed notes -- setting forth his thought process as to how
he's going to go about what he perceives to be his task. And it's a
little difficult to read, but basically what he does is, in the
first page, he sets out what some of the possible options are in
terms of what's going on here. He's describing the problem to
himself. You go to page 2, and at the very top, he's saying
individuals doing the testing have no other motives to establish the
fact that tests will be -- not be fake, or something like that.
Anyway, he's describing his thought process about how he's going
to go about his job. Then we get to page 3, where he writes down
what his job is, at least as to what he's been hired for. What he
says -- and you want to go down to the third paragraph from the end
-- he describes the scenario we have here; and that is, some EDTA,
not a huge amount on the charts, but certainly EDTA that is
unexplained by anything other than purple-top tubes. And he says,
and under your outcome 3, which is what we have, if not planted,
convincing argument must be found for why the EDTA is present at
that level. If not planted, convincing argument must be found. This
is the expert. Experts are supposed to be impartial. Obviously, this
guy wasn't told to be impartial. He was told find us an explanation:
How do we get around this EDTA stuff? How do we get around this EDTA
stuff? So what does he come up with? He comes up with ghosting. The
notion that, well, maybe the EDTA that showed up was left over from
some of the earlier samples, and maybe that -- maybe that's what
happened. Well, why don't we bring Martz back, ask him? Lambert said
he's going to do that. He told you that. Never did. Never did. We
asked Terry Lee, hey, did you ever talk to Rodger Martz about this?
He said, I sure would have liked to talk to that Rodger Martz. Why
didn't you? Plaintiffs told me that the FBI didn't want to be
involved in the civil case. Bill Bodziak was here the next day,
testifying. What do you mean, the FBI didn't want to be involved in
the civil case? Rodger Martz doesn't want to be involved in the
civil case. Rodger Martz doesn't because his tests reveal the
presence of EDTA that allows you to conclude that that evidence is
planted. Okay. Let's talk about the socks.
MR. LEONARD: Is there a board?
MR. BLASIER: Yeah. Get me the history of the sock board. Let's start
talking about the socks. There were only two items of clothing taken
out of Mr. Simpson's house on June the 13th; and that is, the socks
and the tennis shoes that we know that Detective Lange took home.
These are dress socks, supposedly found in the middle of the master
bedroom, and they're the only clothing on the ground in the
bedroom. They look like -- if that's truly where they were, they
look like they were left there in a hurry. They find no other
clothing of significance in the bathroom, the bath or the shower.
And they're looking for a murder weapon and they're looking for
bloody clothing. They're looking for clothes that a killer may have
worn. And here they come across this pair of socks, supposedly
sitting right in the bed -- right on the floor, completely out of
place. Completely out of place. Anyone in their right mind who had
any training in detective work, would say that's an important piece
of evidence; that may be the most important thing we have here, the
only clothing that's there that looks like maybe it was just
recently worn and hurriedly put there. That should be considered a
very important and significant piece of evidence. But what do they
do? Fung and Mazzola don't really carefully examine them at all.
They don't -- they don't notice anything at all. They're supposedly
trained to recognize blood. They could have held it up to the light
and looked out at them to see if anything was there. They claimed
that, oh, no, it's dark fabric, would have been hard to for us to
see, anyway. There's no blood around them, of course. Now, here's
one other point, too. On this floor, you can see that those socks
are not touching. Those are two pieces of clothing -- just because
we call them a pair of socks, they are two separate and distinct
items of clothes. What do Fung and Mazzola do? They throw them in
the same bag, forever contaminating one with the other. Now, we have
the socks that the detective would conclude, this is important
stuff; this is what we ought to look at first; this might be the
murderer's clothing; let's look at it first. What do they do? They
put them in the same bag and they take them back to LAPD. And, of
course, they don't -- again, they don't have a manual that tells
them how to handle stuff. They just take them back to LAPD. Now,
let's look what happens after this. Dr. Baden asked to inspect the
physical evidence. And again, nobody apparently looked at these
socks for any evidentiary value. And I believe it was Dr. Baden, who
was seen in mid June -- mid to early June, that wanted to inspect
the evidence, and Vannatter says no, don't stand there, don't touch
anything we keep in the bag. We don't want you to really look at it,
exactly. If you're from the defense, don't really look at it and go,
go away, no blood seen at that point at all.
(The board entitled History of socks item 13, June 13, 1994 at
Rockingham) Now we have June 29, when Mr. Petrocelli described as
just an inventory, when it was -- actually, they were analyzing --
they were looking at this evidence carefully to see what testing
should we do, and whether we can split the evidence with the
defense. Now, do you have that none obvious document?
(Document displayed.)
MR. BLASIER: We have Greg Matheson looks with Michelle Kestler with
Collin Yamauchi. Surely they know this is dark clothing, and if
there is anything of evidentiary value to it, they should look at it
in the light, we would think. And they write down, dress socks,
blood search, nothing obvious. No obvious blood stain. Now, Matheson
comes in, tries to tell you, well wait a minute. I think what I
meant there was, we'll look at it later. This was their going
through the evidence, trying to determine what should be tested,
what's important what's the most important stuff. Still, nobody
focuses on the socks, other than to examine them and say there's no
blood there. Now, what happens to them? They stay in one of these
boxes until, I believe, it was August 1st or August 4th, when Collin
Yamauchi first examines them and sees blood. Now they have blood on
them. For the first time, it's being seen. And it's a lot of blood.
There's that big stain around the ankle of one of the socks that was
sent to the FBI and had EDTA in them. And we have testimony from
Gary Sims, who I believe testified that he knew that he could see
the blood with the naked eye. And I believe there may have been one
or two witnesses, as well, to acknowledge that you can -- yeah, you
can see it; it's there after August, now. Not before -- not before,
but after August. Now, of course, defense claims foul; that, all of
a sudden, now, the case is getting better again. We got socks, now,
with blood on them that -- where none was obvious before. And what's
going on here? And, of course, prosecution denies there's been any
planting. So we examine the socks and we find EDTA, or the FBI does.
There, Dr. Herb MacDonell and Dr. Henry Lee examine the socks, and
they find these little balls of blood on surface 3. Remember, if you
look the at sock as being surface 1, 2, 3 and 4, and the big stain
was starting -- started on surface 1, went to the other side,
surface 2, and then these little balls of blood came on the opposite
side of the ankle from surface 2. And it was Dr. MacDonell's
professional opinion that the only way that could have happened is
if blood was smeared on that ankle, and while the socks were not
being worn. But if the socks had been -- were being worn at the time
that blood got there, there wouldn't be any blood at all on sides 3
or 4. So that, in his opinion, it was put on there, and a little bit
of it went through to side 3. They bring in Dr. Fox to say -- who
basically says that, now, you know, it could have happened other
ways. But it really depends -- his opinion depends on the -- he
says, how do you know that those blood drops are in the linen
themselves -- or bound to the linen. And all of his theories revolve
about the notion that it wasn't bound to the linen; it could have
happened this way, as long as these little balls weren't bound to
the linen. But Doctors Lee and Dr. MacDonell tell you -- who looked
at it, by the way, under much more magnification, to my
recollection -- said no, it's bound; it's bound to the fabric of the
sock with little balls of blood. Okay. Now, this chart -- Mr.
Petrocelli, toward the end of his argument yesterday, was talking
about the Willie Ford video. Remember, that's your video -- to make
sure that we can't -- they can't say we broke a dish. The only video
the police took. And we have a scenario with Willie Ford, Dennis
Fung, and the collection of these socks. And Mr. Petrocelli tells
you that it's obvious what happened: The Willie Ford videotape was
taken after the socks were collected. The socks have already been
collected; that's why they aren't there. They're not contesting
that. They weren't there. They aren't saying that Willie Ford really
did see them. They're acknowledging that Willie Ford saw no socks at
4:13, when he took that videotape. You have to remember this whole
sequence of Willie Ford picking up the socks -- and the video takes
place over a relatively short period of time -- according to Fung,
he picks up the socks between 4:30 and 4:40. The Willie Ford video
is at 4:13. Obviously, if that timing is correct, then the socks
have been planted, because they weren't there. But that's just
thinking about the clock. I understand that Dennis Fung came in and
tried to say, well, this is kind have a ballpark -- kind of a
ballpark -- trying to explain away Willie Ford's testimony that
there are no socks here; there are no socks here before they were
supposed to have been collected. Well, let's look at this picture.
Let's look at these pictures.
(Indicating to board entitled History of Socks, Item 13, June 13,
1994, at Rockingham.)
MR. BLASIER: Okay. And this is kind of important. It's a little bit
-- a little tricky, so we'll walk you through this carefully. We
have three pictures up here. And they all have the socks in them.
Okay. What can we tell from these pictures? Okay. Let's look at the
picture on the left here
(indicating to photograph entitled Bedroom), has the socks on the
ground, but no tag, no number 13
(indicating to photograph entitled Bedroom). Remember in the
sequence, what they do is, they put the card down, then they collect
it, then they pick the card up. So what can we tell about this
picture versus this picture on the lower right and the one right
above it? You can see the card, too, as well. What we can tell is
that this picture
(indicating to photo marked "bedroom") was taken before these two
because there's a card down there, yet no card down there yet. Can
we tell anything else going on with these things? And they were all
taken probably really close together in time. So we know that the
picture on the left is taken first. What else do we know? Well, if
you look around at these pictures, you'll start to see other things.
One other thing you see is a strap on a bed. The picture on the left
has a strap on the bed which is hanging down
(indicating to photograph entitled bedroom). You can see that
clearly. You can see that clearly. The picture on the right top that
has the socks and the tag, which is right before collection, has the
strap up. Okay. You with me so far? The strap is up
(indicating to photo entitled Socks on Rug). What can we tell from
that? What we can tell is, at the time those socks were collected,
the strap on that bed was up, because here's -- the strap is already
up, socks are still on the ground. Okay. With me so far? Now, we
have Willie Ford's video; we have Willie Ford's video. Do you --
think about it: This one video that the police took to protect
themselves in case they broke something, has a picture of this area
around the same time. And I'm telling you that -- By the way, Mr.
Petrocelli said that the Ford video was also taken after everything
was collected. Phil, play the part where it shows the drops of
number 12 in the foyer, where number 12 hasn't been collected yet.
MR. PETROCELLI: Your Honor, I'm not sure this part is in evidence.
Can we approach?
THE COURT: You may. Ladies and gentlemen, take ten
minutes. Don't talk about the case. Don't form or express any
opinions.
(The following proceedings were held in open court, outside the
presence of the jury.)
MR. PETROCELLI: Judge, the way this is going -- I want to be able to
finish on Monday; I don't want to be rushed on Monday. You know, I
can see what's happening.
THE COURT: Mr. Petrocelli, time is no
longer of the essence.
MR. PETROCELLI: To me, it is.
THE COURT: It just fell apart this
morning.
MR. PETROCELLI: To me, it is of the essence.
THE COURT: It's my show
at this point.
MR. BLASIER: The entire video was introduced; it wasn't introduced
selectively.
MR. PETROCELLI: You only played the part showing the rug.
MR. BLASIER: No, we didn't. The part of 12,
MR. P. BAKER: The portion of the video was authenticated when Willie
Ford stepped on that chair and I asked him if that was the
videotape. It was moved into evidence. And you told the jury that.
MR. PETROCELLI: Discuss -- play the part in question concerning
number 12.
MR. P. BAKER: No, it wasn't an issue. The video became an issue --
my turn -- the video is in. He authenticated the video. You can't
correct portions because you misled the jury about which evidence is
collected.
MR. PETROCELLI: You're making the closing argument here.
MR. P. BAKER: You can't cherry-pick the document because you're in
closing argument.
MR. PETROCELLI: I had an understanding -- Your Honor even pointed
out in chambers that only certain parts of certain pieces of
evidence were shown. And I thought that was the ruling. Don't you
remember, you asked me in there, how are we going to tell what parts
were shown to the jury?
MR. P. BAKER: This issue --
MR. PETROCELLI: Now, they conceded that was not shown. There was no
examination about the foyer item, and now they're -- and also, that
chart wasn't used, either, in --
MR. P. BAKER: That videotape was authenticated. It shows blood in
the foyer -- that's not been collected. You told the jury that that
video was taken after evidence items have been taken.
MR. PETROCELLI: You can say whatever you want to the jury. We'll
take care of that. I'm concerned about you showing the jury things
not in evidence.
THE COURT: Okay. You can show what was shown to the
jury, but you're not going to show what was not shown.
MR. GELBLUM: This board they've been using is not in evidence.
MR. PETROCELLI: The board is not in evidence, either. It's not in
evidence.
MR. P. BAKER: In terms of the board, I think --
MR. GELBLUM: You put in --
MR. P. BAKER: I think --
MR. GELBLUM: Here you are.
MR. P. BAKER: I misnumbered 1362, 1361.
MR. GELBLUM: Our board?
THE COURT: What is 1361?
MR. GELBLUM: It's a different board. There's 1361. That number 2 is
the one that you marked.
MR. P. BAKER: I got to fix that tomorrow.
MR. GELBLUM: Has this one been used?
THE COURT: What's on there that
you don't like?
MR. GELBLUM: I think the photographs that have just been going
through have not been moved into evidence, have not been used
before, I believe, because the board was not used.
THE COURT: Why don't you make sure.
(Recess.)
THE COURT: Is everybody ready?
MR. BAKER: Yes.
THE COURT: You may resume.
MR. BLASIER: Okay, folks, we're going to get done with this. This is
my last point. I apologize for going on as long as I have. I went
much faster in the shower this morning, so. . .
(Laughter.)
MR. BLASIER: This is important. Again, I want to walk you through
these pictures. You've got the one on the left, which there's no
card on the ground, so we know
(indicating to photo entitled Bedroom) that this is before -- this
picture is taken -- of these three pictures, this one had to be
taken first in the sequence of things. These two pictures up here
(indicating) were probably taken right around the same time. You've
got the card on the ground, the number 13 card on the ground. You
can barely see it in the top one, but it's there. And this is taken,
presumably, right before collection. They put the card down. Now,
Mr. Fung has put the card down and is getting ready to collect. And
you know that in the picture on the left, the earlier picture
(indicating to photo entitled Bedroom), this strap is down on the
bed; socks are still here. In this picture, the socks are here with
this strap down. Over here
(indicating), to the top right-hand picture, the socks are there.
The card is there, but now the strap has been moved up; we don't
know how.
(Indicating to photo entitled Socks on Rug.) Maybe Mr. Fung lifted
it. There's nothing mysterious about that, the fact that the
photograph shows that, while those socks are still on the ground,
before they've been collected. Folks, the strap on the bed is up.
Now, let's compare this with the Willy Ford video of -- Mr. Ford
took a video of this room, and he took a video of this area. And if
that video shows a bed with the strap up, then maybe they're right.
Maybe the socks had already been collected. But if that video shows
a bed with the strap down, then we know these socks were planted
there, because this is before they were collected. The strap goes
up, the socks are still on the ground. If Willy Ford's video shows
the straps down, that means, at some point, when he took his video,
it was before that, and there were no socks there. Play the video.
(Videotape played, displaying 3:13 p.m, 6/13/94.)
MR. BLASIER: Stop right there. You can back up a little, Phil. You
can start to see it here. Okay, go a little further.
(Mr. P. Baker complies.)
MR. BLASIER: Stop it. There it is. There it is. The strap is down,
folks. This picture was taken before that one, and there are no
socks on the ground. Those socks were put there. They were put there
before they were collected by the Los Angeles Police Department.
Blood was put on them at some point that has EDTA on it. If you have
-- you've seen -- have you seen enough cockroaches yet to accept the
fact that this physical evidence is not worthy of acceptance in a
case of this seriousness? I submit to you that you cannot accept
this physical evidence. You cannot accept it. You must make your
decision in this case based on other -- other bases. I want to thank
you for your attention. I know that, as attorneys, we -- sometimes
we get in the heat of battle and say and do things that are immature
and not very nice. If I've done that, I apologize to you. I hope
other people do, too. Thank you very much.
MR. BAKER: Your Honor, Dan Leonard's going to do the photos and
shoes.
MR. LEONARD: Did you really think Coach Baker was going to keep me
out of the lineup? I don't think so. Ready? If it please the Court,
brother counsel, ladies and gentlemen of the jury: Good afternoon.
Why Dan Leonard? Why is he arguing this part of the case? My
brothers, Baker and Blasier, are obviously more intelligent,
wittier. Mr. Blasier especially has more analytic skills, but I'm a
hard-headed Irishman. One thing I have is common sense. That's what
it is going to take you to decide whether or not you're going to
accept the photographic evidence that's been presented to you in
this case, common sense. Common sense will tell you that these are
photographs that come too late and cost too much. Now, let's talk a
little bit about the timing of this evidence. We all know that this
was the most celebrated, most covered case in the history of
American jurisprudence. All across this great country of ours,
people knew all about the case, and in all kinds of detail. One of
the things that came up early on in the case was this question of
Bruno Magli shoes, these $300 designer shoes. Did Mr. Simpson wear
them? Did he ever own a pair? Was he ever seen with a pair? You
heard agent Bodziak talk about a search that was national and
international scope for any evidence whatsoever that Mr. Simpson
ever owned, or ever wore, or was ever seen with these shoes. The
countryside was scoured for any evidence: Receipts, photographs,
anything. Nothing was found during the criminal trial, prior to the
criminal trial. Nothing. Not one sales person was located who could
say that they sold my client, one of the most well-known, highly
visible people, probably in the United States, maybe in the world,
could not say that they sold him these shoes. Now, think about that,
ladies and gentlemen. Common sense. Remember, we put some witnesses
on in this case that saw Mr. Simpson at the airport; they saw him in
the hotel; they saw him on the plane. They'll never forget that.
Think about your own experiences in life when you've seen somebody
who's really famous. Think about it. You remember. You think back
and you remember. Where's the salesperson? Where's the person that
sold these shoes to Mr. Simpson? Why wasn't all the resources of the
LAPD, the FBI -- why weren't they able to locate this person? Why
didn't this person come forward? I'll tell you why: Because he never
bought a pair; he never owned a pair. Scull. He's a photographer.
Takes photographs all the time at Bills' games. Why didn't he come
forward? Why didn't he come forward? Why didn't he tell the police?
Why didn't he come forward for the prosecution? Why did he wait? Why
did he wait till he gets a hold of this guy MacElroy? Why did he
wait? What's that about? How come these photographs don't really
surface until March of 1996, basically two years after the murders,
after the criminal trial is over? How come they don't emerge until
then? And how come, when they emerge, they emerge in the National
Enquirer? Why is that? Why is that? There's a reason for that.
Money. Dough. There's money to be made in those photographs; that's
what it's all about. Remember what Scull told you in his deposition
about the history of these photographs and the history of the
negatives? But one thing you didn't hear from the FBI, Agent
Richards -- or former FBI agent, anything about the history of those
photographs, anything, anything about the history of these
photographs. Why? You call that tunnel vision. He did not want to
look outside what he could see with his head loupe on. What did
Scull tell us? He said, oh, I took the photographs; I remember I
sent them off to the Pro Football Weekly about a week after they
were taken. Okay. Where's the guy -- where's anyone from Pro
Football Weekly that confirms that? Where are they? Where's the
photograph that was sent to Pro Football Weekly? Where is it? He
mentioned a guy named Peters, if I'm not mistaken, some kind of pro
football editor from Pro Football Weekly. Where is he? Did they
bring him into this courtroom to say yeah, I remember; here's the
photograph? No. Why not? Why not? Scull tells us in his -- in his
deposition, well, you know, I didn't -- I didn't try to hawk these
for the first time in March of 1996; my guy, MacElroy -- I tried to
sell them in June of 1995, in the middle of the criminal trial.
Newsweek, Time. What happened with that? What about, did Scull tell
you they weren't newsworthy? Really. He tells you, oh, yeah, Time
and Newsweek were "O.J.'d out." There might be a couple of people
in this courtroom that might be able to tell you something different
about that, O.J.-d out. We hear that echoed again when Flammer got
on the stand, same words: "O.J.-d out." I can't imagine that Time,
Newsweek or any other legitimate media could have possibly been
O.J.-d out at this time. Do you think -- do you think that Scull
didn't know that they were looking for photographs of OJ Simpson,
desperately looking for photographs that might show him in any kind
of footwear? Do you think he didn't know that? No, he doesn't send
it to the prosecution, doesn't talk to the police about it. Talks to
MacElroy, though. Hey, where's MacElroy? Where is he? Did he come to
this courtroom and did he tell you what he did with the negatives?
Did he tell you why he had to send the Scull negatives, as Harry
Scull tells you in his deposition, to London and back from Paris, or
whatever, on the Concord? Why did he did he have to do that? Why
didn't Agent Richards want to talk to him? Why wasn't he -- why
didn't he interview him? Did do you think that if these photographs
showed Agent Richards' son or brother and -- somehow committing a
crime, or were inculpatory -- they were evidence that this was used
in a murder trial -- do you think he might want to talk to MacElroy?
Do you think he might want to talk to the guy who had access to and
control of the negatives, to find out what he did with them? I don't
know. I think so. He didn't come into this courtroom. Now, Flammer.
Two and a half years later, after the big buzz in Buffalo about the
Scull photo in March of '96, no, that doesn't -- that didn't pique
his memory. He didn't remember then. Gee, I have those kind of
photographs and Scull made a few bucks, maybe I should look into
selling it, maybe I should look around, look for my negatives. I've
taken a lot of photographs of OJ Simpson. It was all over the TV up
there, it was all over the newspapers when Scull's deposition was
taken in this case. Flammer: No, I don't know anything about that.
Didn't put 2 and 2 together. Gee, here comes MacElroy. Now, 2 and 2
gets put together. Now, 2 and 2 is put together. When does that
happen? After our expert, Robert Groden, takes the stand. Why? Why
is that? Why do these 30 photographs all of the sudden show up, and
Flammer is all of the sudden somehow miraculously reminded that he
has these incriminating photographs? Why does that happen through
the agency, through the help of MacElroy, after Mr. Groden gets on
the stand and talked to you about these photographs. Why? Think
about it. Common sense. Would you forget about it? Flammer didn't
tell you he was OJ'ed out. He said, oh, I was fine, I was aware -- I
was aware of it. Money makes the world go around. Money spins the
globe. People kill each other over money. Countries get into wars
over money. You heard Richards. If you have enough money, if you
have the time, and God knows they had the time, if you had the
connection, the right person, and you had access to the equipment --
I wonder what kind of equipment there was in London -- you can fake
any photograph so that no expert can decipher whether it's been
altered or not. Do you think that happened here? Do you think that
renting the photographs for $1800 a week was enough motivation? Do
you think that -- does that satisfy you? Is that proof -- absolute
proof? Is it -- you know, Richards got up here -- and Mr. Gelblum
also had a lot of fun with Mr. Groden. Doesn't have a -- he has a
high school diploma, but, you know, he had to drop out. Mr. Gelblum
points out -- this is very relevant -- points out that he was -- he
was released early from the military. Why? He got beat up by a
sergeant in an anti-Semetic incident. Mr. Gelblum also tries to
suggest to you, gee, he didn't have enough experience in this, this
is the first time he's ever testified as an expert in altered -- in
whether or not photographs are altered. Oh, he's had a couple of
strokes, too. That's important. Well, do you remember when I
cross-examined Agent Richards, Bill Bodziak's friend? Do you
remember? When you were on direct examination, Agent Richards, were
you trying to let the jury think that this examination of
photographs to see whether they're altered, that's something you do
a lot, that's something you testify to a lot? Oh, no, no. No, I
wasn't letting them try -- I didn't want the jury to think that.
Well, well, well. By the way, how many times have you testified in a
court of law on that subject, whether or not a photograph is
altered? This is my first time. Really? Okay. Mr. Gelblum thought
that was pretty strange when it came to Mr. Groden. Oh, and let me
ask you this, Agent Richards, how often in your career with the FBI
would you actually look at photographs, not to see what's in there,
not to look at -- for the CIA at -- spy satellite photographs to see
whether you could figure out whether it was a certain kind of truck
or a tank, but how often in your career did you look at photographs
to determine whether they were fake? Oh, maybe two or three times a
year. Really? So maybe 50 times in your whole career? Yeah. Didn't
tell you that on direct examination. Oh, and Agent Richards on
cross-examination, not on direct examination, Agent Richards --
MR. GELBLUM: Objection. He's not Agent Richards.
MR. LEONARD: Excuse me. Mr. Richards. Former agent. Mr. Richards,
how often in your career have you undertaken a full analysis like
the one you did in this case, not when you have a copy of a
photograph or a -- or a print, a single print, but you have access
to the contact sheets and to the negatives? How often? Maybe once
every three or four years. When's the last time you did it? I don't
know, maybe three years -- I can't really remember. Maybe three
years ago. Now, contrast that with Mr. Groden. Yeah, they had a lot
of fun with Mr. Groden, basically because of the position he's taken
with regard to the assassination of John Kennedy. Yeah, sure, he'd
like to be making a lot more dough, he'd like to be in the position
that Agent -- Richards was. Does that make a difference? Does that
really make a difference to you? Aren't you going to decide this on
common sense? What you can see. What you heard. But you know, he's
got something that Mr. Richards doesn't have, and that is
experience, actually making these kind of composite negatives. You
heard him describe that to you. Richards didn't do that. Richards
spent 99 percent of his time, as he testified to, as he admitted,
looking at questioned documents and also analyzing photographs to
see what's in them, without any view towards determining whether
they were fake or not. Then what did he tell you in the end? He said
this is not an absolute science, looking at photographs. He said
that it's subjective. He said that the examiners can differ as to
what they see in their interpretation. And he said something else
that was interesting. He said with regard to the Scull photograph,
when he was first up on the stand, he said I'm a hundred percent
sure, I'm a hundred percent sure that that photograph is not fake.
But remember when he got up with regard to the Flammer photographs?
What did he say? No, I can't be 100 percent sure. Why? Why did he
change his mind? Why? You heard my learned brother, Mr. Blasier,
talk about science and you know true science, you can never say
something to an absolute certainty. Why did he feel compelled to
tell you with regard to the Scull photograph that he was 100 percent
certain? Why? Was he trying to impress you? Was he trying to fool
you? Was he trying to overstate the case? Well, if you can really
tell -- if you can't really tell that somebody does a very good job
and they have the right equipment, then how can he tell you
anything, ladies and gentlemen? How can he tell you anything? How
can he possibly tell you that he's 100 percent sure? And how can he
tell you that when he hasn't even bothered and he hasn't been
presented with the history of this negative. When MacElroy has been
hidden even from him, as he was hidden from you. How can he say
that? Where's MacElroy? Now, Richards -- Mr. Richards said, oh, no,
everything that Mr. Groden told you, that's all wrong, everything's
wrong, everything. Yeah, that could -- that's a scratch. Do you
remember the continuous scratch? That's not an edge mark, no, no.
Examiners can differ. It's subjective. I don't have any bias. But
no, that's a continuous scratch. That's not an edge. And yeah, that
first negative may be out of line a little bit, but that's -- that's
the natural movement. It could be the movement of the film within
the camera. Yeah, it's subjective, but that's my opinion. I'm not
biased. Phil, can you put the scratch photograph up.
(Photo is displayed on Elmo.)
MR. LEONARD: Where is the pointer? Does someone have the pointer?
MR. PETROCELLI: I do.
MR. LEONARD: Oh. I knew it was you. I should have figured. Okay.
Do you remember what Mr. -- what Mr. Agent Richards told you about
what he's calling a scratch here? He said, oh, that's not a problem,
that's caused by the movement of the film in the camera. Do you
remember that? And then he --
MR. GELBLUM: That completely misstates the testimony, Your Honor.
MR. LEONARD: That's for the jury to decide.
MR. GELBLUM: You can't argue it unless it's based on evidence.
THE COURT: Overruled. It's argument. You may --
MR. LEONARD: Strike that. Do you remember that Mr. Richards said in
his opinion this scratch was caused when the film passed over --
when it moved in the camera, passed over a little burr? Do you
remember that? And he said -- this is all in direct examination. He
said that's completely innocent, that doesn't mean anything. And
then I asked him on cross-examination -- wait a minute. Oh, and then
he said, of course, in addition to that, he said you know when this
-- if this thing's out of line, which obviously you can clearly see
here, using the scratch as a reference point, you can see how far
out of line the first frame is. If that's out of line, that's just
because as the -- as the film moved through the camera or as it was
snapped it would shift. Well, if the film is shifting or the -- or
the frame is shifting, where's the shift there? Why isn't the
scratch moving? Why isn't there a little jig in the scratch? Why?
You can take that down
(indicating to Elmo.) He told you that what Mr. Groden thought might
be an edge mark on the bottom of the first negative, the negative in
question, oh, that's an image of the football field. Did you take a
good look at that? Did you see how, if -- if that -- and this is on
direct examination. The camera was down, the camera was down when
that film was taken. How does he know? He didn't even bother to ask
Scull about that. How did he know? Let's assume he's correct.
Camera's facing down when that picture is snapped. Take a look at it
when you're back in that -- and deliberating. You'd have to -- how
high in the air would you have to be to create that image? Think
about it. Looking down, the camera's down, but of course when I
caught him on that in his -- in the cross-examination, then he
started to talk about how, you know, maybe it was up like this, I
don't know. He doesn't know. Never talked to Scull about it. Didn't
bother to do that. This was interesting, too. I asked him -- well,
you know what Mr. Groden told you. He said, you know, if it is a
scratch, that really doesn't make a difference. First of all, it
illustrates his point of how the first frame is out of line, but
that really doesn't make a difference, because if you're smart and
you fake a photograph and you're trying to cover your tracks, you're
going to use the same camera to create the false negative or the
duplicate negative and you're going to snap it right through. He
explained that to you. Well, I asked Richards, gee, isn't that true.
I'm thinking this guy's not going to fight me about that. That seems
like that's a pretty common sense thing. No, I have never heard of
that technique before. Well, that doesn't surprise me. Two or three
times a year did this kind of work, hardly ever looked at negatives.
Oh, yeah. And if you're going to use the same camera, what did
Groden tell you to do with it? Get rid of it. Get rid of the
evidence. You can't match it up. Get rid of it. And what did Scull
tell you in his deposition? Gee, I have lost that camera, I lost it
-- I mean -- excuse me -- it was stolen. That camera was stolen.
Can't look at the camera. Sounds like a pretty good idea. Money.
Money makes people do a lot of things. We all know that. Can you put
the close-up of the shoe?
(Photographs of shoe displayed.)
MR. LEONARD: Another interesting point. One of the few things that,
despite all my skills, I tried to use, I could not get out of Mr.
Richards: You see this right here
(indicating)? See how you could see the pattern of the sole there
(indicating)? See this reflection here
(indicating)? Now, there was a fight about whether it should be
white or red. Mr. Groden said it should be white, and it shouldn't
be red like that. And Mr. Richards said, no; no, in my opinion, my
subjective opinion, that's okay; it can be -- it can be red. But
look at this
(indicating) take a look at it when you're back in the deliberation
room. This clearly extends beyond the sole
(indicating). And that shouldn't be. But more importantly, see the
sole pattern pretty well, and gee, that's pretty convenient. Because
as Agent Bodziak testified, that's how you make this shoe. That's
how you identify this shoe as making the footprint at Bundy. Pretty
distinctive sole pattern, he said. Remember that? Mr. Petrocelli
said it's like fingerprints. Gee, that's -- that's really, really
convenient. That's great. Got a photograph of Mr. Simpson striding
across a field, a photograph that never appeared before; and lo and
behold, you can see the pattern on the bottom of the sole. What
could be better than 30 more photographs later on? What could be
better? Remember what I asked Mr. Richards? Did you look at all the
other photographs that Scull took, the contact sheet? Can you --
could you see the bottom of the sole? Can you see any pattern? Oh,
yeah, I looked at that. No, you really couldn't. There was one you
could see a little bit. Yeah, you could see a little bit, but
nothing like this
(indicating), this
(indicating), this
(indicating), this
(indicating). No. Hum? Boy. If you were going to -- if you were
going to take care of this photograph and make it right, you'd work
on that part first, wouldn't you? Sure. Oh. And yeah, Bodziak came
in and said, my God, this is definitely a Bruno Magli. Hello. I
mean, what would you -- if you're doctoring a photograph and this is
the issue in the case, you better believe he'd use a Bruno Magli.
And that goes to the Flammer photos, too. That was really -- that
was a great point. I also want to you take a look at another thing
here. Take a look at the heel of that shoe. Take a look at the
position of the heel. Now, agent -- excuse me -- Mr. Richards -- we
went back and forth a little bit, though, but he basically agreed
that that's -- that heel, it's pretty much flat on the surface. He
said, ah, there might be a little bit right there. That -- and that
-- he said he takes into account physiology and things like that and
what he knows about anatomy. But he said, I'm no human factors
expert. I remember he -- I believe he said that. Think about that.
Think about your own experience when you're walking. Think about it.
Do you think that, as you're striding along, that with your heel
flat on the ground like that, that the shoe is going to be -- the
toe is going to be up in that position, and twisted -- very
conveniently twisted over, "cocked," as Mr. Richards said, towards
the camera? Think about it. Take it down
(indicating to Elmo). Now, Richards goes up to Buffalo on the 7th of
January. A miracle occurs: The Flammer photographs come forward. And
what -- what did he say, two minutes? Two minutes. A negative, a
print, looking at it. Comes back, clean bill of health. Well, that
didn't surprise me. Maybe they got it right this time. Maybe they
didn't leave behind any evidence. He told you. Again. Do you -- you
do if you have the motivation. What could motivate more than dough?
And you have the time and you have the connection, MacElroy. Where's
MacElroy? And you have the equipment: You can make a photograph or
30 photographs that nobody can tell. Now, but Mr. Petrocelli had an
answer for that. He said, well, wait a minute. This photograph was
used in a newspaper in -- wherever it was -- shortly after this
photo was taken. One of these photographs was used in the Buffalo
Bills newsletter, something like that. Yeah. That's a good point.
But remember what I -- when I asked Richards, did they show you the
black-and-white print that was supposedly used, the actual
black-and-white print? No, he wasn't shown that. What he was shown
-- and by the way, half of what he got, he had to get from MacElroy.
What he was shown was what was purporting to the original negatives
-- and God knows what McCelroy did with them -- and color prints. He
was never shown the black-and-white print that was actually used in
the newspaper, nor did he look, did he analyze the newspaper
photograph. Nor did Bodziak do that. Why? Why weren't they shown
that? Why didn't they look at that? Tunnel vision. You can get that
board. Never mind; I'll get it. I have -- I've been doing it all
day, might as well do it now.
MR. LEONARD: Okay. You remember this, right, Mr. Gelblum? Very nice.
That one-by-one he knocked out, remember? He was telling you that he
had knocked out all these points that Mr. Groden had made, and he
did that to Mr. Richards.
(Indicating to chart with items crossed off.) I would suggest to you
that there's another very important factor here, and that would be
factor 13, which Richards didn't talk about. Right there. Factor 13.

MR. BAKER: I can't see it, Dan; it's green. Put black.
MR. LEONARD: Right there.
(Counsel writes on butcher paper.)
MR. LEONARD: Let's see if Mr. Petrocelli wants to get up and
cross-examine that one out.
MR. PETROCELLI: I can't wait.
MR. LEONARD: Maybe he does. Money. Is that what this is about? Is
that what this evidence is about, store-bought evidence, evidence
with -- evidence with a price list.
(Chart blow-up is displayed.)
MR. LEONARD: Remember this, ladies and gentlemen. How much
motivation do you need?
(Price list from Mr. MacElroy is displayed.)
MR. LEONARD: Rate schedule. Group shot, vertical shot, studio photo
of E. J. Flammer. One time, $5,000. 24 hours, $7,000. One week,
$12,000. Until one day up to the trial ends, $18,000. Not a lot of
motivation. But, no, E. Flammer didn't -- he didn't know how much he
was going to get; he didn't know how much they were asking. He was
told by his attorney not to know that, not to know it. Imagine. Oh,
I'll insulate myself from that. God knows, if he didn't really know,
imagine what he was thinking in his mind. Who knows? Maybe he
thought a million dollars. Who knows? Looks like Scull dropped in
value here a little bit. One time, $1500; 24 hours, $2400; one week,
$5,000; trial ends, $8,000. What a deal. What a deal. Evidence or
sale? Does that satisfy you? Does evidence like this satisfy you,
ladies and gentlemen? What this comes down to is, are you going to
be able to come back, based on this evidence, and tell my client
that he killed the mother of his children? Are you going to do that?
Is it worth it? Did it cost too much? Did it come too late? I
think so. Thanks.
THE COURT: Monday?
MR. LEONARD: I'm done.
MR. BAKER: Yeah, Monday.
THE COURT: Okay. Well, the best laid plans
of mice and men have gone awry. So we're going to resume Monday. I'm
sorry I got you up so early this morning. We'll resume Monday at
8:30. Don't talk about the case. Don't form or express any opinions.
Don't listen to or watch any news on this matter. Don't have any
news articles or magazine articles or anything like that about this
case come before your eyes. Don't let anybody talk to you about this
case. We've come a long ways in this case. Keep yourselves
inviolate. See you Monday morning, 8:30. Have a nice weekend.
JURORS: Thank you, Your Honor.
(At 4:00 p.m., an adjournment was taken until Monday, January 27, at 8:30 a.m.)