Or, they presented evidence that brought reasonable doubt into the mind of the jury and pressed home this point. Which is what they are supposed to do. There was no conspiracy created. The said that Furhman is an admitted evidence tamperer. Hell, it was enough to overturn a large portion of cases Furhman worked on. That’s good lawyering and bad police work. But you go on being a hater without reason. What harm could it do?
No, that is not what happened. They found evidence that Furhman TAMPERED WITH EVIDENCE. There was no need to dirty him up, he did that all by himself.
Cochran had a partnership with Scheck and Neufeld to handle civil rights cases, which is likely what made me think he was part of the Innocence Project. Thanks for the correction.
I don’t think that you can judge Johnny Cochran for his actions on any one case he worked on.
I rarely agreed with his views. I found when he was a commentator on CourtTV and CNN that he usually left me annoyed and ticked off.
That, however, has nothing to do with his worth as a human being. A man died, and I’m sorry for that. He was a skilled and intelligent man, who, as other posters have said, was flawed. I’m not going to defend his actions during the OJ trial, nor offer up other actions to balance it out.
And, to be honest, I have to say I agree 95% with Cliffy:
Just so I know, we’re talking about the O.J. Simpson case, right? Orenthal James Simpson? The ex-football player who killed his wife and a waiter? Believe it or not, the trial I saw and reviewed showed the defense arguing that other police officers were involved in “framing” OJ too, including Vanatter, Fung, the police officer who drew Simpson’s blood, and the 16 other officers who arrived at the murder scene before Fuhrman. Of course the defense created a conspiracy, and Fuhrman was the one they picked out to give that conspiracy an ugly, lying, racist face.
I don’t hate Johnnie Cochran. I think poorly of him and the tactics he used to obtain an acquittal for his client in one of his cases. I think poorly of him for paying off Al Sharpton. I think poorly of him for his grandstanding. But I think highly of him for some of his other work, though too.
I’m with Biggirl on this one. Cochran does not deserve to be pillaried for being good at his job. I think when you get right down to it, OJ got acquitted because black people in LA didn’t trust the cops. I also think that Cochran would have been guilty of malpratice if he hadn’t introduced the evidence that the cop who found a crucial piece of evidence was a racist idiot who had made prior claims (on tape) that he would be willing to tamper with evidence to frame black people. What was Johnny supposed to do, throw the case? Lay down for Marsha Clark? She got beaten by a better lawyer. That’s the way it goes.
I think it should also not get lost that Johnnie Cochran spent more than 30 years working as an assistent DA for Los Angeles specializing in police brutality and civil rights cases. He didn’t just work on the OJ case. he did a lot of good work both as a prosecutor and a defense attorney. In the Geronimo Pratt case he got a man out of prison who had served 25 years for a murder he didn’t commit. Johnny Cochran cannot be reduced to one case and one verdict that a lot of people didn’t like.
I didn’t watch much of the OJ trial and only remember bits of what I did see. Is there some reason why Cochran is the defense lawyer that everyone thinks of with regards to this trial and not Bailey or Shapiro? I often hear derisive comments (not so much here, but off the boards) about Cochran and his tactics, but I never hear anything about the other lawyers. What set Cochran apart? Was it just the rhyming bit?
IIRC Shapiro had been involved only in case an appeal was necessary. He actually was not part of the team during the trial, though on retainer should he become necessary after a verdict was reached.
But the way you write it, you make it sound as if the defence invented a conspiracy out of whole cloth, and forced it down the jury’s throats. You almost make it sound as if it were devious of them to have an actual sworn evidence-tamperer working the case. What they did is what any good defence team should have done, which is present the jury with the perfectly valid alternative possibility that Simpson was framed. This they did, and they didn’t pick Fuhrman as their fall guy - he was a genuine dirty cop who was genuinely involved in the investigation. How could they possibly ignore this and uphold their duties as lawyers? He made the conspiracy seem more plausible to the jury, sure, but not through any sneaky tactics on the side of the defence, but because he was caught on tape saying he would do exactly what they claimed he did.
If the framing theory is as ludicrous as you claim, surely any half-competent prosecution should have made this clear at trial. Are defences expected to assess their opponents’ level of skill, and play down to their level?
You act like Mark Furhman was the lowly janitor at the LAPD, not a detective responsible for finding and processing evidence. If the theory you’re going with is that the investigation was slipshod from the get-go (a theory that many, if not most, defense attornies use), why wouldn’t you go after the “repellant” guy who’s running the frickin’ investigation?
Look at this objectively: You are a lawyer charged with defending a high-profile black man. You find out that one of the lead investigators of the case is not only a known racist, but you have tapes as evidence. You find out that this detective has said, “Yeah, we work with niggers and gangs. You can take one of these niggers, drag 'em into the alley and beat the shit out of them and kick them. You can see them twitch. It really relieves your tension.”
What do you do? Should your first thought be, “Ooh, I can’t use this stuff at ALL! Lord knows I don’t wanna be accused of being the worse thing in the world–a RACE BAITER!!”
Hell no.
Johnny Cochran was brave. He had to know that people would go berserk if he “played the race card”, but he did it any ole damn way and did it successfully. Saving OJ aside, he exposed what so many people are too stupid or in denial to see: That our criminal justice system employs racists who have a hard-on for black people. He did not make up Mark Furhman or exaggerate his past. He just laid it out there and allowed us to conclude whether it was plausible that evidence was planted in this case. IMHO, only an idiot would say it wasn’t plausible, given the info that was presented. And that was all OJ needed to be acquitted.
You can be upset about OJ getting away all you want. But to besmirch Johnny Cochrane for doing his job the way it should be done is wrong, IMHO.
Defence lawyers have a job to do within the adversarial system. Are there arguments to be made against such a system? I’m sure there are. But this is the system we’ve got, and it’s hardly fair to expect the lawyers on one side of the courtroom to put in a substandard performance just because you or even the whole country think the person in the defendant’s chair might be guilty.
And complaining about lawyers who play to juries’ fears and prejudices? Give me a fucking break. Johnny Cochran was hardly the first lawyer ever to do that. Anyway, if you want to get angry at someone over this, get angry at jury members who fall for this shit instead of looking at the evidence.
They did invent a conspiracy out of whole cloth. The only “evidence” they had was that Fuhrman lied under oath about using the n-word and that he bragged in an interview with a writer. The defense took those two things and created an entire conspiracy involving numerous other cops, a conspiracy that had absolutely no basis in actual evidence.
Even then, I suppose I could swallow it as a desperate trial tactic. But it didn’t stop with an unfounded allegation of conspiracy. The defense team had to create a motive for the conspiracy. So they preyed on the bias, fear, and hatred of the jury and played the race card. Then the case wasn’t about the evidence or vast conspiracies, it was about the race of the defendant, the race of the inverstigators, the race of the prosecutors and the race of the jury. And Cochran, especially, played it perfectly to the jury.
Sworn evidence tamperer? The only admission ever of his evidence tamperering was an unsworn bragging to a writer. NOTE: I am not defending Mark Fuhrman. He is a perjuring piece of garbage. But, I’m just point out facts.
Perfectly valid? Oh please. To be perfectly valid, there should be some evidence, maybe even a fair inference. But they didn’t have that. And they didn’t have that to the extent necessary. To accept the defense theory, there had to be at least 9 people all conspiring together on the spur of the moment, and another 11 or so who turned the other way while it was going on. Of course they didn’t have any evidence to suppor this, so they went with the old standby, fear and prejudice of the jury.
But the conspiracy the defense alleged wasn’t just Fuhrman, it had to involve so many other people. But since those other people weren’t racists liars, they weren’t the ones focused on by Cochran in the courtroom, and in the press.
There wasn’t a half-competent prosecutor within a thousand miles of the Simpson case.
Regardless, I’ll back out of this thread. There is no way I’m going to rehash the details of the Simpson case, so I’ll just applaud Johnnie on his successful defense of OJ.
Are you sure about that? I’m not an expert on the OJ trial–being that I have a life and whatnot–but I seem to recall a little something about aEDTA-contaminated blood sample. While it doesn’t prove tampering, it puts more than a reasonable amount of doubt in a key piece of evidence.
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They didn’t have to create anything if Furhman practically handed it to them on a platter. That combined with other evidence, such as the clumsy way evidence was handled (specimens left in a car overnight, WTF?) put the prosecution’s case in doubt, and rightfully so.
The hatred of the jury? So not only do you consider yourself an expert in the case–even though you don’t even seem to be aware that important evidence was shrouded in question–you now somehow know that the jury had “hatred”? Wow. This absolute certainty you exhibit is amazing.
So we’re supposed to believe that had he been giving a * sworn* testimony, his description of events would more likely resemble truth? Even in the face of evidence showing the man to be a perjurer? Gimme a break.
You think Furhman’s own admission that he has played fast and loose with evidence is immaterial here? Maybe your hysterics are preventing you from realizing that the defense didn’t have to prove that Furhman tampered with evidence. All they had to show was that the idea is plausible. And it is.
Where do you get this from? How many of people does it take to plant a couple splatters of blood?
Right. They didn’t have any exhibits at all. They didn’t pose any challenging questions to the prosecution’s experts which validly put their testimony into question. Their whole case was nothing but unsupported allegations and fantasy land imaginings. All they did was pose in front of the cameras and lead the jury in chants of “Kill Whitey!!” :rolleyes:
I swear, the OJ Simpson trial produced so many armchair “experts” I have to wonder why the state of California even bothered trying it in court. Maybe they should have treated it like American Idol. Sounds like justice to me.
I don’t know if Alan Dershowitz actually said IRL what his character said in Reversal of Fortune, but it’s true. “If lawyers only defended innocent people, there would only be ten trial lawyers in the entire country.”
I know I’m going to get flamed to hell and back for this, but here goes.
The OJ trial wasn’t just black vs. white; it was also liberal vs. conservative. And just as in last year’s election, the conservatives brought their A game and the liberals did not.
Who were the prosecutors? A soft-spoken white woman and a high-yellow brother. And they were ineffective. Who was on the defense team? An angry brother, an aggressive New Yorker (two if you count Barry Scheck) and an old-school WASP. Again, forgive me, but that is a dream team.
“Whites: 3,234,023
Blacks: 1”
The OJ Simpson trial was never about race. It was about who got to beat and kill women—and uppity white women—and get away with it. Johnny Cochran made that possible, made it seem like rebellion. Murdering and beating women is SO rebellious and so against The Man.
Yeah, whatever. He got a wife-beater and murderer off and made it seem racial.
Oj’s just another wife-murdering scumbag. Cochran’s just another wife beater’s lawyer. Conspiracy? Give me a fucking break. The prosecution wasn’t the best but Cochran played the stupid card in front of the jury and it worked. It was just like a replay of the Clarence Thomas hearing, where the guy whined that the woman or her defenders were lying.
OJ wasn’t some revolutionary hero. He was a wife-beater. Cochran enabled him t get away with murder. Sorry, but killing somebody seems a lot worse than calling them names.