Okay, I didn’t really follow the details of the trial. My understanding was that the main line of the defense was to create reasonable doubt by producing evidence that the police might have had racist motives to frame Simpson and there was evidence that could have been fabricated. This is a circumstantial argument but it was enough to convince a jury that was chosen to be predisposed to giving Simpson the benefit of the doubt.
However, I was listening to Alan Dershowitz talking about the case. And Dershowitz talked about the bloody sock. He said that the blood on the sock contained a chemical called EDTA which it could only have gotten from being kept in a medical vial. So that proved that the blood on the sock had not come directly from the people involved and must have been planted. (Dershowitz also said there was a video taken of the room before the sock was found that showed the sock was not present where it was later recovered.) If true, then not only could the police have fabricated evidence as a hypothetical possibility but it proves that they actually did so. And if so, then Simpson actually did deserve to be found not guilty. Because I believe that if it’s proven that the police fabricated one piece of physical evidence then all of the physical evidence cannot be trusted.
But, quite frankly, I’m not going to believe this just because Dershowitz said so. He was part of the defense team and he has a history of promoting himself, so I think it’s very possible he overstated the incontrovertability of the evidence. And doing a quick online search, I see that the prosecution did argue that the presense of the EDTA did not prove that the blood was planted.
So can anyone weigh in on the credibility of this piece of evidence? Is it true that the EDTA proved the blood did not come from Simpson and the victims? Or is it possible for the EDTA to have been present on genuine evidence? Or maybe the EDTA was not present at all in the amounts claimed?
Before starting, I’d like to ask people not to rehash other arguments about the trial and verdict or Simpson’s history or other cases. I’d just like to know the facts about this one particular issue.
That and Alan Dershowitz sounds just like Woody Allen.
I don’t remember all the details years later, but I remember at the time that it was pretty clear to me that some of the police team, particularly Furman and possibly Van Atta were planting blood on stuff. The sock I don’t remember. But I do remember that there was a male nurse that drew blood from Simpson and wrote down something like 8cc drawn and only 6cc was found in the vial. The case was probably lost for me at this point, but when the prosecution produced a videotape of the nurse testifying that he made a mistake and it was 6cc and couldn’t testify in court because he was ill, it was then beyond any repair in my mind. Not offering the nurse for cross examination was worse than leaving it alone and not trying to get the tape in.
Furman had been called to a domestic alteration that Simpson and Nicole had a while back and knew immediately upon coming on the murder scene that it was the same woman who was married to O.J. Simpson. Of course Simpson is immediately the leading suspect or person of interest as they like to lie about it these days. 80 percent of murdered women are murdered by boyfriends and husbands, current or ex. Furman plainly lied when he said that they went to Simpson’s house to make sure he was not also a target. He was a suspect.
Furman dug a deep hole in refusing to admit he ever used the “n” word. The prosecution should have objected (and may have) and the judge should have sustained such an objection. Bailey’s tape recording of him using the word and being shown to be a racist perjurer, surprisingly enough, hurt. Who would have thought that? Furman blew the case for the prosecution very badly.
I always thought that Simpson probably committed the murders, but the cops planted evidence and the prosecution could not get around those inferences, even if they had been better lawyers than they were.
As I wrote, these things only show it’s possible that the police fabricated evidence. If what Dershowitz said is true, then it’s a proven fact that the police fabricated evidence. There’s a massive difference between saying something could have happened and saying you have proof that it did happen.
That was one of the links I found during my online search. Unfortunately I couldn’t form any conclusions from it. The defense expert said that the evidence only supported one conclusion and the prosecution said he was wrong and there were other possible conclusions. I’m no expert on forensics so I can’t say who’s right or wrong. I was hoping that other experts on the subject had weighed in since the trial and formed a consensus on whether or not the evidence supported what Dershowitz claimed.
Briefly: at the time of the investigation, there was no test for EDTA in blood. FBI toxicologist Roger Martz attempted to develop one based on mass spectrometry. This procedure ripped the sample’s component molecules, including any EDTA, into pieces called “daughters,” which were then ionized (adding a single charge). The resulting sample stream is then subjected to a magnetic field, which applies an equal force to each charge. Because F=ma, the daughters are spread out into a spectrum according to their mass. The relevant masses for EDTA are 293 (the whole molecule), 160, and 132 (two “halves” of the molecule). If the daughters do not show up in equal amounts, the results are equivocal – is there another molecule present that contributes a 160 daughter? Is 132 being suppressed? Are both peaks just noise?
The prosecution’s argument was twofold: (1) EDTA occurs in a lot of places, and could have been a contaminant from the environment or from the donor’s diet; (2) the test did not unequivocally show the concentration of EDTA that the defense claimed. Both of these arguments are supported by the positive results from Martz’s own blood, but he didn’t document his work properly because he thought that he was just doing research by that time. The jury, apparently, found Martz less convincing than Dr. Reiders, despite the fact that Reiders was only reviewing Martz’s data, anc conducted no tests of his own.
My main focus of college is archaeology though I’ve taken quite a few forensics classes, I may make it my minor. The general consensus in the forensics community is that OJ’s lawyers were good liars/manipulators, the jury was ignorant/gullible, and OJ got away with murder and should have been in prison forever and ever and ever. The author of one of my criminalistics books sounds like he wants to go shoot OJ and his lawyers himself for making a mockery of the DNA testing and results.
This is a more detailed analysis of the blood samples and handling of the testing. What is says is there was NO EDTA in the unpreserved blood samples, those gathered from the tailgate and the socks. http://www.usdoj.gov/oig/special/9704a/07simpso.htm
Several years back, in a small-town convenience store, I bought a bottle of some soft drink I had never heard of. Among the ingredients was EDTA. Dershowitz was either clueless or lying when he said EDTA could come only from a blood vial.
In Dershowitz’s defense that’s not what he said. His claim was that EDTA is not a naturally occurring chemical found in blood and it would not be present in blood that came directly out of a body.
I predicated my remark “Dershowitz was either clueless or lying when he said EDTA could come only from a blood vial” on something said earlier in this thread; viz., “He said that the blood on the sock contained a chemical called EDTA which it could only have gotten from being kept in a medical vial.” Interestingly, that remark comes from the second graf of your OP.
(I’m not picking on you, just find it mildly amusing when someone unwittingly argues with himself!)
The nice thing about arguing with myself is that I always win.
The situation was that there were only two sources for the blood in question; the bodies and the evidence specimens that were kept in medical vials. So if the blood in a body doesn’t contain EDTA, then in this particular situation, it’s correct to say that the only way the blood could contain EDTA was from a medical vial.
But you can’t expand that into a general rule like you did. Nobody claimed that the only place you’d find EDTA would be in a medical vial. So your evidence that you found EDTA in a bottle of soda proves nothing either way.
The real villian in the case (aside from Simpson himself) was official LA District Attorney. It was Gil Garcetti who volunteered without a fight to move the case from Santa Monica where it was suppose to be tried to downtown LA. The jury that heard the case never should have been there to hear it.
I clearly remember the day when I went out to the street and brought in the morning paper, read the small story about the change in venue at the bottom of the page and announced to my wife that Simpson had just beat the murder charge. It was clear to me that any trial downtown would be about one thing and only one thing and that was race.
I’ve read the posts and the links. But I’m not so interested in this issue that I’m willing to put in the time it would take to get a university degree and become a criminal forensics expert. So doing my own research is out. I was hoping to skip ahead and find out what existing criminal forensics experts have said.
No reasonable, intelligent person needs to do that. I much less deep understanding would suffice, including that gained from approximately ten minutes of reading online or a thorough disseciton of this very thread.
It was apparently not clear to you at all. Which of course was the exact goal of the Defense Attourneys (who mostly sucked, but who did their jobs well on that point, at least). Nobody planted blood on anything - except Simpson himself, when he bled on everything. The police did not, did not have to, and had no reason to. Furman may have been a loudmouth, but he probably wasn’t even particularly racist, judging by his own service record.