F. Lee Bailey, defending O.J. Simpson on murder charges, turned up the volume in his effort to discredit a Los Angeles policeman Tuesday, pointing out that Detective Mark Fuhrman was left alone at the crime scene and at Simpson’s house and suggesting that he arranged to have others preoccupied so he could plant a key piece of evidence.
Bailey, whose cross-examination of Fuhrman on Monday started gently, was on the attack from the outset Tuesday.
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Employing his renowned bluster, Bailey suggested at least two scenarios for why Fuhrman might have planted a glove behind Simpson’s house in order to implicate the former football star in the June 12 murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman: Either that Fuhrman is a racist who wanted to frame a black man who had been married to a white woman, or that the detective was angry about being ousted from the case and replaced by colleagues from the LAPD’s Robbery-Homicide Division.
Despite a pointed cross-examination, the detective remained calm, firmly but politely denying each of the suggestions that the defense lawyer floated during a tense day of testimony.
Simpson has pleaded not guilty to the knife murders, which Fuhrman was briefly charged with investigating before being replaced by the other detectives.
“When you turned out to find this glove over at (Simpson’s) Rockingham (Avenue estate), you knew that you would be on the case as long as it lasted, didn’t you?” Bailey asked.
“No,” Fuhrman responded, later adding: “I couldn’t make that determination at that time, sir. I didn’t even know what the implication of the glove was.”
Outside the presence of the jury, Bailey asked Superior Court Judge Lance A. Ito to allow him to question Fuhrman about new allegations of racist remarks. Over the objections of Deputy Dist. Atty. Marcia Clark, who sniped openly with Bailey about the latest defense attack on Fuhrman, Ito allowed Simpson’s lawyers to pursue some of the allegations in front of the jury.
One allegation involves a Marine Corps sergeant named Maximo Cordoba. According to Bailey, Cordoba is prepared to testify that Fuhrman called him a “nigger,” and a “boy.”
Clark doubted Bailey’s description of what Cordoba would say, however, fuming that “these allegations get more outrageous by the minute.”
She said that prosecutors had interviewed the Marine and that he had never made any such statement to them. Similarly, Cordoba told The Times on Sept. 21 that Fuhrman had never made racist comments in his presence.
“At no time when Mark was with me or in our office did he speak in any racist manner about blacks or anyone,” Cordoba said at that time, adding that it would have been strange for Fuhrman to treat him in a racist manner.
“I’m black,” he said. “I’m decorated in martial arts and still currently an active bodybuilder.”
Cordoba, who made similar comments to a network news program, excerpts of which were aired Tuesday, said in the interview with The Times that he would have been offended if Fuhrman had made racist comments within his earshot: “If I had heard that said in my presence, I would have (been) pretty upset, and I would have removed the person from the office.”
Cordoba described Kathleen Bell-the real estate agent who has accused Fuhrman of making racist comments to her-as a nice person but also “a groupie, who liked to see Marines in uniform, to be as closely related to them as possible.” Cordoba also said Bell “liked to be in the limelight.”
But other witnesses also may take the stand to question Fuhrman’s truthfulness. Although the detective has repeatedly denied meeting Bell, defense lawyers say Andrea Terry, a friend of Bell, will back up her story. According to the defense, Terry, Bell and Fuhrman all spoke at a Redondo Beach bar, where Terry allegedly heard Fuhrman make a derogatory remark about interracial couples.
Another Marine Corps witness, Sgt. Joe Foss, also may take the stand to say he introduced Fuhrman to Bell, defense lawyers said.
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Still another witness, according to defense sources, is prepared to testify that Fuhrman investigated a 1993 carjacking in which she was the victim. Defense sources say she initially identified the carjackers as two white men, but Fuhrman tried to persuade her to say they were light-skinned blacks. That witness, Alwyn Martin, was not available for comment.
With the witnesses against Fuhrman mounting, Clark expressed growing frustration at the defense attack on the detective’s character, which she likened to a “smear campaign.” Tuesday, before the jury entered, she referred to the charges of racism as “nonsensical allegations” and labeled Fuhrman’s accusers “Kathleen Bell and her ilk.”
In court, when Clark accused Bell and the other witnesses of collaborating to tell a false story about Fuhrman, Simpson rolled his eyes and huddled with Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., his lead trial lawyer. Cochran shook his head sympathetically.
In large part, the intensity of the challenge to Fuhrman reflects the essential role he plays in the Simpson case. The detective has testified that he found a bloody glove behind a guest house at Simpson’s estate, and that glove is a potentially valuable piece of prosecution evidence: It matches one found at the crime scene, and prosecutors say DNA tests of the blood on it reveals that it contains genetic markers consistent with a mixture of the two victims’ and Simpson’s blood.
At the same time, the allegations of racism against Fuhrman have made him the lightning rod for the defense’s charge that the police investigation of Simpson was biased and that evidence was mishandled or even manufactured in the rush to build a case against the former football star.
In waging their attack on Fuhrman, defense attorneys have tried to show that he had both motive and opportunity to plant the bloody glove outside Simpson’s house. On Tuesday, Bailey fired a series of questions at Fuhrman in order to establish that the detective had been alone at the time he said he found the glove and that no one else could account for Fuhrman’s whereabouts for about 15 minutes.
“Was it not your purpose to be in the area along the south wall alone?” Bailey asked.
“No,” Fuhrman responded. “It wasn’t.”
“It just worked out that way, is that it?” Bailey said, his voice conveying his disbelief.
“I didn’t even know the south wall was accessible,” Fuhrman said.
“It just worked out that you left the house and made your investigation for 15 minutes or more alone,” Bailey said again, this time emphasizing the word alone.
“That’s how it worked out,” Fuhrman said.
That could help bolster the defense case that Fuhrman had the chance to plant the glove-an essential ingredient in the Simpson camp’s contention that their client is the victim of a police conspiracy. Bailey also questioned why Fuhrman said the glove appeared sticky when he found it despite the fact that it was more than seven hours after authorities believe the glove was dropped outside the house-enough time, the attorney suggested, for the blood to have dried.
Bailey also continued to question why Fuhrman went without backup to investigate the glove. That, Bailey said, was inconsistent with Fuhrman’s testimony that he was concerned that a suspect still could be nearby.
Still, in nearly two days of cross-examination, Bailey has not extracted many significant admissions from Fuhrman, and legal analysts so far give the defense lawyer mixed reviews on his handling of a witness of such great importance to Simpson’s case.
“Bailey is asking what seem like fairly innocuous questions and then every once in a while he will slip you a dagger,” said Karen Smith, a Southwestern University law professor. “But he hasn’t been able to get the answer to the dagger questions.”
Harland W. Braun, a prominent Los Angeles criminal defense lawyer contrasted Bailey’s theatrical style of questioning with Fuhrman’s matter-of-fact responses.
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“I look at Bailey as Mr. Huff-and-Puff up there. And Fuhrman looks like a policeman out of central casting.”
In court, Bailey asked Fuhrman to reconstruct his actions immediately before and after he reported finding the glove, and the defense lawyer then attempted to show that Fuhrman was changing certain elements of his story. To do that, Bailey confronted Fuhrman with his testimony at last summer’s preliminary hearing and asked him about a number of areas in which the detective’s trial testimony appears different.
Specifically, Bailey questioned Fuhrman about two comments that the defense lawyer described as “slips of the tongue” during the preliminary hearing.
In one, Fuhrman was asked about when he saw a bloody glove at the crime scene. He gave a long response, at one point stating that he saw “them” near Goldman’s feet. Defense lawyers have suggested that Fuhrman slipped up in that comment, inadvertently disclosing that there were two gloves at the crime scene-possibly bolstering their argument that Fuhrman pocketed one and planted it at Simpson’s house.
Fuhrman, however, said Tuesday that he was referring not to two gloves but to one glove and a knit ski cap, both of which were discovered near Goldman.
Bailey also pressed Fuhrman about a point in his preliminary hearing testimony in which Fuhrman said he had seen blood “in” Simpson’s Ford Bronco, rather than “on” the car, as he testified during the trial.
Fuhrman first denied saying he had seen blood in the car and suggested that the court reporter might have made a mistake. Later, however, Fuhrman was shown a videotape of his preliminary hearing testimony, in which he can clearly be heard using the word in .
Shown that tape, Fuhrman conceded that he had misspoken, but reiterated his insistence that he never saw blood anywhere inside the car. That point is potentially important because Bailey has suggested that Fuhrman could have smeared blood in the car. According to prosecutors, DNA tests of blood spots in the car reveal that the blood shares genetic characteristics with both victims and Simpson, raising the stakes for the defense to discredit their reliability.
Fuhrman and Bailey have been facing off for most of two days, with Bailey picking apart the detective’s testimony a small piece at a time, often jumping back and forth between subjects. At times, the questioning has been brusque and confrontational, with Bailey often cutting off the witness before he completed his answer.
Ito repeatedly admonished Bailey on Tuesday to let Fuhrman finish his responses before jumping in-a reminder that drew appreciative chuckles from the audience at one particularly testy point during the cross-examination. Fuhrman described his interview with Brian (Kato) Kaelin at Simpson’s house in the early morning hours of June 13 and admitted that he had cut off Kaelin as he was responding to a question.
“Do you normally ask somebody a question and before they have a chance to answer, cut them off and ask them another one?” Bailey asked. Members of the audience burst into laughter and Fuhrman smiled.
“Mr. Kaelin wasn’t exactly quickly responding to certain questions,” Fuhrman responded after the laughter subsided. “And that’s, to the best of my recollection, why I came up with another question.”
As the court day ended, Bailey zeroed in on the defense’s strongest allegation of racism against Fuhrman, the statements of Bell. First, Bailey asked the detective a series of questions about a practice session in which government lawyers-including the two who prosecuted the police officers who beat Rodney G. King-put Fuhrman through a cross-examination.
Fuhrman said that session, which he described as lasting only 20 to 30 minutes and as being not particularly helpful, was devoted largely to questioning him about Bell’s allegations. Until Tuesday, jurors had only glimpsed those allegations when prosecutor Clark projected a portion of a letter by Bell on the screen above the witness box.
Fuhrman had denied the letter’s charges then, but Bailey confronted him with the allegations again, going through them more slowly and deliberately as all stirring in the courtroom ceased and jurors gazed at the full letter displayed on the screen above Fuhrman.
In response to those questions, Fuhrman acknowledged that he had visited the Marine recruiting center where Bell said she met him and also said there was a real estate office nearby. He also said he was working in Westwood at the time, as Bell said in her letter.
But Fuhrman, without any display of emotion, denied the most explosive of the allegations against him, charges that he made violently racist comments.
He is scheduled to return to the stand this morning.
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