Department no. 103 hon. Lance A. Ito, judge

APPEARANCES: (Appearances as heretofore noted.)

(Janet M. Moxham, CSR no. 4855, official reporter.)

(Christine M. Olson, CSR no. 2378, official reporter.)

(The following proceedings were held in open court, out of the presence of the jury:)

THE COURT: All right. Back on the record in the Simpson matter. Mr. Simpson is again present before the court with his counsel, Mr. Shapiro, Mr. Kardashian, Mr. Blasier, Mr. Neufeld, Mr. Scheck and Mr. Cochran. The people are represented by Miss Clark and Mr. Darden. We are in argument. Let's have it quiet in the courtroom, please. All right. Deputy Trower, let's have the jurors, please.

(Brief pause.)

(The following proceedings were held in open court, in the presence of the jury:)

THE COURT: All right. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Please be seated. And let the record reflect that we have now been rejoined by all the members of our jury panel. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.

THE JURY: Good morning.

THE COURT: We are in the midst of the final arguments. Mr. Cochran, you may continue with your argument, sir.

MR. COCHRAN: Thank you very kindly, your Honor. Good morning, judge Ito. Good morning again, ladies and gentlemen.

THE JURY: Good morning.

CLOSING ARGUMENT (RESUMED) BY MR. COCHRAN:

When we concluded last night, ladies and gentlemen, we had discussed a number of things, and I'm sure you have them very much in mind. To summarize some of the things that we talked about and put it in perspective, we talked about a police department who from the very beginning was more interested in themselves and their image, and that carried through. We talked about socks that appeared all of a sudden that weren't there, socks where evidence was planted on them. We talked about police officers who lie with immunity, where the oath doesn't mean anything to them. We talked about messengers where you couldn't trust the message. We talked about gloves that didn't fit, a knit cap that wouldn't make any difference, a prosecution scenario that is unbelievable and unreasonable. In short, we talked about reasonable doubt. We talked about something that has made this country great, that you can be accused in this country for crime, but that is just an accusation, and when you enter a not guilty plea, since the beginning of the time of this country, since the time of the Magna Carta, that sets the forces in motion and you have a trial. This is what this is about. That is why we love what we do, an opportunity to come before people from the community, the consciences of the community. You are the consciences of the community. You set the standards. You tell us what is right and wrong. You set the standards. You use your common sense to do that. Your verdict goes far beyond these doors of this courtroom. As Mr. Darden said, the whole world is watching and waiting for your decision in this case. That is not to put any pressure on you, just to tell you what is really happening out there. So we talked about all of those things, hopefully in a logical way. Hopefully something I said made some sense to you. Hopefully as a advocate, you know my zeal, you know the passion I feel for this. We've all got time invested in this case. But it is not just about winning, it is about what is right. It is about a man's life that is at stake here. So in voir dire you promised to take the time that was necessary, and you have more than done that. Remember I asked you, though, that when you got down to the end of the case, when you kept all your promises about coming here everyday and taking these notes and paying attention, and you know, listening to us drone on and on and on, that pretty soon it would be in your hands and then you couldn't just rush through that, could you? And we tried to make it a little more simple with regard to the issues, but still we are going to have twelve minds coming together, twelve open minds, twelve unbiased minds to come together on these issues. And you will give it, I'm sure, the importance to which it is entitled. Please don't compromise your principles or your consciences in rendering this decision. Don't rush to judgment. Don't compound what they've already done in this case. Don't rush to judgment. Have a judgment that is well thought out, one that you can believe in the morning after this verdict. I want you to place yourself the day after you render the verdict, when you get up and you look in the mirror and you are free, you are no longer sequestered, you will probably look for each other but you will be happy to be home again. But what is important, look in that mirror and say, have I been true to my oath? Did I do the right thing? Was I naive? Was I timid? Or was I courageous? Did I believe in the constitution. Did I believe in justice? Did I do my part for integrity and honesty? That is the mission you are on in this journey toward justice. And now yesterday I touched briefly on some of Mr. Darden's argument and we talked a little bit about the fact of his contention about motive. We talked about his analogy about a fuse. And I referred to him as dr. Darden with regard to what he had to say, and I thought I would just summarize briefly this morning the response to what he had to say and what he tried to weave together. As I said, he talked about an incident in 1985, an unfortunate incident between two people who were married. There was no arrest, there was no physical violence. The one incident in `89, the one he is not proud of, the one he wrote those letters about, the one he apologized for and said he was sorry, and there is no physical violence after that. In the 1993 call, the 911 call, you listen to that entire tape when they cut it off and you will remember that it is unfortunate when anyone has an argument, but you listen carefully to what Mr. Simpson is arguing about, what he is talking about and what the discussion is about. Mrs. Simpson mentions the children and he says, "You weren't worried about the children when you were doing so and so on the couch." He is pretty graphic, but any man or woman would be upset over what he is talking about on that tape. There was no physical violence. There is no excuse for him kicking the back door, but by the end--you remember what Kato Kaelin said and what the police officer said. They resolved this matter. It was an argument, it was loud and raucous and they moved on. There was no fuse after that. And this was during a time, you will recall, that in January of 1992, when they first agreed to separate. You don't hear anything about a dispute, but Miss Nicole Brown Simpson moved out. There was not my question about a dispute. When she got this divorce at the end of `92, there was no dispute. They were both dating other people. He is with Paula Barbieri for that like whole year and then, you know, it wasn't Mr. Simpson who pursued Mrs. Simpson; it was her who wanted to get back with those kids. You heard Arnelle Simpson and then they agreed, but he put on provisos on that. She couldn't move back in that house. She still kept her own house. Who is controlling whom? Who is pursuing whom when he talks about fuse? There is no fuse. They get back together and they tried to make it work. It lasts for almost a year.

My learned friend has the dates all wrong. It is around mother's day when they break up. You remember there is testimony from Kato Kaelin with a pediatric aids affair where Paula Barbieri goes with O.J. Simpson, early part of may, after mother's day, after they break up, with the kids Sydney and Justin. Now, we know they had been friends. Even when they broke up they were friends. You know how you know that? Remember the barber, Juanita Moore, nice lady who came in here and talked about O.J. Simpson not having dandruff, not having treated hair? And she said she came to the house the first part of may and there was Nicole there over at O.J.'s house. There is no fuse. Then they go on later that month. They break up. Even after being broken up, what does Arnelle tell you? That when Nicole gets sick, none of these other people who she may be seeing or whatever, it is O.J. taking her soup trying to help out. Now, you do that for your ex-wife or your ex-boyfriend or whatever. There is no fuse. There is no strings attached to that. He goes on with his life because now he is back with Paula. He had been with her the year before. And Miss Clark tried to get Kato Kaelin to ask, didn't he take Paula someplace in the summer of `93 when she knew they were now back together? And Kato says no, I don't think so, because they made this arrangement to date each other exclusively, and that is what happened, you see, and so we get all the way back past may into June and there is no trigger, there is no fuse, there is nothing going on. The only fuse, the only trigger is in Mr. Darden's mind. The evidence isn't there. And they spent all this time about motive. There is none. These were two people who divorced. The case was settled. They had their homes. They moved on. Christian Reichardt tells you that night he is happier than he had been for a long time because he had gotten his life together and moved on. And so I just wanted you to put that in perspective. If that wasn't enough, you look at that video of June 12th and the photograph of him with his daughter and you see whether or not this is a happy man just getting on with his life. So when he rhetorically asked the question why didn't we call Lenore Walker, I say back to him, why didn't you call Lenore Walker if she had something bad to say about O.J. Simpson? It wasn't necessary. It wasn't necessary. It wasn't necessary. As you know, we could be here forever calling one witness after the other. Sooner or later you were going to revolt and I wouldn't blame you. Mr. Darden agrees, we had to cut it off at some point. So I hope that when you look about this so-called board of abuse and they have things about a divorce, you put this in perspective. Absence of motive tends to establish innocence. That is what the jury instruction says. Evidence of other offenses are introduced for a very limited portion in this case. The bottom line is the positive things in this man's life, the good days far outweigh the bad things. And in your life, in all of our lives we just hope at the end, when we must ultimately meet our makers, that the good days have outweighed the bad days, and in this marriage the lasting monuments and memorial to this marriage are these two beautiful children. They had more good days than bad days by all of the evidence. These two people loved their children. They may have gone separate ways, but they loved their children. That is why he was back in town, to go to that recital, that recital where there is so many people, where it is in this auditorium where Nicole Brown Simpson gets his tickets. You know, that is why they are talking in the afternoon, to make arrangements, and she is the one who holds a seat for him. This is what happened on that date. This isn't about any argument. This is a family thing. So Mr. Darden wants to make a big thing and says, well, he had to go out to dinner with Kato, he had to catch a plane. See the evidence for what it is. Understand these things. Put them in perspective. And so you use your common sense. There is no fuse with regard to that. It is important for you to know that. Take a look at that video when you are back there. Take a look at all of the evidence. In this case Miss Clark in her argument on several occasions said that Mr. Simpson was cut on his razor sharp cell phone. Well, that is not what the evidence is, is it? That is not what was said. I read you what dr. Baden said about that and so we can use these words, but let's hopefully be accurate as we try to say those things.

Now, let's go back to where we were when we broke last night. We had started talking about the messengers in this case. We talked briefly about Vannatter and about all of his big lies. Lies become very important because he is the co-lead investigator in this case. From the very beginning he was lying to you. And it was interesting--and I thought about this last night after I left you. Just about ten days ago, a week or ten days ago, Vannatter took that stand again, and you saw him, you had a chance to again observe his demeanor, and you are smart, you know when somebody is lying and not telling you the truth. I don't have to go into that. You don't need the jury instruction. You have got this visceral experience and you have got your experiences in life and you know when somebody is lying. And he said something really interesting. It was really preposterous when you think about it. He said, "Mr. Shapiro, Mr. O.J. Simpson was no more a suspect than you were." Now, who in here believed that? Did he really think he was going to come back in here and we were going to believe that that O.J. Simpson was no more a suspect than Robert Shapiro? That is what he told you. Big lies. You can't trust him. You can't believe anything he says because it goes to the core of this case. When you are lying at the beginning, you will be lying at the end. The book of Luke talks about that. Talks about if you are untruthful in small things, you should be disbelieved in big things. There is no question about that. We have known that all along. So this man with his big lies--and then we have Fuhrman coming right on the heels and the two of them need to be paired together because they are twins of deception. Fuhrman and Vannatter, twins of deception who bring you a message that you cannot trust, that you cannot trust. Let's continue on where we left off then with this man Fuhrman who says some very interesting things in the course of his testimony, and as we talked about Vannatter's big lies, we have Fuhrman's big lies. Vannatter, the man who carried the blood; Fuhrman, the man who found the glove. You will recall that he was asked, as I read to you yesterday briefly, the question well-phrased by lee bailey, "Have you ever used this `n' word in ten years?" Went right back to `85. And he picked that `85 date. You know why? Because of the Kathleen Bell letter. Just like they knew about it, picked that date, so he knew he was lying. Honed in on it. Liars can be tricky. And so he was at that point trying to pin it down for you, ten years, `85 to `95. This was like in February of this year. He says also he never met Kathleen Bell at this marine center. He tells you that Rokahr, the photographer, took this photograph after seven o'clock in the morning. Remember that? Go back through your notes. And the reason he tells you that is because he wants that photograph of him pointing at the glove taken after he supposedly finds the glove at Rockingham. Now, you may not have caught that right at the beginning when this was happening. He says he took the photograph at Rockingham after seven o'clock A.M., after they returned from Rockingham. You know they all go over to Bundy after five o'clock. Strike that. At Bundy. They all go over to Rockingham at five o'clock, from 5:00 to 7:00, and so it becomes very, very important, as we look at this photograph in a few minutes. Rokahr then comes here near the end of the case, and there has been nobody called to refute him in rebuttal, and says these photographs on this contact sheet are all taken while it is dark. He says he could tell the difference in a photograph taken an hour and a half before sun rise, 5:41, 5:42, and an hour and a half afterwards, so then why then is this big liar in the crime scene with access to the glove and the hat? Why is he down there pointing at this glove where he is walking all in the blood and everything when he wants you to believe it is seven o'clock? Now, we know it is not seven o'clock. You see that photograph up there? That is Mark Fuhrman pointing. You see the envelope. Pointing under this neatly arranged cap. Glove supposedly just happened to fall right under that bush in that fashion. That is what you are asked to believe. There he is pointing at it. Well, now let me tell you why you recognize it. You recognize Fuhrman, personification of evil. When he is doing is that he is trying to tell you this is an important piece of evidence here and I just came back from Rockingham and this matches the glove found over there. That is what he tells you. But he is lying again. He is lying and that is why he is central to this case, because he hadn't even been to Rockingham at that point and he is tracking in that blood at that point and that becomes very important because you remember he slips up and says "In the Bronco" at some point. You get "In that Bronco." He put a bloody footprint in that Bronco. Are his shoes size 12? He talks about "In the Bronco." He talks about them. Remember there is a question he was asked about gloves and lee bailey asked him about. Well--he says, well--he is talking about gloves and he says, "Them." He never explained that. He says "Them." Does that mean two gloves? He said, "I saw them." Is that two gloves? Why would you say "Them"? He is intelligent enough to come and lie to you. So that picture, that photograph there, that seals their doom. That seals their doom. This man who in `85 in his mind started this, this man who is asked to go over and help O.J. Simpson and notify him and take care of the kids, this man, this perjurer, this racist, this genocidal racist, this is the man. And he says then inferentially he didn't plant the glove and now we know about these photographs, when they were taken, and you will have that contact sheet and you will see a photograph of Miss Nicole Brown Simpson and the last two on the roll taken at nighttime with the flash at 4:30 or so in the morning. Why else is this important? Because they are going to tell you, well, he didn't have an opportunity to get the glove or get access to anything. Remember they brought all these police officers in here, including Lieutenant Spangler, to say, well, you know, we were just watching Fuhrman the whole time. First of all, you knew that was a lie at the beginning. Why would they necessarily be watching him. They were always covering for him anyway. But we know that wasn't true because remember Rokahr got there shortly after three o'clock. Rokahr goes to that back alley and he sees Riske who is back there then. Remember Rokahr sees Riske in the back alley. Rokahr doesn't even see Fuhrman for like a half hour after he gets there, he says, and all of a sudden Fuhrman shows up. Where has he been? What has he been doing? And then Riske is out in the front of Bundy there and Riske testifies about the taking of this photograph. He wants to place the time later, but he said it is before the sun comes up, before daylight. That has to be because we've stipulated to it before 5:41. So inadvertently he corroborates Rokahr, but Rokahr knows because he took these photographs. Why then, ladies and gentlemen, is he pointing at this glove when he hasn't even been over there? Why then would they try to tell you he doesn't have time at Bundy when he is by himself for this period of time? He is not with Spangler; he is walking around by him. Why then is he walking in that crime scene and why does he lie to you and said he didn't have access to the crime scene? These are the facts. These are the facts. I haven't made them up. This is what you heard in this case. This is what we have proved. Some of it came in late; some of it came in early, but our job here is to piece this together so that you can then see this, so when he refers to the gloves as "Them," that has never been cleared up for you and he can't. That is a Freudian slip when he talks about "In the Bronco." And there was a dispute. Well, did he really say that? Remember the tape was played at the preliminary hearing and his voice was heard saying "In the Bronco." You can see all these things. He is strolling down to Rockingham, the big man, figuring a way to do this, to carry out this plan, this spot he has in his mind since 1985, to make the big score, and so Rokahr severely impeaches Fuhrman about these photographs, and once again, these photographs speak a thousand words. Concluding about Riske, he said on cross-examination that the photograph pointing at the glove was taken at least forty minutes before daylight, the sun rose at 5:41, maybe a little bit late, but it was before daylight and so we know that. That is now clear. Why did they then all try to cover for this man Fuhrman? Why would this man who is not only Los Angeles' worst nightmare, but America's worse nightmare, why would they all turn their heads and try to cover for them? Why would you do that if you are sworn to uphold the law? There is something about corruption. There is something about a rotten apple that will ultimately infect the entire barrel, because if the others don't have the courage that we have asked you to have in this case, people sit sadly by. We live in a society where many people are apathetic, they don't want to get involved, and that is why all of us, to a person, in this courtroom, have thanked you from the bottom of our hearts. Because you know what? You haven't been apathetic. You are the ones who made a commitment, a commitment toward justice, and it is a painful commitment, but you've got to see it through. Your commitment, your courage, is much greater than these police officers. This man could have been off the force long ago if they had done their job, but they didn't do their job. People looked the other way. People didn't have the courage. One of the things that has made this country so great is people's willingness to stand up and say that is wrong. I'm not going to be part of it. I'm not going to be part of the cover-up. That is what I'm asking you to do. Stop this cover-up. Stop this cover-up. If you don't stop it, then who? Do you think the police department is going to stop it? Do you think the D.A.'s office is going to stop it? Do you think we can stop it by ourselves? It has to be stopped by you. And you know, they talked about Fuhrman, they talked about him in derisive tones now, and that is very fashionable now, isn't it? Everybody wants to beat up on Fuhrman, the favored whipping boy in America. I told you I don't take any delight in that because you know before this trial started, if you grow up in this country, you know there are Fuhrmans out there. You learn early on in your life that you are not going to be naive, that you love your country, but you know it is not perfect, so you understand that, so it is no surprise to me, but I don't take any pride in it. But for some of you, you are finding out the other side of life. You are finding out--that is why this case is so instructive. You are finding out about the other side of life, but things aren't always as they seem. It is not just rhetoric, it is the actions of people, it is the lack of courage and it is a lack of integrity at high places. That is what we are talking about here. Credibility doesn't attach to a title or position; it attaches to the person, so the person who may have a job where he makes two dollars an hour can have more integrity than the highest person. It is something from within. It is in your heart. It is what the lord has put there. That is what we are talking about in this case. And so why don't they speak out? Why do they take him to their breast? Compare how our prosecutors treat Fuhrman as opposed to Kato Kaelin. Look at how they treated mark partridge as opposed to Kato Kaelin. Look at how they embraced him. And now they want to distance themselves. These same people say, oh, he is not important, but the Rokahr photograph puts the lie to that. He is very important. And what becomes so important when we talk about these two twin demons of evil, Vannatter and Fuhrman, is the jury instruction which you know about now and it says essentially that a witness willfully false--I think Mr. Douglas is going to put that up for us--

"A witness willfully false in one material part of his or her testimony is to be distrusted in others. You may reject the whole testimony of a witness who willfully has testified falsely to a material point unless from all the evidence you believe the probability of truth favors his or her testimony in other particulars." Why is this instruction so important? We got the bullet points up there. First of all, both prosecutors have now agreed that we have convinced them beyond a reasonable doubt, by the way, that he is a lying perjuring genocidal racist and he has testified falsely in this case on a number of scores. That is what his big lies tell you. And when you go back in the jury room, some of you may want to say, well, gee, you know, boys will be boys. This is just like police talk. This is the way they talk. That is not acceptable as the consciences of this community if you adopt that attitude. That is why we have this, because nobody has had the courage to say it is wrong. You are empowered to say we are not going to take that any more. I'm sure you will do the right thing about that. So that what then it says we must do is you have the authority, you may reject the whole testimony, you can then wipe out everything that Fuhrman told you, including the glove and all the things that he recovered with the glove. That is why they are so worried. That is why when people say Fuhrman is not central, they are wearing blinds. They have lost their objectivity. They don't understand what they are talking about. It is embarrassing for learned people to say that, but they are entitled to their opinions, but we are going to speak the truth. In a courtroom you are supposed to speak the truth. A witness who walks through those doors, who raises his or her hand, swears to tell the truth. You've heard lie after lie after lie that has been exposed and when a witness lies in a material part of his testimony, you can wipe out all of his testimony as a judge of the facts. That is your decision again. Nobody can tell you about that. Lest you feel that a greater probability of truth lies in something else, they said wipe it out. This applies not only to Fuhrman, it applies to Vannatter and then you see what trouble their case is in, because they lied to get in there to do these things when Vannatter carries that blood. They can't explain to you why he did that, because they were setting this man up, and that glove, anybody among you think that glove was just sitting there, just placed there, moist and sticky after six and a half hours? The testimony is it will be dried in three or four hours, according to MacDonell. We are not naive. You understand there is no blood on anything else. There is no blood trail. There is no hair and fiber. And you get the ridiculous explanation that Mr. Simpson was running into air conditioners on his own province.

THE BAILIFF: Excuse me, your Honor. We need to take a break.

THE COURT: All right. Anybody else?

(Brief pause.)

THE COURT: All right. The record will reflect that we now have our complete jury panel. Mr. Cochran.

(Brief pause.)

MR. COCHRAN: Witnesses willfully false in one material part, distrusted in others. These two form basically the cornerstone of the prosecution's case. Now, you know people talk all the time, well, you know, you are being conspiratorial and whatever. Gee, how would all these police officers set up O.J. Simpson? Why would they do that? I will answer that question for you. They believed he was guilty. They wanted to win. They didn't want to lose another big case. That is why. They believed that he was guilty. These actions rose from what their belief was, but they can't make that--the prosecutors can't make that judgment. Nobody but you can make that judgment. So when they take the law into their own hands, they become worse than the people who break the law, because they are the protectors of the law. Who then polices the police? You police the police. You police them by your verdict. You are the ones to send the message. Nobody else is going to do it in this society. They don't have the courage. Nobody has the courage. They have a bunch of people running around with no courage to do what is right, except individual citizens. You are the ones in war, you are the ones who are on the front line. These people set policies, these people talk all this stuff; you implement it. You are the people. You are what makes America so great, and don't you forget it. And so understand how this happened. It is part of a culture of getting away with things. It is part of what looking the other way. We determine the rules as we go along. Nobody is going to question us. We are the LAPD. And so you take these two twins of deception, and if as you can under this law wipe out their testimony, the prosecutors realize their case then is in serious trouble. From Riske to Bushey they came together in this case because they want to win. But it is not about them winning; it is about justice being done. They have other cases. This is this man's one life that is entrusted or will be soon, to you. So when we talked about this evidence being compromised, contaminated and corrupted, some people didn't believe that. Have we proved that? Have we proved that it was compromised, contaminated and corrupted? And yes, even something more sinister--I think you will believe we do, but there is something else about this man Fuhrman that I have to say before I am going to terminate this part of my opening argument and relinquish the floor to my learned colleague Mr. Barry Scheck, is something that Fuhrman said. And I'm going to ask Mr. Douglas and Mr. Harris to put up that Kathleen Bell letter. You know, it is one thing, and I dare say that most of you, when you heard Fuhrman said he hadn't used the "N" word, that you probably thought, well, he is lying, we know that is not true. That is just part of it. That is just want the prosecutors want to do, just talk about that part of it. That is not the part that bothers us on the defense. I live in America. I understand. I know about slights everyday of my life. But I want to tell you about what is troubling, what is frightening, what is chilling about that Kathleen Bell letter. Let's see if we can see part of it, and I think you will agree, so I want to put the focus back where it belongs on this letter and its application to this case. You will recall that god is good and he always brings you a way to see light when there is a lot of darkness around, and just through chance this lady had tried to reach Shapiro's office, couldn't reach it, and in July of 1994 she sent this fax to my office, and my good, loyal and wonderful staff got that letter to me early on. And this is one you just couldn't pass up. You get a lot of letters but you couldn't pass this one up because she says some interesting things. And she wasn't a fan of O.J. Simpson. What does she say? "I'm writing to you in regards to a story I saw on the news last night. I thought it ridiculous that the Simpson Defense team would even suggest that there might be racial motivation involved in the trial against Mr. Simpson." Yes, there are a lot of people out there who thought that at that time, and you know, you can't fault people for being naive, but once they know, if they continue to be naive, then you can fault them. That is what it is and this is why this case is important. Don't ever say again in this county or in this country that you don't know things like this exist. Don't pretend to be naive any more. Don't turn your heads. Stand up, show some integrity.

"And so I then glanced up at the television. I was quite shocked to see that officer Fuhrman was a man that I had the misfortune of meeting. You may have received the message from your answering service last night that I called to say that Mr. Fuhrman may be more of a racist than you could even imagine. I doubt that, but at any rate, it was something that got my attention. "Between 1985 and 1986 I worked as a real estate agent in Redondo Beach for Century 21 Bob Maher Realty now out of business. At the time my office was located above a marine recruiting center off of pacific coast highway. On occasion I would stop in to say hello to the two marines working there. I saw Mr. Fuhrman there a couple of times. I remember him distinctly because of his height and build, you know, he is tall.

"While speaking to the men I learned that Mr. Fuhrman was a police officer in Westwood." Isn't that interesting? Just exactly the place where Laura McKinny met him. "And I don't know if he was telling the truth but he said that he had been in a special division of the marines. I don't know how this subject was raised but officer Fuhrman says that when he sees a Nigger, as he called it, driving with a white woman, he would pull them over. I asked what if he didn't have a reason and he said that he would find one. I looked at the two marines to see if they knew he was joking, but it became obvious to me that he was very serious." Now, let me just stop at this point. Let's back it up a minute, Mr. Harris. Pull it back down, please. If he sees an African American with a white woman he would stop them. If he didn't have a reason, he would find one or make up one. This man will lie to set you up. That is what he is saying there. He would do anything to set you up because of the hatred he has in his heart. A racist is somebody who has power over you, who can do something to you. People could have views but keep them to themselves, but when they have power over you, that is when racism becomes insidious. That is what we are talking about here. He has power. A police officer in the street, a patrol officer, is the single most powerful figure in the criminal justice system. He can take your life. Unlike the supreme court, you don't have to go through all these appeals. He can do it right there and justify it. And that is why, that is why this has to be routed out in the LAPD and every place. Make up a reason because he made a judgment. That is what happened in this case. They made a judgment. Everything else after that is going to point toward O.J. Simpson. They didn't want to look at anybody else. Mr. Darden asked who did this crime? That is their job as the police. We have been hampered. They turned down our offers for help. But that is the prosecution's job. The judge says we don't have that job. The law says that. We would love to help do that. Who do you think wants to find these murderers more than Mr. Simpson? But that is not our job; it is their job. And when they don't talk to anybody else, when they rush to judgment in their obsession to win, that is why this became a problem. This man had the power to carry out his racist views and that is what is so troubling. Let's move on. Making up a reason. That is troubling. That is frightening. That is chilling. But if that wasn't enough, if that wasn't enough, the thing that really gets you is she goes on to say: "Officer Fuhrman went on to say that he would like nothing more than to see all niggers gathered together and killed. He said something about burning them or bombing them. I was too shaken to remember the exact words he used. However, I do remember that what he said was probably the most horrible thing I had ever heard someone say. What frightened me even more was that he was a police officer sworn to uphold the law." And now we have it. There was another man, not too long ago in the world, who had those same views who wanted to burn people, who had racist views and ultimately had power over people in this country.

People didn't care. People said he was just crazy, he is just a half-baked painter. They didn't do anything about it. This man, this scourge, became one of the worse people in the history of this world, Adolph Hitler, because people didn't care or didn't try to stop him. He had the power over his racism and his anti-religion. Nobody wanted to stop him, and it ended up in world war ii, the conduct of this man. And so Fuhrman, Fuhrman wants to take all black people now and burn them or bomb them. That is genocidal racism. Is that ethnic purity? What is that? What is that? We are paying this man's salary to espouse these views? Do you think he only told Kathleen Bell whom he just had met? Do you think he talked to his partners about it? Do you think commanders knew about it? Do you think everybody knew about it and turned their heads? Nobody did anything about it. Things happen for a reason in your life. Maybe this is one of the reasons we are all gathered together this day, one year and two days after we met. Maybe there is a reason for your purpose. Maybe this is why you were selected. There is something in your background, in your character that helps you understand this is wrong. Maybe you are the right people at the right time at the right place to say no more, we are not going to have this. This is wrong. What they've done to our client is wrong. This man, O.J. Simpson, is entitled to an acquittal. You cannot believe these people. You can't trust the message. You can't trust the messengers. It is frightening. It is quite, frankly frightening, and it is not enough for the Prosecutors now to stand up and say, oh, well, let's just back off. The point I was trying to make, they didn't understand that it is not just using the "N" word. Forget that. We knew he was lying about that. Forget that. It is about the lengths to which he would go to get somebody black and also white if they are associated with black. That is pretty frightening. It is not just African Americans, it is white people who would associate or deign to go out with a black man or marry one. You are free in America to love whoever you want, so it infects all of us, doesn't it, this one rotten apple, and yet they cover for him. Yet they cover for him. And so how do we do it and what do we do with regard to this man? Well, we call some witnesses. And you recall these witnesses. And before I talk about these witnesses just briefly, and I'm going to conclude my remarks with regard to them, I indicated to you that by the nature of this case I'm going to pass the baton to Mr. Barry Scheck. You have been great from the standpoint of listening and watching, and I stayed longer than I planned to, but I hope you agree that some of these things were important. And I will get one more time to conclude with some concluding remarks after Mr. Scheck finishes. The good news is that Mr. Scheck and I will both hopefully finish today and turn it back over to Miss Clark, so in a day or so you are going to get this case. You don't have to hear lawyers talk to you any more. It will time to hear you talk, time to hear you speak out. And I will be happy. I will be able to relax tonight knowing that soon it will be in your hands. We are real comfortable about that, all of us, and you should know that, so please give Mr. Scheck the attention to which you've given me. And understand all parts of this case are very important and it all ties together because it is--all the evidence in this case went through that LAPD and that black hole over there, that cesspool of contamination and you listen into him about what he has to say in that regard. Mr. Darden said that in a textbook fashion we had impeached Mr. Fuhrman. We thank him for that. We take no pride in that, but that is what did happen. In addition to calling Kathleen Bell where you saw her--and she is not the kind of lady that--you know, in looking at her--you probably remember her. Unless you know it would be very interesting--you know he is lying about not knowing her, but this man used these words and these racial epithets so much he probably can't remember who he said it to you. He said it to whoever came in contact with him, on tape. Can you imagine the gall about that that you would have these racist views and yet would you put it on tape? Thank God he put it on tape. And so Kathleen Bell came in here and told you the same things in those letters. You saw her. You observed her. You know she told us the truth. They couldn't mess with her because now we had those tapes. And then there was Natalie Singer. Barely knew this man. He was dating her roommate. This man is an indiscriminate racist. He talks so bad that she didn't want him back in the house. What does he say to her in her presence? "The only good Nigger is a dead Nigger."

You probably all heard that expression sometime in your background somewhere or heard somebody say this. And that is tremendously offensive. He just says it in the presence of his partner's girlfriend, like they are going to go on a date. I mean, I hope that in homes throughout this country people aren't acting like this. This happened to come to light, but I would be pretty frightened if I felt that the majority of people in this country acted like this behind closed doors or whatever. Because what you do in the dark is going to come to the light. Remember that. That is what this case is about. It came to the light and just in time to get it to you. So you saw her on the stand. You saw her graphically. We will talk about that. Any doubt in anybody's mind she is telling you the truth? Any one of you think she is not telling you the truth? And then finally we had Roderic Hodge, and this series of witnesses. And Roderic Hodge, intelligent young man, understands something about his rights, too, because when--after this run-in with Fuhrman and his partner when he is in the back of the police car, Fuhrman turns around and says to him words that I want you to remember in this case, "I told you I'd get you, Nigger," that is what he tells Roderic Hodge. Why is that important? Because from 1985, when he went on that one call involving the Mercedes, that was this man's mind-set vis-à-vis O.J. Simpson, I'm going to get that guy. And in `89 when he wrote that report, indelibly impressed on his mind, and in `94 he had his chance, still in west Los Angeles, he had his chance. So Hodge is important because you can espouse all these epithets and talk theoretically about your racism, but when it is directed toward a human being--and I said to him, "Mr. Hodge, tell this jury how that made you feel." He said, "It made me feel angry and upset and frustrated." It was dehumanizing in a free society. But this man, Fuhrman, does it with immunity and his partner sat there and heard it and didn't report it. There is something rotten about this kind of conduct, that it is going on too long, and so that is why he is important. But the capper was finding those tapes, something that you could hear. Lest there be any doubt in anybody's mind, Laura McKinny came in here, and I can imagine the frustration of the Prosecutors, they've had the glove demonstration, they have seen all these other things go wrong and now they got to face these tapes. And they didn't know how to handle her. Quite frankly, she was a reluctant witness. You know that. Mr. Darden asked her those questions where he became negative with her. She is very smart, not like some others who didn't know how to handle it. He says, "Why are we having this negative conversation? Why are you acting and treating me like this?" I didn't try to stop him about cover-ups and things. "Why are you asking me these questions? I am the one who is here under subpoena. Why are you treating me like this?" You know it is true because they have heard the tapes. Why are you messing with this lady? You obviously get so wrapped up with what you are doing, I guess. Why are they messing with this lady? We owe a debt of gratitude to this lady that ultimately and finally she came forward. And she tells us that this man over the time of these interviews uses the "N" word 42 times is what she says.

And so-called Fuhrman tapes. And you of course had an opportunity to listen to this man and espouse this evil, this personification of evil. And so I'm going to ask Mr. Harris to play exhibit 1368 one more time. It was a transcript. This was not on tape. The tape had been erased where he said, "We have no niggers where I grew up." These are two of 42, if you recall. Then this was his actual voice.

(At 10:00 A.M., Defense exhibit 1368, a videotape, was played.)

MR. COCHRAN: This is the word text for what he then says on the tape. Now, you heard that voice. No question whose voice that is. Mr. Darden concedes whose voice that is. They don't do anything. Talking about women. Doesn't like them any better than he likes African Americans. They don't go out and initiate contact with some six foot five inch Nigger who has been in prison pumping weights. This is how he sees this world. That is this man's cynical view of the world. This is this man who is out there protecting and serving. That is Mark Fuhrman. And he is paired in this case with Phil Vannatter. They are both beacons that you look at and look to as the messengers that you must look through and pass. They are both people who have shown that they lie, will lie, did lie on the stand under oath. And you know, one little parenthetical thing how these people all try to stick together from the standpoint of law enforcement. The FBI agent come in here and he talks about--when I bring out the facts he says that Vannatter says they are not there to save lives. On cross-examination, he says, well, I think he was being sarcastic, Vannatter was being sarcastic or maybe it was a joke. But you know, when I listened to that, I thought about that, I said, well, what is the joke? What is the sarcasm? Is the constitution this man's rights to be safe and secure in his home? Is that the joke? Is that the sarcasm? Sad state of affairs. That is the lead detective I'm talking about, these two twin devils of deception. You think about it and keep them in mind. Thank you for your attention during this first part of my argument. I hope that during this phase of it I have demonstrated to you that this really is a case about a rush to judgment, an obsession to win, at all costs, a willingness to distort, twist, theorize in any fashion to try to get you to vote guilty in this case where it is not warranted, that these metaphors about an ocean of evidence or a mountain of evidence is little more than a tiny, tiny stream, if at all, that points equally toward innocence, that any mountain has long ago been reduced to little more than a molehill under an avalanche of lies and complexity and conspiracy. This is what we've shown you. And so as great as America is, we have not yet reached the point where there is equality in rights or equality of opportunity. I started off talking to you a little bit about Frederick Douglas and what he said more than a hundred years ago, for there are still the Mark Fuhrmans in this world, in this country, who hate and are yet embraced by people in power. But you and I, fighting for freedom and ideals and for justice for all, must continue to fight to expose hate and genocidal racism and these tendencies. We then become the guardians of the constitution, as I told you yesterday, for if we as the People don't continue to hold a mirror up to the face of America and say this is what you promised, this is what you delivered, if you don't speak out, if you don't stand up, if you don't do what's right, this kind of conduct will continue on forever and we will never have an ideal society, one that lives out the true meaning of the creed of the constitution or of life, liberty and justice for all. I'm going to take my seat, but I get one last time to address you, as I said before. This is a case about an innocent man wrongfully accused. You have seen him now for a year and two days. You observed him during good times and the bad times. Soon it will be your turn. You have the keys to his future. You have the evidence by which you can acquit this man. You have not only the patience, but the integrity and the courage to do the right thing. We believe you will do the right thing, and the right thing is to find this man not guilty on both of these charges. Thank you very, very much. I appreciate your attention. I think, your Honor, we may need a brief break because he has to be--

THE COURT: Exhibits?

MR. COCHRAN: Judge, yes.

THE COURT: All right. Ladies and gentlemen, we will take a 15-minute recess at this time. Remember all my admonitions to you. And we will see you back here in fifteen minutes. All right. We will stand in recess.

(Recess.)

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA; THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 1995 10:10 A.M.

Department no. 103 Hon. Lance A. Ito, Judge

APPEARANCES:

(The Defendant not being present, represented by Johnnie L. Cochran, Jr., and Peter Neufeld, esquires; the People not represented.)

(Janet M. Moxham, CSR no. 4855, official reporter.)

(Christine M. Olson, CSR no. 2378, official reporter.)

(The following proceedings were held in camera:)

THE COURT: I am going to recite the following facts that just occurred in open court after we recessed. Mr. Neufeld called my attention, told me his glasses had not been fixed, that he wanted to sit over by the rail next to the jury. I told him he could not, and then he told me that was not fair. I find that to be a contemptuous remark, accusing this court of not being fair. I cite you for contempt. Mr. Neufeld.

MR. NEUFELD: May I be heard?

THE COURT: You may be heard.

MR. NEUFELD: Thank you. Your Honor, what I said was that I had repaired my glasses with the glue, but that it broke again this morning. It didn't hold. And I sat there through Mr. Cochran's summation and I couldn't see what was happening. I asked if I could sit up there in the seat not next to the railing, but next to Detective Lange. Detective Lange could sit next to the railing. All right. That's what I asked for because, as I stated, I can't see the summation otherwise. You said no at that point and I said I didn't think that was fair. I said it not in front of anybody else. It was a private comment. I was simply saying for the court to deprive me the ability to see the summation and see what was happening when there was seats there I didn't think was fair. I really didn't. I just can't see it otherwise.

THE COURT: Mr. Neufeld, this court gave you as much assistance as possible to help you with your glasses. There are one-hour glass repairs that are readily available. You decided not to take advantage of that. That's not my problem. To ask to sit on the side of the courtroom and in the row that's reserved for the Prosecution because you have a problem with eyeglasses that you have not addressed is not this court's problem.

MR. NEUFELD: Your Honor, with all due respect, number one, I tried to take care of my glasses. I don't even have a prescription. I called the doctor in New York. He couldn't give me the prescription because they're in the archives at this point because I haven't been there in several years. That's not the point. The point is that there have been many times during this trial when we were permitted to sit in those seats. We were permitted to sit in those seats so we could see boards being shown. We were permitted to sit in those seats when witnesses during the Prosecution's case came off the witness stand to point out certain things to the jury. That has never been a problem. You've never made it an issue. This is the very first time you made it an issue.

THE COURT: The Prosecution objected to your being there during their arguments.

MR. NEUFELD: That's exactly right. So we went back. It's no longer the Prosecution's argument right now. It's the Defense argument. So the Prosecution--

THE COURT: And it's their side of the courtroom. Do you want them to sit on your side of the bench?

MR. NEUFELD: I have absolutely no problem with them sitting over on our side of the bench, your Honor. In fact, it could have been suggested for purposes of summation.

THE COURT: That's not the issue. The issue is what you said to me, and I find that to be contemptuous.

MR. COCHRAN: Could I address that? I think if the court understands that--and I appreciate what the court is saying. I glean as a third party here that he did not mean it in a contemptuous fashion. I'm sure he doesn't. He apologizes that the court took it that way because he didn't mean it.

THE COURT: I haven't heard him apologize, counsel.

MR. NEUFELD: I did not mean it. I did not mean it to be contemptuous to the court, your Honor. I do think, however, that I should be permitted to sit over there because I can't see otherwise. I have tried--made every effort to try and get new glasses or take care of these glasses so I can see, and I can't. I literally can't see. I've worked on Mr. Scheck's summation for days with him and I would like an opportunity to be closer so I can see it. That's all I am asking, all I was asking.

MR. COCHRAN: Let me address that. It is true, your Honor, as you know, Mr. Neufeld and Mr. Scheck work together day and night, and we would ask the court to consider--in fact, if--the court indicated the Prosecution had an objection. Since it's our argument, I would ask for an opportunity to ask them if they have any objection to, during Mr. Scheck's argument, Mr. Neufeld being close by. I think he would like to see it. They live together. They came here together, and I think that would be reasonable. I think it's clear to the court he was not and would not be contemptuous to this court on that issue. He does apologize from that standpoint.

THE COURT: I don't believe that's a genuine apology, counsel. I think it's a pretense just to get out of this at this point.

MR. COCHRAN: Your Honor, I think that given this--and given where we are, over this issue, I just don't think he would--this would be an issue that anybody would go over the wall, just on the issue of eyeglasses I don't think. I think, knowing the respect he has for this court, I don't think he would do that.

THE COURT: For him to say that in open court while the jury is still in the box, the public is still there--

MR. COCHRAN: I didn't hear it, your Honor. I was over there. I did not hear it.

MR. NEUFELD: I don't think that's fair because I do think when I said it to you, you came over toward me, the jury had already left the box. I looked over--

THE COURT: The jury was still--some of the jury members were still there.

MR. NEUFELD: You were walking off the bench at that point when I said it to you and had that discussion with you. There were no more jurors in the box. I purposely waited until they were all gone. The only other person who was present in the range of my voice besides you was Deirdre. There was no one else who heard, no one else who could have heard it, and I would have--I wouldn't do something like that. And I mean it's not fair to even think I would do something like that. If you can appreciate the frustration of not being able to see what's going on in the proceedings where I've worked here for seven months, you know, at great sacrifice--and I've tried to make efforts so I could see it today, all of which failed. I was on the telephone with a number of different places yesterday to try to take care of this. It couldn't be done. So I reglued it again, I came in today, and they broke again. I mean, that's all that happened. I was trying to put them on, and I couldn't and they broke again. So I couldn't see. And if you looked, I didn't have glasses during the summation this morning when Mr. Cochran spoke.

THE COURT: Mr. Cochran, would you ask either Miss Clark or Mr. Darden to join us, please.

(Christopher Darden is now present.)

THE COURT: Mr. Darden.

MR. DARDEN: Good morning.

THE COURT: Good morning. How are you, sir?

MR. DARDEN: Fine.

THE COURT: Mr. Neufeld, because of his broken glasses, has requested permission to sit on one of those seats on your side of the rail on the back row so he can see Mr. Scheck's performance. Do you have any objection? He can't see because of his glasses.

MR. DARDEN: You mean, we have like 500 one-hour glass places in this town and he hasn't gone there? Is he going to sit next to McKenna?

MR. NEUFELD: I thought--Detective Lange is sitting on the railing--I could sit next to Detective Lange, inside from Detective Lange.

MR. DARDEN: I don't mind him sitting next to McKenna near the elmo.

MS. CLARK: He can sit next to him for Barry's argument. I don't want him there for me, if you don't mind.

MR. COCHRAN: The understanding is, he's to the right of McKenna, is on their side.

THE COURT: All right.

MR. COCHRAN: I think--Judge, I appreciate that. And I do reiterate that I don't think he meant any disrespect for this court. I wasn't aware of this. I was focusing--I didn't hear from where I was.

THE COURT: You guys are insistent on making this exciting every day.

MR. COCHRAN: I want to get through a day with no problems, get this case to the jury. I want to pass it off to them.

MR. DARDEN: Anything else?

THE COURT: No.

(Mr. Darden exits chambers.)

MR. COCHRAN: I believe we are getting close. We can do everything we can to talk to Mr. Scheck now, see if we can't finish ours I hope by the dinner break and then so they can wrap it up.

THE COURT: No. I was telling Peter earlier today I think tomorrow morning.

MR. COCHRAN: Are you telling me that you would go over?

THE COURT: No. I don't think they'll finish.

MR. COCHRAN: No, I don't think so. But I think--just for your planning, I think you can try--I think we'll get it to the jury tomorrow. You only have a few instructions left?

THE COURT: Yeah. Just concluding instructions.

MR. COCHRAN: Judge, may I ask--can we go off the record?

THE COURT: Off the record.

(A conference was held, not reported.)

THE COURT: All right. I'm going to withdraw my citation of contempt. Mr. Neufeld, you may sit on the back row next to Mr. McKenna. All right.

(At 10:20 A.M., in camera proceedings were concluded.)

(The following proceedings were held in open court, out of the presence of the jury:)

THE COURT: All right. Back on the record in the Simpson matter. All parties are again present. All right. Mr. Scheck, do you have your exhibits organized? Are you ready to proceed?

MR. SCHECK: Yes. Thank you, your Honor.

THE COURT: All right. Deputy Trower, let's have the jurors, please.

(Brief pause.)

(The following proceedings were held in open court, in the presence of the jury:)

THE COURT: All right. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Please be seated. Let the record reflect that we have been rejoined by all the members of our jury panel. Good morning again, ladies and gentlemen. And Mr. Scheck, I understand that you are going to address the DNA issues or physical evidence issues?

MR. SCHECK: I hope so.

THE COURT: You may proceed.

MR. SCHECK: Thank you, your Honor.

CLOSING ARGUMENT BY MR. SCHECK:

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, good morning.

THE JURY: Good morning.

MR. SCHECK: Let me join with everybody in thanking you for your service. I can--the frustration, the loneliness, the sacrifice you have made in this sequestration is something that we understand or we are trying to understand. As the Judge has pointed out a number of times, my colleague, Mr. Neufeld and I, we are from New York city. More specifically, we are from Brooklyn, and we've been out here quite unexpectedly for a lot of months. And I remember when that detective from Chicago testified about having those keys that you stick in and out of the doors and little lights go on, umm, every day going in and out of those doors again and again, and again like groundhog day, everything repeating itself, the monotony, the loneliness, the frustration. We sit around and we talk sometimes in amazement at how you deal with this and how appreciative we are and--well, it is just really a honor and a privilege to present this case to you. And as lawyers that dealt with some of the forensic evidence in this case, which was detailed and complicated, and I'm sure I speak for myself, Mr. Blasier, Mr. Neufeld, Mr. Clarke, for the Prosecution, Mr. Goldberg, that we had a job. Our job was to make it simple, to make it cogent without sacrificing any meaningful detail. That is our job. And I can't tell you how appreciative we are because you paid attention, you were patient, you followed the evidence. I know that. I watched it. Now, you know it is our job to make it simple, to make it cogent without sacrificing detail that was important, and sometimes we let you down. I know that. Some days when we were talking about some of this, it was hard, and we came back to it again. And I think both sides tried to clarify the issues as much as we could, but you never let us down, because those were long days, but you were more than fair with us. I know you followed and paid attention to this evidence. So it is a privilege and honor to have presented that evidence to you and I must also say that standing before you right now is a terrifying responsibility. It is a terrifying responsibility because we think the evidence shows that we represent an innocent man wrongly accused.

MS. CLARK: Objection, objection.

MR. SCHECK: We represent, we think--

THE COURT: Excuse me.

MR. SCHECK: We think the Prosecution hasn't come close to meeting its burden of proof in this case beyond a reasonable doubt and we--

MS. CLARK: Your Honor, objection.

THE COURT: All right. Side bar, counsel.

(The following proceedings were held at the bench:)

THE COURT: All right. We are over at the side bar. Miss Clark, I think your objection is that there was a comment by Mr. Scheck that "We also believe."

MS. CLARK: Yes.

MR. SCHECK: My comment was, and I want to be specific because I am very aware of these rules, we believe the evidence shows.

MS. CLARK: That is not what he said.

MR. SCHECK: That is exactly what I said. I resent this interruption. I know the rules and she can go check the transcript.

MS. CLARK: Read it back.

THE COURT: That is not just what was said there, but just a caution.

MS. CLARK: Your Honor, we think we represent a man--

THE COURT: That is what he said. I cautioned him.

(The following proceedings were held in open court:)

THE COURT: Thank you, counsel. Proceed.

MR. SCHECK: The integrity of this system is at stake. You cannot convict when the core of the Prosecution's case is built on perjurious testimony of police officers, unreliable forensic evidence and manufactured evidence. It is a cancer at the heart of this case and that is what this evidence shows. When you go through it patiently, when you go through it carefully, when you go through it scientifically, logically, that is what the evidence shows, and you cannot convict on that evidence. There are many, many reasonable doubts buried right in the heart of the scientific evidence in this case, and we have demonstrated that. And we don't have to prove them, but the evidence shows it. So in the words of Dr. Lee, something is wrong. Something is terribly wrong with the evidence in this case. You cannot trust it, it lacks integrity, it cannot be a basis for a verdict of beyond a reasonable doubt.

There was a logo that we showed you in the opening statements that we have reproduced here on a board, and you may recall it, it is a black hole. As you recall, it shows the evidence from Bundy, the evidence from Rockingham and the Bronco, the evidence from Mr. Simpson itself passes through the Los Angeles Police Department, the messengers that Mr. Cochran was talking about, the lab, criminalists, Coroner's office, and then it is tested by the FBI, the Department of Justice and Cellmark. And if you recall, in the opening statements we said contaminated, compromised and corrupted, integrity of the evidence. Now, the importance of this flow chart is point no. 1, and you heard Dr. Cotton, Gary Sims, Dr. Gerdes, all the forensic experts told you with respect certainly to DNA testing, all the testing, if it is contaminated, compromised or corrupted here, it doesn't matter what the results are by these other testing agencies, because if it happens within that black hole of LAPD, it doesn't matter how many times you test it. Miss Clark got up there and said, well, why didn't we hear from Dr. Blake. If we didn't have Dr. Blake in this case to be sitting there as the testing was going on--while you were already serving on this jury panel things were being tested. He was up there looking at what he was doing. We wouldn't have even known what was going on in this case. But the point is, by the time it reached the California Department of Justice and Gary Sims, if that evidence--and we have demonstrated, contaminated, compromised and corrupted. You could do a hundred tests. Dr. Blake could test it, Dr. Lee's lab could test it, everybody could test it and you would get the same result, so that has not been the issue in this case and don't be distracted by that. Dr. Terry speed, you will recall him, he gave testimony in this case about error, laboratory error, and he again used that term, common mode error. If it happens here and that is where the evidence is compromised, contaminated and corrupted, these results are not adding anything. So you ask the question how did the Los Angeles Police Department, how does any laboratory become a black hole that impairs the integrity of the evidence? Can we have the first slide. Any laboratory has to have three things: You have to have rules and training, you have to have what is known as quality assurance and you have to have chain of custody, security of the evidence. Well, what have we heard about rules and training at the Los Angeles Police Department laboratory? Well, this laboratory is run without a set of rules. That everyone knows. They don't even have a manual. Think about that. That is extraordinary. And then they have this draft manual and it is ignored by the criminalists, Fung and Mazzola. They don't know what is in the draft manual, what procedures there are. And then the laboratory director, Michele Kestler, well, she was the acting laboratory director. Actually one of the real problems here is at the time of this case the head of the laboratory was a police officer, not a scientist, but Michele Kestler, she had that draft manual on her desk for four years going through it. And she says, well, some of this is no good and they didn't get around to it, so that is how you become a black hole. The testimony is clear in this case they did not give their criminalists training in state of the art techniques, in particular of great relevance here, there was no DNA training for the evidence collectors. Now, that has got to be a significant point. Miss Clark told you in the opening statement that collecting, preserving bloodstain evidence for purposes of DNA testing was a simple as going into your kitchen and cleaning up spillage. Now, we all know, we all know that is not true based on what we've heard in this case. May we have the next slide, please. Quality assurance. That is a term that is used in bureaucracies and hospitals and laboratories, any places where you are trying to deliver service with integrity. What is going on here? There is a failure to document how you collect the evidence, a fundamental duty as Dr. Lee showed you, remember, with that chart, fundamental duty of the criminalists to document the evidence. In other words, where it was picked up, how it was picked up, when it was picked up. And we have seen the problems in this case when you can't do that and to try to reconstruct it later when your memories are gone and you can't do it. Well, that is not done. And failure to document testing is tolerated. Compare the notes at the Department of Justice, Gary Sims and Renee Montgomery, with what you saw from Collin Yamauchi and Dennis Fung. We--it was--I had to rearrange the notes for Collin Yamauchi, his own notes, when he was on the witness stand, and he goes that's right, first I took out O.J. Simpson's reference sample and made the fitzco card, then the next thing I did was the glove and then the next thing I did, all within that one hour twenty minutes, were the Bundy blood drops. I had to reconstruct his notes for him and he goes, that's right, that is the way it happened. I guess that is right. I mean, it had to be when you reconstructed it all, but the notes are not there and that is fundamental for having any integrity whatsoever. There was no serious supervision of these people. That is just clear. You saw it. This lab was not inspected. This lab is not accredited. This lab is not subjected, certainly the DNA, to external blind proficiency testing which you know, which you know, is what you need. Dr. Gerdes told you about that. Everybody talked about that. This national research counsel report, DNA technology in forensic science. Could we have the next slide. Now, this is critical. Chain of custody and security. There is absolutely nothing more fundamental to preserving integrity of forensic evidence than a chain of custody, than having security. You have to know what you are picking up. You have to be able to document it, otherwise bad things can happen and nobody can trace it. In this case they did not count the swatches when they collected them. They did not count the swatches when they got back to the laboratory and put them in the tubes for drying. They did not count the swatches when they took them out of the tubes and put them in the bindles. We don't know how many swatches they started with. They didn't book the evidence in this case for three days. They kept it in the least secure facility, the evidence processing room, for three days, without being able to track the items. The lead homicide detective in this case, and we have talked about it a little and we will talk about it some more, is walking around with an unsealed blood vial for three hours. It is unheard of. The other lead detective in this case is taking shoes home right out of--this could be critical evidence. The shoes that they suspect he was wearing that night, taking it home. Now, you know, it was amazing, when Mr. Fung testified, the extent to which, you know, they have lost all tract of the rules. At one point I asked him, well, it would have been all right if they took the blood home and he said sure you could put it in the refrigerator overnight. Do you remember that answer? I mean, there is no sense of what has to be done in order to give you reliable evidence. None. Think about the Bronco. They finished doing the collection in the Bronco and then it is abandoned literally for two months. There is a box supposed to check off, give special care if you are going to check it for biological evidence, not checked off. It is sent to Viertel's. It is abandoned for two months. There are no records of who went in and out of that car. There was a theft. Everybody was around in there. And then on August 26th they are collecting evidence from it. And then finally, and this is--could we have the next board. This is a critical point that I think demonstrates all you need to know about security and chain of custody in this laboratory, the missing lens, the missing lens. Now, this is very important evidence. This is the envelope that is found at the crime scene with the prescription glasses. If you are investigating a case, you are very concerned about this.

THE COURT: Mr. Scheck, are there any remains on this board?

MR. SCHECK: No, there are not, your Honor.

THE COURT: All right. Thank you.

MR. SCHECK: Now, we can tell, as Dr. Lee pointed out, on this lens there are smears of blood, trace evidence. There could have been fingerprints from the perpetrator who was going into that envelope. On June 22nd Dr. Baden and Dr. Wolf got an opportunity just to look, just to look at the evidence, not touch or examine or test, just to look, and they saw two lens there, made a note of them. February 16th, think about it, that is the first time we got a chance to inspect and just even handle the evidence. You are already sitting here February 16th. There is something wrong. When we look at it, that lens is gone. There is no report, no record, no investigation of its disappearance. Nobody comes in and tells you what happened. Now, that tells you a lot. Did somebody take this from the laboratory as a souvenir? Did somebody walk off with this? How can that be? This is critical evidence in a case? How can that be? It just vanished down this black hole?

Now they are going to say we are Fort Knox. Nobody could get to the evidence in this case with our evidence tracking system. I should just tell you in passing, I'm sure you caught it, that even when it is booked into the evidence control unit and it is supposedly being tracked, they didn't say their computer tracking system is a chain of custody system. It isn't. They have all the evidence items in boxes, like the sock and the blood drops, and they will put them in the serology freezer and they are in a box there and then somebody will hit the computer and they can go in and then they can take any item they want out of that box. It is not tracked by specific items. There is no good security in this system. There is plenty of access if you want to tamper with evidence if you are authorized personnel, if you are a lead detective, if you are somebody there. It can happen. And the missing lens is you all you need to know. What is going on here? And if they come back and say, well, maybe Dr. Baden and Wolf are wrong, there was no lens to begin with, well, that is even weirder, isn't it? What kind of killer takes a souvenir like this? How does that fit in with their theory? The missing lens is a serious problem in this case. Now, the black hole symbolizes something else. You know, science is not better than the methods employed and the people who employ it. DNA is a sophisticated technology. It is a wonderful technology. But there is a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it. The issue in this case is not is DNA good or bad DNA technology. The issue is right or wrong. So Miss Clark gets up here and tells you, well, Dr. Lee said DNA is okay, therefore the DNA evidence in this case is okay. That is ridiculous. Dr. Lee said right way, wrong way. Dr. Lee is one of the authors of this report. Right way, wrong way. And something else. During the cross-examination of Dennis Fung and Andrea Mazzola and Mr. Matheson, we brought out a pamphlet entitled "Collection of DNA evidence," how you should do it. It was a pamphlet that was put together by Dr. Henry Lee in association with others. Mr. Fung had only heard of it, if you recall, after he was prepared to testify in this case, not before they all went out and collected the evidence. And in that report, as it was established, and Mr.--Agent Bodziak, I don't know if he really knows a lot about Dr. Lee. As he said he had limited knowledge. I mean, he is questioning whether he goes to crime scenes. The FBI is saying how do you collect evidence at a crime scene? Dr. Lee writes the manual and in that manual they say you don't put these swatches in plastic bags because you put wet blood swatches in plastic bags, you are going to degrade all the DNA in them. And they sat here debating whether you could do that for months, and as we will talk about it now, they are trying to turn that argument around, but it is just plain that they didn't know what they were doing here. And you can have the most sophisticated technology in the world and if you don't apply it correctly, you can't trust the results. There is no compliance with the NRC report. There is no compliance with the kind of standards that you would require in a life and death situation, and this is a life and death situation. And that is what you have to demand of a laboratory. And Dr. Gerdes is a man that deals with life and death situations, bone marrow transplants, organ transplants, disease diagnosis. He came in and told you about the standards that we demand, that we require, that ought to be the minimum. They are not close. You can't brush this off, as Miss Clark did in her argument, by saying sloppy criminalists, sloppy Coroner and that is all she said. I fully anticipate that most of the matters I am going to address to you she has been planning to address in her rebuttal summation because she certainly didn't address them in her closing argument, did she. You can't just say sloppy criminalist, sloppy Coroner, big deal. She said DNA--insult to your intelligence, frankly--DNA is used to identify the war dead therefore accept all the evidence in this case. That doesn't answer the question, does it? As a matter of fact, the DNA tests she is talking about are something that are all mitochrondrial dealing DNA tests and it has nothing to do with the DNA tests in this case and the war dead has nothing to do with what was going on in this case. Zero. It is not an answer, it is not this case, it is not the techniques. They argue that the Defense has to prove exactly how, exactly where, exactly when tampering occurred with any of this evidence. That is not our burden. That is not our burden.

They have to prove that this wasn't tampered with beyond a reasonable doubt. When people tamper with evidence they try to do is with some stealth, they try to cover their tracks, and as Mr. Cochran pointed out, it wouldn't take more than two bad police officers to do this and a lot of people would look the other way. Could we have 2.01. Now, the way that I would like to organize the rest of my remarks for you is a systematic study of the essential facts and the circumstantial evidence charged in this case talks about key points. "Each fact which is essential to complete a set of circumstances necessary to establish the Defendant's guilt must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt." Each essential fact. That is what is special about a circumstantial evidence case. For each essential fact they have to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. If they fail, if there is a reasonable doubt about an essential fact, you must acquit. Those are the rules. And when you are looking at a piece of circumstantial evidence, if it is susceptible of two reasonable interpretations, one points to guilt, one points to innocence, you must adopt the one that points to innocence. Could we have the next chart. So what I propose to do with you today, and I will try to do it as quickly as I possibly can, is go through what I believe are essential facts. Now, we don't have to prove anything and we don't have the burden of proof here and I'm going to confront each and every one of these essential pieces of evidence in this case and raise a reasonable doubt about it, more than a reasonable doubt, many reasonable doubts. But if they fail in one of their essential facts, you have to acquit. We are going to go through the sock--another reason I put this up here is that you will know when I'm getting close to done and you can follow along. The socks, the stains on the back gate, the missing blood, the hair and fiber, the evidence of struggle at Bundy, the testimony of Dr. Baden and Dr. Lee, the Bronco, the Rockingham glove. That is what we will be discussing this morning.

Let's start with the sock. We know that on June 13th when Mr. Fung went to collect the sock--not yet--he saw it on the throw rug--not yet--and he did not see blood. He did not see soil on the carpet. He did not see any trace evidence around, not on the stairwell, not on the carpet leading into the bedroom, not anywhere. There is supposedly a stain, an ankle stain, on these socks. You saw it, cut out, about an inch and a half. More DNA in that than anything in this case. Wouldn't that, if it were there, have left a transfer, some speck, something, if they are in a struggle? You have children; I have children. Did you ever see them go out to play in dirt like that closed-in area at Bundy, get into some kind of ruckus. Socks come back, they are filthy. It would have to be here if there is anything on them at all. Nothing. Nothing there. Now Mr. Fung is looking for blood. These socks are the only clothing they take. It is logical as a criminalist, as he admitted on cross-examination, that he would be looking at the ankle area, the one they would look to first, because that would be the most likely exposed. He sees nothing. He is running around trying to do testing of anything that looks like blood. No test of the socks. Then on June 22nd Dr. Baden and Dr. Wolf were permitted to go to the crime lab and Michele Kestler shows them the socks. They see nothing. Now, we get to June 29th. This is very interesting. On June 29th the Defense wanted access to sample, split them, and the criminalists, Matheson, Kestler, the head of the laboratory and Yamauchi, are going through all the evidence in about a five or six-hour period, right there they are going through all the evidence to make an assessment of what kind of testing could be performed, of what kind of biological material or blood would be on any of these pieces evidence to see from testing, RFLP testing, how they could be divided. They also--Mr. Yamauchi said they were literally measuring the size of the swatches and making assessments and making examinations. What piece of evidence at that point is more important to these people than the socks found in Mr. Simpson's bedroom? Wouldn't you look at that?

And they told us that they took white paper and they put the socks on the white paper and if there is blood, inch and a half on that ankle, you know you saw it every time that we put something down, little specks would come off. Even when Miss Clark put those gloves on the very first day, we actually had it on white paper, you know, the plastic gloves and little pieces of trace fell off and we actually pulled those together, put them in a separate exhibit, because these kind of things fall off. If there were that stain on the sock, that big stain on the sock, they would have seen it. Gary Sims told you he was disturbed by it, that a trained criminalist should have seen it. You use light that is sufficient to look at what you are doing. They are now telling you we didn't have light. We didn't look at what we were doing. Please. Where I come from, that don't pass the laugh test. Now, what is the summary? The socks, on the report they do on June 29th, dress socks, blood search. None observed. None observed. That tells you all you need to do. Or none obvious, I'm sorry. I can't even remember that.

It is either none observed or none obvious. They have two different phrases, one on the handwritten report and one on the typewritten report. Okay. Then suddenly on August 4th Mr. Yamauchi can't remember it was some kind of general inventory, can't--Mr. Matheson might have asked him, he can't remember what the direction was. It wasn't specific to the sock. Somebody said look at--go look at this and then for the first time they find the stain on the ankle. Now we have evidence of the wet transfer going through surface 1, surface 3 through the little holes in the sock to surface 3. It is pretty simple. If there is a leg in those socks, you can't have the transfer. Professor MacDonell and Dr. Lee came in and they showed you the pictures of the little red balls and I don't think it is even being seriously contested that this is evidence of a wet transfer now. They are not contesting it really. Can't get it when the leg is in the sock. Their testimony stands unrefuted. There was no bloodstain expert that came in here and said that is not a wet transfer. Dr. Henry Lee, Professor MacDonell. Dr. De forest didn't show up here. Why?

Now, during the course of cross-examination of Dr. Lee and Professor MacDonell, the Prosecution sent up some hypothetical explanations for this that I'll view with you and each one of them was rejected by Dr. Lee, Professor MacDonell, but Dr. Lee in particular, as I recall, I think they gave him all of them, as highly improbable. Lots of things are possible, but he said these explanations were highly improbable. No. 1, the idea that at the time of the killings there could have been a touch with the finger from the victim of Miss Nicole Brown Simpson on the leg and that it wasn't dry when Mr. Simpson somehow got into that Bronco, came back to Rockingham, avoided Allan Park, ran down the side, left no bloodstains, hit the air conditioner, hit the stucco fence leaving no trace, somehow came in all with the bloody clothes, went up the stairs, left no trace of blood, left no trace of soil, left no trace of berries. Got into the house, took off the socks, left them there and then it is still wet. So if it is still wet when he takes off the socks, you get the transfer to surface 3. Well, there is a big problem with that. Then you should have seen something on the carpet if that is what happened. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't fit. Then the next explanation is on August 4th when Mr. Yamauchi did the pheno test taking the swab and brushing the stain to see if it were blood, that that somehow created wetness that transferred into the third surface. Or--well, Dr. Lee and Dr. MacDonell said that that doesn't make sense when you look at the stains because if that brushing had occurred you would see a diffusion and you don't see that kind of diffusion and that is not the way you do the test anyhow. Just touching it couldn't cause that kind of transfer through to surface 3. Highly improbable said the leading forensic scientists in America. Sweat. Next explanation is going to be sweat. Well, there was a stain from the crime scene, but sweating in the sock and then the sock is taken off and then somehow by process of sweat it transfers to surface 3. Dr. Lee and Dr. MacDonell said ridiculous, highly improbable you would see that same diffusion as with the pheno test and we don't see it. The next explanation. When Mr. Simpson is taking off the socks he coincidentally has a finger that touches surface 3 opposite the ankle stain, so it is not Nicole Brown Simpson's blood that is on surface 3, it is Mr. Simpson's own blood that he accidentally touched exactly opposite. That is a ridiculous coincidence. That doesn't pass the laugh test. That is the other explanation they floated. Then another explanation they tried. They showed Dr. Lee the new picture of the sock. Remember how they were folded up? They said, well, maybe blood of Mr. Simpson's, when you fold the sock over, landed on surface 3 coincidentally opposite the stain when they were bundled up and that is what created it. Again, rejected as a ridiculous highly probable coincidence. Now, none of these things make sense. Miss Clark also said, you know, there is a tiny spatter of Mr. Simpson's--Mr. Simpson's--some blood at the top of the socks of Mr. Simpson. She says, well, there is spatter there. Well, you know, doctor--Professor MacDonell said this is no spatter. Gary Sims doesn't pretend to be a bloodstain expert. Professor MacDonell, Dr. Lee, leading experts in this area. They didn't bring in anybody. It is ridiculous to say there is spatter there, and if it is spatter of O.J. Simpson's blood, how does that happen? What? Did he bleed so much that created a puddle and spatter on the top of the sock? Nonsense. The point is every explanation that they are desperately trying to come up with is a highly improbable inference. The most likely and probable inference is the one that is not for the timid or the faint of heart. Somebody played with this evidence and there is no doubt about it. And you know why there is no doubt about it? Because they got so upset in the opening statement about the socks, about the back gate, so upset that they sent it to the FBI. And Mr. Harmon wrote them a letter saying please refute the Defense theory that somebody tampered with this evidence. Please refute it. Those were the words. Not exactly an objective way of sending it out. Please test this for EDTA. Please refute what the Defense has to say. And Agent Martz never testified in the Prosecution's case. And you know why that is? And that is really all you need to know, because he couldn't refute it, because it is an inference consistent with innocence that they can't refute. There is EDTA. How does that happen? There is EDTA there. So if we could have slide 4. The sock. No blood on June 13th when it is collected. No blood on June 22nd when Dr. Lee--Dr. Baden and Dr. Wolf see it. They looked for blood on June 29th on a lab paper with reasonable light, three people with 25 years of experience, and they don't see it. Most important piece of evidence. Examining it for purposes of court. The wet transfer to surface 3 unrefuted. And EDTA. Now, let's think about it. Is this coincidence? Kill that, please. Is this coincidence, all these things with the sock, or is it corroboration? I say it is corroboration that something is wrong, something is terribly wrong with the most important pieces of evidence in this case. It is a cancer that is infecting the heart of this case. You cannot render a verdict beyond a reasonable doubt based on evidence like this. So if we apply 2.01, an essential fact, the socks, Miss Clark said an essential fact, whose interpretation is the most reasonable? And even if you give some of those cockamamie explanations some credence and you say, well, maybe ours is certainly reasonable enough for you to--you must adopt that, and if you must adopt it, really where does that leave us? Because, you know, there is another instruction that I submit has some relevance here. Could we have the slide now. Now, you've been instructed that: "A witness who is willfully false in one material part of his or her testimony is to be distrusted in others. You may reject the whole testimony of a witness who has willfully testified falsely as to a material point unless from all the evidence you believe the probability of truth favors his or her testimony in other particulars." Thank you. Now, yes, that applies to witnesses, but I would argue to you that by analogy it applies to the messengers who are bringing you this forensic evidence as well. Because let's just think about the socks. The LAPD officers and lab people who are responsible for the collection of this, for the chain of custody, for preserving the integrity of this evidence, are the same people that are bringing you everything else. Remember what Dr. Lee said about the socks? He said it is like eating a plate of spaghetti. Looking--bowl of spaghetti I think he said. You see a cockroach. Do you then take every strand of that bowl of spaghetti to look for more cockroaches or do you just throw it away and eat no more? In your deliberations somebody may say, all right, I have a reasonable doubt about this essential piece of evidence; the socks. I have a reasonable doubt. They--it is reasonable that they manufactured this piece of evidence. But let's put that aside and look at everything else. Well, just wait a second. Just think about what that means. If they manufactured evidence on the sock, how can you trust anything else? How in this country, in this democracy, can they come in--there is no doubt Fuhrman is a liar and a genocidal racist. There is no doubt about that. But there is really no doubt either that they played with this sock, is there? And if that can happen, that is a reasonable doubt for this case period, end of sentence, end of case. It really, really is true. Not in this country. It is a test of citizenship. Not in this country. Now, let's go to the back gate. Could we have the next slide. Because, you know, there is more. There is more of this cancer.

We don't have the rest of that? Put it all up. 117--put it all up, Howard. 117 was the stain taken from the back gate, and you know, there was something very strong about it, wasn't there? The blood drops at Bundy were degraded and had extremely low DNA concentrations. 117 had enough for an RFLP test. It was 27 times as much as 47, the first blood drop, 45 times as much as 48, 270 times as much as 49, 51 times as much as 50, 11 times as much as 52. This slide, like most of them I'm going to show you, is in evidence and you know who brought us that testimony; Gary Sims from the Department of Justice. Could we have the next slide. That is 117, the one on the gate. Do them all. This is 115 and 116, the one on the lower parts of the gate. 15 times as much as 47, 22 times as much as 48, 135 times as much as 49, 25 times as much as 50, six times as much as 52. This supposedly has been out there from June 12th to July 3rd. And--kill that.

There is no question sunlight degrades DNA. Moisture and bacteria degrade DNA. Why are these concentrations so much higher? And another point. There is DNA concentrations but there is also a separate test, as you have learned when you look at those yield gels, for degradation. These samples are not degraded. How can that be? Nothing. Now, there is something interesting here, too. The Prosecution is now saying, well, it is on a different surface than the Bundy blood drops. Bundy blood drops are on cement. This is on a metal gate, painted metal gate. So there is something magical about this that will prevent it from degrading at all in over three weeks. It is--remember, the blood drop no. 50 is just a few feet from this bottom portion of the gate that is very, very close to the surface and all the same environmental insults. But you know what proves this argument totally fallacious? And I asked this question of Gary Sims, and you can go back. Remember the blood from the handrail? That was one of the last questions I asked him. It is very curious to me that they never typed that. They are still testing. Remember the blood on the handrail as you are leading up Bundy? Same kind of surface. Totally degraded. Remember the samples from the front gate? There was blood on the front gate. Gary Sims' testimony. No question about that, severely degraded, just like the other samples from Bundy. So those are the same kind of surfaces, so this explanation don't pass the laugh test. Well, what is the other explanation that Miss Clark offered you? Now, this is a whopper. She said, well, it is the plastic bags. I mean, that is rich. They spent weeks trying to deny that putting samples in plastic bags doesn't degrade the DNA. Well, it does. I mean, you know that from the moisture. So now they are saying on July 3rd, when Fung made this collection, he put these swatches in a plastic bag, but he didn't let them cook as long in a truck as he did on June 12th. It is our own incompetence, that is the explanation. That accounts for these differences. Well, you know that doesn't work either, for a number of reasons. No. 1, they were going, as you recall, on a tour of the crime scene and Fung--apparently right away they found--all of a sudden they found this stuff on the back gate and there is no testimony, zero, as to how long it took Dennis Fung to bring those back to the evidence processing room or how long he had them in a plastic bag or what other things they had him doing. There is no testimony that he immediately went back to the lab. He didn't continue with them in the tour or anything like that. And you know why it is significant that they can't come in here and argue that when they don't present evidence? Because they could have. Because we know that there are records of when you go back into that evidence possessing room and get in the door. They could have demonstrated--if they really wanted to put this argument before you, they could have demonstrated how long it took or they could have brought him back here to testify about it. But frankly, if they brought him back here to testify about that explanation so late in the game, you wouldn't have believed him, would you? So they can't use this plastic bag theory and they can't use that it is a different surface. They can't. It doesn't make sense scientifically. It doesn't fit. So what--what--you know, what is going on here? Now, there is another thing. They are going to say, well, you know, Officer Riske, Phillips, I believe, Fuhrman, Rossi, that night when they were entering the premises, the back gate, they had their flashlights and they were looking up and down and they think they saw some blood on the back gate, so they all testified to it, so you know it is there. Well, first of all, we know--you have been there--that this gate was rusty. There were all kind of darknesses, imperfections. There were berries all over there. There is all kind of discolorations. And what did they really see with their flashlights? It is not clear what they saw with their flashlights. But you know what is very, very interesting is that Lange said to Fung, go look, there is blood on the back gate, you should go look, and we have heard reports there is blood on the back gate. Now, this is very interesting. Could we put up the diagram. You may remember this. This is the diagram that Fung did of the back gate. Pull back on it. And you will recall the testimony. These are--the numbers you see, 115, 116, all those numbers, right, those are the photo numbers. You recall how they did the collection, that they started, they put down a photo number, not the evidence item number, so they started on the walkway with 112 and they put down 112 and that was sample 47 and they collected that. Then they went and they put down no. 113 and that was sample 48 and they collected that. Then they went down and they put down 114 and that was sample 49 and they collected that. Then they put down 115 and that was sample 50 and now we are right by the back gate and they collected that. Now, this is what shows you there was no blood on the back gate. Because at that point what do they do? They go to the front gate. They walk all the way back to the front gate where the bloodstain patterns are, that is 116, and then they go back all the way to the end of the driveway and then get the last blood drop, no. 52, 11. Why did they go all the way back? I will tell you why. Because Detective Lange had told Mr. Fung, as he testified, that there was blood on the back gate, and they looked, he heard reports of it, and they didn't see any blood on the back gate. So the only blood they saw on the gate was on the front gate, so they went back and collected 116. And you know what else shows you that? Could we have the picture? Where is it, Mr. Fung? They took no pictures of any blood on the back gate, 117. There is some discoloration there that may be consistent with 115, if it is blood at all, but there is no 116. So there is no pictures either. Thank you. Now, what else? What else? What else? There is EDTA on the stains from the back. So can we have a chart on this? Let's look at the back gate. No documentation or photos on June 13th. Discovered on July 3rd. DNA concentration. EDTA. Coincidence or corroboration that something is wrong, something is terribly wrong. There is a cancer at the heart of this case. This is a reasonable doubt. You put this together with the sock, how many cockroaches do you have to find in the bowl of spaghetti. This isn't made up. This isn't invented. These are facts. How could all of this be? How can--this is not--this is a reasonable interpretation of the evidence based on solid fact. You cannot on your oath reject this and, say, ah, it never happened. You can't. It is a reasonable doubt. Now, let's discuss EDTA, because that is obviously an important issue. They asked for the tests to be done after the opening statement. Refuted. And they didn't put them on because it doesn't refute. Reasonable interpretation of the evidence, if there is EDTA there, consistent with everything, comes from a purple-topped tube on the face of it. They didn't put them on. We had to call them. But you know, there is a very, very interesting point that you might have missed in Dr. Rieders' testimony when you compare Dr. Rieders and Agent Martz, and that is in January there was a gentleman named Henkhaus, works with the LAPD science division, and they were interested, after the opening statement, in seeing whether or not tests could be performed to detect EDTA. Do you recall who they called in at page 38414 of the transcript, of Dr. Rieders'? "Question: Incidentally, at one point were you consulted by the Los Angeles Police Department during the course of this case about methods to detect EDTA?

"Yes." He because shown this letter from Henkhaus. "Do you remember who that was? "Mr. Henkhaus. "And did you provide him with materials on a system in developing a method to detect EDTA? "Yes, of course. There was a letter with a number of citations on it." Before the testing was done, but they knew he was he going to appear as a Defense witness. They reached out to Dr. Fredric Rieders. Why? Because Dr. Fredric Rieders, a Ph.D., a distinguished teacher, he runs a reference lab outside of Philadelphia, a reference lab. People go to this laboratory when you want to develop toxicology techniques which are specialized and sophisticated because he is experienced, he is knowledgeable, he is learned. They asked him for work about EDTA. You know why else? Because Dr. Rieders testified he has expertise in EDTA and it is used to treat people for lead poisoning. He has been working with EDTA for something on the order of 20 years. He is the expert that you would call to interpret the data, so they asked him for references. And now they want to tell you that he is out of his mind, that he is not reasonable in his interpretation of this data and he shouldn't be trusted. Very interesting, isn't it? Now, you know when you evaluate the testimony of Agent Martz and Dr. Rieders, there really isn't that much disagreement. And remember the circumstantial evidence charge about whether if there is two plausible reasonable interpretations, you have to take the one that goes with innocence? There are three questions. Is there EDTA there? Dr. Rieders says yes. Agent Martz says could be consistent with EDTA based on the ms/ms readings. If it isn't EDTA, says Martz, I don't know what else it could be. Next question. If it is EDTA, how much is there? Now, both of them agree that it is in parts per million, not parts per billion. And both agree, when you examine the testimony, that if it is in parts per million, it cannot come from the EDTA we ingest in food that then is secreted into the blood. You don't have parts per million that way, because if you did, you would be in serious--you would have serious health problems. You wouldn't clot. You would bleed to death, as Dr. Rieders was pointing out. The next question. And this is where they parted company. Is the amount of EDTA here sufficient to have come from a purple-topped tube? Agent Martz says--Dr. Rieders says, unless you were treating somebody for lead poisoning and injecting EDTA into them, that is the reasonable explanation for parts per million in these samples of EDTA. Agent Martz says, no, I can't really say because I would expect there to be more EDTA in a sample left for three weeks on the back gate or in--on a sock, you know, that I'm seeing six months later, but he never did a single experiment to find out how much you would expect to get from stains that are months old and are subjected to environmental insults. And you saw that there were quantitation problems when they tested it. It would go up and down. So when you look at it, look at the credentials, Martz versus Rieders. Rieders has far more experience with EDTA. They wanted to hire him or they consulted with him I should say. Dr. Rieders works with the FBI. They go to him and consult, as you heard, on cases. He was working on a case with them at the time he came here to testify. He runs a reference lab that is specialized in these issues. Even though he does not have the $750,000 machine yet, the ms/ms that Martz is using, he understands it, seen it before, interpreted data from it, he is getting one soon. So it is not a question of machine; it is a question of the expertise to understand the data. Agent Martz, he--he is--he has a bachelor's degree, he had some trouble with pi, I don't want to belittle that, but he didn't even--there are some disturbing parts of his testimony, let's face it. He didn't even consider the validation studies that had been performed by others at the FBI laboratory. They are going to make a big deal with these. You know, he didn't look for that 132 daughter ion. I promised not to talk about daughter ions to some people, but he didn't perform the test to find that. All the digital daughters he threw away. He come up with this thing where he says he tests his own blood and he finds some level of EDTA in it but he threw away the documents about what he did. He put it in a test-tube for two weeks that has silicon in it, that has a red stopper in it that could be a source of EDTA. He doesn't go and test anybody else's blood. There would be certainly a phenomena that we found parts per million in parts of whole blood or his whole method is screwed up. They are going to come back and test more. They are going to come back and say, well, Dr. Rieders should have done more of a test on these level of samples. That is what they should have done. Well, you know, it is their burden. It is their burden after all. They say it is key evidence. She said it is their defense. Well, then why not get some real studies or do more studies or save the data or present something to this jury that is credible to disprove it? Miss Clark gets up here and says we have disproven that this could be EDTA from a purple-topped tube. If Rieders has no basis whatsoever for saying this, it can't be a reasonable interpretation of the evidence. Well, saying it doesn't make it so. It is their burden. They have to disprove this beyond a reasonable doubt. They have not.

MS. CLARK: Objection, your Honor. Objection. That misstates--

THE COURT: Overruled.

MR. SCHECK: An essential fact. That circumstantial evidence charge says, an essential fact must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Miss Clark got up here and told you this was essential. Have they done that? No, they haven't. That is many, many reasonable doubts. I would now like to talk about missing blood, and I think that we can talk about this in the following way: Access, opportunity and the smoking gun, nurse Thano Peratis. Could we have the first picture. Now, Detective Vannatter, the man who carried the blood, picked up blood from the Coroner's office of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, blood tubes that contained EDTA. Let's show them all. Remember these? These are pictures of both sides of the tubes. Just pull them out. I think the point is made. One after another covered with blood. He got those from the lab. He carried those. Those tubes, the testimony is, have EDTA in them. He carried them on June 15th. Now, we do not have records. There are no records of the amounts that were initially put in those tubes or where he went, how long he went. No real evidence that we can examine about that, but he carried. On the other hand, when we turn now to Mr. Simpson--that is enough.

MS. CLARK: Your Honor, objection. That--

MR. SCHECK: Yeah. He testified he took them from the Coroner's office and even brought them to LAPD, but there is no record of how much was initially put in those tubes, so we can't retrace the amounts. Now let's look at the handling of the Defendant's, Mr. O.J. Simpson's, reference vial. Detective Vannatter, as Mr. Cochran pointed out, was so upset about how this goes that when he was asked, well, when did you get the blood vial? He said 3:30. Well, it was 2:30. We know that. His testimony is, he gets the vial of blood and he goes off and he has a cup of coffee and he is walking around Parker Center with a blood vial in an unsealed tube. And as you know, the rules are you are supposed to book it immediately. You can book it in that building, Parker Center. You can walk--go a mile away. Takes just a few minutes. And you book them at piper tech where the SID lab is, and you buy a DR number, which is the number for the case, and the case starts. That is what the rules say. But that is not what they were doing. Now, could we have the next--that is not it. I want the instructions.

(Discussion held off the record between Defense counsel.)

MR. SCHECK: There are instructions on this envelope that we reviewed I think with Mr. Yamauchi, which are fascinating. It says that the investigating officer--"Officer requesting withdrawal of blood shall, when the vial is returned to you, enter your initials, shake the tube vigorously. When the affidavit is completed, sign below as a witnessing officer and seal the vial in the completed sealed evidence labels." In other words, what you are supposed to do, after you get the vial from the nurse, is you put it in this envelope and the instructions say, "Using completed sealed evidence labels," you seal the envelope. Now, he has been a detective a long time. He knows the rules. And the testimony is he has never done this before, not seal it, not walk around with the blood. And now there is something else, and it is a little hard to see on this photograph, and we tried to get the original here, but at the very, very bottom there is something really weird that you can inspect--it is covered over by the label. You see the date. "I declare"--this is Thano Peratis. "I declare under penalty of perjury the foregoing is true." And then it says "5/10/94." May 10, `94. Well, wait a second. This was June 13th. This envelope is an old envelope in the lab. It is something that Mr. Peratis had had around there for some reason that says May 10, `94. It is an old envelope in the lab? Why is that? What is going on here? They are not following the rules. He is grabbing this envelope. He is carrying around this blood. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't fit. It is a serious problem, isn't it? Now, the next thing that we have is this misnumbering, you will recall, of the blood vial, and Mr. Fung, as you remember, was stumbling over it. There is a problem here. The sneakers were brought in by Detective Lange the next morning and they were put in as 17. The blood vial is numbered as 18 indicating receipt the next morning after the sneakers and 19 is this hair that Mr. Fung took off the Rockingham glove, all that morning of June 14th. And you recall the testimony that we had in this case that Mr. Fung remembers he had such, you know, problems. He said, well, and I walk walked out of Rockingham, I had the tube either in my posse box, that metal box, or I had it this in my hand in the envelope, or I had it in a brown paper bag and I put it into the truck. And then we showed him videotape and all of a sudden it changed, and we had videotape of people inside and Vannatter bringing in the envelope and now the state of the evidence is that Andrea Mazzola was given a black trash bag and that she didn't know, nobody told her, that the envelope had been put in it and maybe some of those other evidence cards. And you saw the video where they walk into the truck and they throw that trash bag inside the truck and they go back to the lab and now the testimony is, is that they leave it out on the table in a trash bag after they, you know, putting the swatches in the test-tubes and they leave. Now--and they don't even refrigerate the vial. Now, this is a very odd story, to say the least.

And what--and I think what is really peculiar about it, when you get down to it, is the way the testimony came out. Andrea Mazzola said something very interesting. She said that when she saw the next morning, June 14th, the blood vial in the black trash bag, she realized for the first time that she had been the one that carried the blood vial out of the Rockingham residence. So she is saying that she knew that on June 14th. Are you with me? Now, we had all this--we spent three days on this, if you recall. Mr. Fung couldn't remember how the blood vial was carried out. These Prosecutors knew that there was misnumbering, that there was a problem with this blood vial and its transfer. They knew it was a problem. Now, if Miss Mazzola had known since June 14th that she had carried this out in a plastic bag, because she realized it looking at that at the next moment, how come nobody was told this? Why didn't somebody know this? Why didn't they interview these witnesses before they got on the stand for eight, ten days a piece? And this was obviously a crucial problem. Because there is something wrong here.

And of course when she ultimately testified, poor Miss Mazzola had to go over and sit on the couch and close her eyes for twenty minutes, because she was tired and didn't see what went on in the foyer. Now, look. I would submit to you I don't think that is all credible evidence. I think there is something really wrong here, but, you know, you don't even need it really if you think about it, because in terms of access and opportunity, all that really matters is what nobody can deny, and that is Detective Vannatter is walking around with a May 10th envelope that he should have sealed and he should have booked for three hours at least unaccounted for. What is going on? There is something wrong. It is not coincidence. There is something wrong, terribly wrong. Now, the last part really of the missing blood issue, Thano Peratis, the issue arose about how much blood was in the blood vial. Now, if you recall from the testimony, the first thing that happened is that Mr. Yamauchi got the blood and he stuck in a pipetter that says one mil and he created the fitzco card. So that is one mil. The next thing that happens--that is on June 14th. On June 21st toxicology gets there, and toxicology does things in an appropriate way. They measured how much blood was in the tube. They take a tube, they--as Mr. Matheson described, you fill it with water, you look at the other tube and you make a measurement, and they measured it to be 5.5. Now, if it is 5.5 and we started with eight cc's and Yamauchi took one, there is 1.5 missing. No way out of that. No way out of that. Now, Mr. Matheson came in and you saw these incredible experiments that he was performing where he went and he started taking--he looked at all the other times people went into the tubes and is saying, well, you know, if you pipette it out and you pipette it out, you may lose something over time. But let's face it, the Matheson explanations can't get around the 1.5 missing right away. There is 1.5 missing right away and toxicology proves it and they know it. So the only other way to explain the missing blood is Thano Peratis must have been mistaken. That is the only way. And what I will leave you with this morning are two clips from Thano Peratis, technology willing.

(At 11:55 A.M. a videotape, was played.)

MR. SCHECK: When we come back from lunch, we will discuss the meaning of this. Thank you.

THE COURT: All right. Ladies and gentlemen, we are going to take our break for the lunch recess. Please remember all my admonitions to you. Don't discuss this case among yourselves, don't form any opinions about the case, don't conduct any deliberations until the matter has been submitted to you, don't allow anybody to communicate with you with regard to the case. We will stand in recess until 1:30. All right. Thank you, counsel.

(At 11:58 A.M. the noon recess was taken until 1:30 P.M. of the same day.)

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA; THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 1995 1:30 P.M.

Department no. 103 Hon. Lance A. Ito, Judge

APPEARANCES: (Appearances as heretofore noted.)

(Janet M. Moxham, CSR no. 4855, official reporter.)

(Christine M. Olson, CSR no. 2378, official reporter.)

(The following proceedings were held in open court, out of the presence of the jury:)

THE COURT: All right. Back on the record in the Simpson matter. All parties are again present. All right. Deputy Trower, let's have the jurors, please.

(The following proceedings were held in open court, in the presence of the jury:)

THE COURT: All right. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Please be seated. And let the record reflect that we've been rejoined by all the members of our jury panel. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.

THE JURY: Good afternoon.

THE COURT: And, Mr. Scheck, you may continue with your argument, sir.

MR. SCHECK: Thank you very much, your Honor. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen of the jury.

THE JURY: Good afternoon.

MR. SCHECK: When we left, we were--I showed you two clips from Thano Peratis. In the first clip, he was under oath. He said when he drew Mr. Simpson's blood, he looked at the syringe and that's how he knew it was between 7.9 and 8.1. No doubt about it, something he does all the time, routine, something people in this field would do and know. He looked at the syringe. Then, because he couldn't live with it, because 1.5 is missing--and they could have called Thano Peratis in their direct case and put him under oath--Mr. Goldberg goes out and does this statement, this strange bizarre statement in Mr. Peratis' home which they told you is unscripted or that is to say, let's not say gave a script, but common sense tells you that they spoke to this man before they went and did this videotape. And you could tell at parts, he literally said, "I don't remember," because he was forgetting certain parts of what he--I guess what it was--what was planned to say. But let's get down to the substance. I mean, this is not under oath. It is the only testimony you've gotten in this case that is not under oath, which is fairly extraordinary. But you know what's even weirder? It's what he said. His position is this now. First of all, you can see the syringe and you can see the calibrations on the syringe. So now he's saying, "Well, the syringe was turned over and I didn't see the numbers." Well, that's pretty strange, but I think that what's even more odd is that it is his position that he now realized that he goofed. How does he know? He says that he took one of these tubes--you know, these are items in evidence--and he looked at it, and he now remembers months later that when he drew Mr. Simpson's blood on June 13th, he can remember the level that the blood was in the vial. And based on his recollection of where the blood is in the vial, he then starts putting water into another test tube to get it up to that level, and then he says, well, that's 6.5. Well, that's not worthy of belief, is it; that you can remember all these months later the exact level and that's how you come up with 6.5? So not only is it not under oath and not only is it obviously a convenient recantation and appears to have been prepared, shall we say, to suit the Prosecution's purposes when things just didn't fit, but the story is an absurdity. It is just an absurdity. It is not worthy of belief. It is a reasonable doubt in and of itself. Blood is missing.

THE COURT: Mr. Scheck, which two evidence items are they?

MR. SCHECK: This was the syringe, which is 1382, and 1124, a purple top tube of exactly the kind involved in this matter.

THE COURT: Thank you.

MR. SCHECK: Could we have slide no. 9? So let's review the bidding. Missing blood, access opportunity and Mr. Peratis, the smoking gun. Detective Vannatter is walking around with this tube in a May 10th envelope unsealed going up for coffee, three hours. It is misnumbered. It comes in as 18, not 17, 18, after the sneakers which were brought in the next morning. There is at least 1.5 mil missing, no question about it, early in the game because of the toxicology entry, and then we have Mr. Peratis' unsworn recantation. Is this a coincidence or is it corroboration that something is wrong, something is terribly wrong at the heart of this case? It is a reasonable doubt because missing blood I submit to you, the blood is an essential fact, an essential fact in the Prosecution's circumstantial case. If you can't trust the man who carried the blood, if you can't trust where this blood went--I mean, EDTA missing blood. Coincidence? Corroboration? Something is terribly wrong. Now, I'd like to move to the blood drops found at Bundy. And there are two aspects of examining this evidence. The first has to go to the integrity of the samples and the second one goes to the issue of cross-contamination. First, I would like to address the issue of the integrity of the samples. We start with the handling of the swatches. And we know that they are not counted at the scene. They are not counted when they get back to the lab and put into test tubes for drying. They are not counted the next morning when they are taken out of those tubes. There's no count. The first time there's a count is when Yamauchi gets it between 9:00 and 11:20 that morning, June 14th. So we don't know how many swatches we started with originally. And as Dr. Lee told you, as all the criminalists told you, as Gary Sims told you, it is the first duty of a forensic scientist to document the evidence and to establish a chain of custody that preserves the integrity of the evidence so that you can bring it into court and good people like you can feel satisfied that you have honest, reliable evidence. That was not done. No booking until June 16th. It's in the lowest security area, that evidence processing room, where that metal gate can be lifted where supposedly you have to have a card to get in the door, but other people walk in and out and entries are not monitored. It is an unlocked cabinet, and in this phase, there's no way to trace the individual items. Now, we had asked your Honor for the bindles to be produced, but they have not been produced. But you can get them. You can get them when you go back into the jury room. And there is one absolutely extraordinary fact in this case. On August 23rd, Andrea Mazzola was called to testify at a hearing in this court, put her hand on the bible, swore to tell the truth. When she came in, she had her notes, the same crime scene log notes that she and Mr. Fung had reviewed in their testimony. She got on the stand and she was asked questions by Mr. Neufeld about how they went about collecting the swatches and the evidence in this case, and she described the process of taking up the swatches, coming back to the lab, putting them in the tubes for drying, taking them out the next morning, putting them into bindles, and then she testified that they initialed the bindles, that she, Andrea Mazzola, took some of them, Mr. Fung took others of them and she initialed the bindles, those little white bindles that the swatches were in. You all recall that. She said that under oath on August 23rd. And, you know, think about whether or not she would have good reason to remember and have a best recollection of what actually occurred when she testified on August 23rd. This case was the first crime scene that Andrea Mazzola had ever primary responsibility for collecting blood evidence, a good reason to remember. Between June 13th and August 23rd when she testified under oath, Andrea Mazzola had not done another crime scene. So there was nothing to confuse her. She collected blood from a crime scene. When she testified, she knew that this was an important matter. I realize that she did not know who Mr. O.J. Simpson was, fair enough, but she certainly knew that this was an important matter and that everybody was concerned about it, and you would expect that she would want to testify in a fashion to the best of her recollection looking at those notes. She said no question about it that she initialed the bindles. You will get the bindles. We laid them out for you. You can look at 52, 50, 49, 48, 47. Her initials are on no bindles. Zero. Something is wrong. We have the board. Dr. Henry Lee is quite a remarkable man. And we tracked this evidence. He was not--his offer was not taken up, he and Dr. Baden, to examine this evidence at the time it was collected. As the testing was going on, he really did not get a chance to examine and handle the evidence until February 16th while you're still sitting there. However, we did try to track it as much as possible and we were allowed to take pictures at the Cellmark laboratory of the swatches and we were allowed to take pictures of the bindles and measure them and weigh them because something was wrong. And then we found the wet transfers. This is very disturbing, as Dr. Lee indicates, because the uncontradicted testimony is that these swatches were put in test tubes to dry for 14 hours, and Dr. Lee gave you his best estimate that he thought they would dry within three. Then Mr. Goldberg came in with--do you have that study?--the Epstein Bar study. And if we go to cotton cloth, indicates that it should take about 55 minutes if you look at it under condition no. 1, that's at room temperature, to dry. They should have been dry. I expect they'll come in and they'll say there's a swatch sandwich, they were all stuck together so they wouldn't dry. Nonsense. Use your common sense. How do you get wet transfers like this? Well, within three hours of the time that they were taken out and put in bindles, if somebody had switched swatches, you'd see wet transfer. Now, it was a very interesting point in this trial where Mr. Matheson was asked some questions about knowledge that detectives had with respect to the collection of blood evidence. And he and both Mr. Fung testified to this; that detectives are trained in the collection of blood evidence in exactly the way that they do it at LAPD. Now, remember, the way they do it at LAPD is not the way one should do it for the collection of samples for purposes of DNA evidence. They haven't changed their procedures as was testified by Miss Kestler, the head of the lab, in terms of, you know, old conventional serology testing. So they're putting them in plastic bags and degrading samples. But put that aside for a second. Matheson is asked starting at 25031 of the transcript about: "Question: When you say evidence collection technique, have you ever taught detectives how to collect a stain using LAPD procedures? "Talking about biological stain, yes." And he goes on to talk about how they want detectives to have the capability to collect blood drops and they have an on-call system and sometimes a criminalist--excuse me--is not available, so they want detectives to swatch bloodstains. And he goes on to say, and I quote:

"We supply them with blood collection kids, simply a file box with the tools that are necessary to collect the samples." We're talking about here plastic bags, swatches and gloves. And: "Question: I know they are taught to, you know, take a control and use the distilled water and use the tweezer, the whole nine yards? "Answer: Yes. They are both shown in the demonstration form, we talk to them about it. It is demonstrated to them, and if time permits, we have practiced with them in class. "Question: And are detectives in fact collecting biological evidence in the Los Angeles Police Department and submitting it to your laboratory for analysis? "Yes, they do. Detectives have swatches." These detectives would put them in plastic bags just like Fung and Yamauchi. If they were to be stored for some period of time, it would degrade them. Even if they put swatches with EDTA blood on them, they still degrade them. These ridiculous techniques, if they were put into those envelopes and left wet transfers, the integrity of the evidence is in question. Something's wrong. We--well, admittedly, to be fair to the Prosecution, there's probably not enough sample left from the Bundy blood drops to take them out for EDTA testing. But they didn't do it. And I think you have to ask yourself a fair question given the way the blood evidence has been handled in this case. What would those results be? Just from this, you must question, must have a reasonable doubt about the integrity of this evidence. But when you consider the evidence, we have to take the evidence as it is and we have to reconstruct as best we can what's going on in the case as you must in a fair and unbiased way. And you consider the evidence, the whole issue of contamination arises. And it arises in a funny way because one can see that if these samples had been contaminated, cross-contaminated in a way that I know you have followed and I will review with you--and forgive me if I repeat details that I'm sure you've followed--that certainly would convince certain people that they were on the right track and maybe they wouldn't hesitate to tamper with other evidence after that to make the case look better. Could cross-contamination have happened on these facts? Before I go into detail, I would like to make two points, the same point I think I made at the beginning, Dr. Speed made.

If there was cross-contamination in the evidence processing room on the morning of June 14th when Mr. Yamauchi was handling the samples and Mr. Simpso