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