LOS ANGELES, July 20 -- Trying to support their claim that evidence was planted, the defense called a police photographerto the stand Thursday to testify he did not see a crucial pair of bloodstained socks in O.J. Simpson's bedroom the day after the murders -- but he and others had a solid explanation that clearly benefited the prosecution. Photographer Willie Ford acknowledged that his video did not show the socks on Simpson's bedroom floor, but he said police criminalists had already collected evidence before he entered the room to videotape it. Another witness called by the defense, police detective Bert Luper, helped the prosecution's case by testifying that he saw criminalist Dennis Fung collect the socks before the photographer videotaped the room's contents. The bloodstained socks -- one of the most important pieces of evidence against the football legend -- contain DNA matching that of Simpson and his slain ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, prosecution scientists have testified. Simpson's defense team claims that blood was sprinkled on the socks later to frame Simpson for the murders of his ex-wife and her friend, Ronald Goldman, and had promised the jury the socks would be among the most hotly contested pieces of evidence. Simpson, 48, is standing trial in Superior Court on two counts of first-degree murder for the June 12, 1994 stabbing and slashing deaths of Nicole Simpson and Goldman outside her Brentwood condominium. Faced with Luper's testimony that he was 'positive' the socks were in plain view before Ford arrived, Cochran pointed out contradictions in his testimony and that of Fung in April.

Luper said he believes Fung collected the socks between 3:30 and 3:45 p.m., while Fung said he believed he picked up the socks collected the socks between 4:30 and 4:40 p.m. although he was not exactly sure of the time. Fung's testimony also is apparently contradicted by the videotape, which includes a time counter. The photographer said he had been told that the time shown on the videotape -- 3:13 -- was off by an hour, so he must have shot the footage in Simpson's bedroom at 4:13 p.m. Luper, a veteran police detective, said he first saw the socks about 12:30 or 12:40 that afternoon and noticed the socks were out of place in Simpson's neatly kept Brentwood mansion. He acknowledged that he did not get close enough to the socks to notice if they were stained with blood. Prosecution witnesses have testified that they did not notice bloodstains on the dark socks until several months after they were collected. The defense has said there is 'no question' the blood was smeared on the socks long after their collection. In an effort to imply that the socks had been planted, chief defense attorney Johnnie Cochran Jr. called Simpson's housekeeper, Josephine 'GiGi' Guarin, to the stand to testify that Simpson never left clothes lying around his bedroom. 'He wants everything in order, he's neat in putting everything in place,' Guarin said, adding that she had never seen Simpson leave clothes strewn about his room even when he was in a hurry to catch a plane. The defense also used Guarin as another demeanor witness to try to establish that there was nothing unusual about Simpson's behavior the night of the murders. The housekeeper said she spoke with Simpson on the telephone about 8 p.m. that night and that he appeared to be 'the same O.J.' Prosecutors contend the murders took place about 10:15 p.m. and that Simpson rushed home to get ready for his red-eye flight to Chicago. In a day of testimony that appeared to largely benefit the prosecution, Deputy District Attorney Christopher Darden also used his cross-examination of Ford to try to shoot down the defense's theory of a conspiracy that could have involved police and criminalists. The photographer said he did not see anyone plant any evidence or do anything wrong, and that he would tell the jury about it if he had seen anything of that sort. Ford also noted that he was at Simpson's mansion solely to videotape his belongings for liability purposes, not to videotape evidence linked to the murders. In other developments Thursday: --the football legend's lawyers said in court papers that Simpson has been stripped of 'key elements of his defense' and 'crippled in his effort' to rebut prosecution evidence suggesting he was the only one motivated to kill Nicole Simpson and Goldman. In a five-page motion, Simpson's defense attorneys asked Judge Lance Ito to reverse a July 13 ruling barring them from questioning a witness about drug use by one of Nicole Brown Simpson's friends, Faye Resnick. The judge's ruling had gutted a key defense strategy suggesting that drug dealers seeking retaliation for an unpaid drug debt may have killed Nicole Simpson, mistaking her for Resnick, who stayed at Nicole Simpson's condominium days before the murders. --Ito fined lead prosecutor Marcia Clark $250 for questioning the honesty of one of the defense's expert witnesses outside the jury's presence. Ito, who had warned Clark earlier about personal attacks and said he was in a 'bad mood,' told Clark to write a check before leaving for the day. --Ito limited the testimony of the defense's bloodstain expert, Herbert MacDonnell. The judge said MacDonnell cannot testify about an experiment he performed on how long it took a sock to dry, or about presumptive blood test results on a portion of the sock. The judge had earlier precluded the prosecution from using presumptive tests on other pieces of evidence because the tests are not conclusive. Simpson defense lawyer Peter Neufeld said outside the jury's presence Wednesday that Nicole Simpson's blood soaked through from one interior portion of the sock to the other interior portion, where a person's foot should have been if the socks were worn by the killer. --Defense attorney Robert Blasier said the defense intends to wrap up its case on Aug. 7. The defense, which began presenting its case on July 10, has presented 30 witnesses so far, about half what the prosecution called in the five months it spent presenting its case. --Simpson's defense team filed court papers calling the credibility of controversial police detective Mark Fuhrman 'the central issue' in the trial. They said they want to call four witness to 'directly impeach' Fuhrman's denial that he used a racial ephithet to describe blacks, while prosecutors are asking the judge to preclude testimony from those witnesses. Fuhrman has testified that he found a bloodstained glove at Simpson's estate that matched one found at the murder scene. The defense contends Fuhrman is a racist who may have planted the glove to frame the famous black football star with the beautiful white wife. --Prosecutors filed a motion asking Ito to limit the defense's questioning of the Police Department's crime lab director, Michelle Kestler. The motion asks the judge to preclude the defense from asking questions that imply she had a motive to plant blood evidence on a pair of socks because her husband is a homicide detective.

Role of the Police in the OJ Simpson case In the case of the murders of Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman, Robert Riske a police officer with the Los Angeles Police Department was the first attending police officer at the scene. The Scientific Investigation Division (SID) of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) claims it is America’s first crime lab, but in 1994 it was America’s worst crime lab. Unlike most criminal defendants, OJ Simpson had the funds to allow his defense team to investigate every facet of the case against him. With no witnesses to the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, DNA evidence in the O. Simpson murder case was the key physical proof used by the prosecution to link O. Simpson to the crime. Over nine weeks of testimony, 108 exhibits of DNA evidence, including 61 drops of blood, were presented at trial.Testing was cross-referenced and validated at three separate labs using. OJ Simpson case taught police what not to do at a crime scene The O.J. Simpson murder trial cast a harsh light on police and forensic work, and gave law enforcement a textbook example of what not to do.

Copies of Detective Tom Lange’s Notes from the double homicide investigation of Nicole Brown-Simpson and Ron Goldman, National Law Enforcement Collection, 2016.8.3

Los Angeles (CA) Police Detective Tom Lange wasn’t surprised by the verdict exonerating O.J. Simpson for the murders of Ronald Goldman and Nicole Brown-Simpson on October 3, 1995. As lead homicide detective for the investigation, he spent eight days on the stand listing off the wealth of evidence he and his partner Detective Phil Vannatter collected over the course of the investigation. However, the jury didn’t seem interested in what he had to say:

“When I was being on direct examination with Marcia [Clark] I’m answering these questions and introducing evidence, the jurors, they’re a few feet away, are not staring, they’re glaring at me. All jurors have a pad of paper and a pencil. They can write stuff down. This is relevant evidence that I’m producing, introducing in the trial. Nobody’s writing anything, which is a little strange. Yet when Johnny Cochran is cross-examining me, they’re writing like crazy, because he’s saying, intimating, that cops plant evidence, cops are racist, cops lie. “You live in Simi Valley where the jury in the Rodney King case was, don’t you?” Three times he asked that. What relevance does that have to do with anything? And they’re writing like crazy. I knew one thing then, that this case was never going to be won.”

To the jurors and millions of viewers watching on TV, O.J. Simpson’s trial fell into a larger context of racial tensions and mistrust of police in the Los Angeles area. In particular, many African Americans were deeply frustrated with the LAPD, and felt the department had a history of mistreating their community. Although the most infamous event exasperating these tensions had occurred four years earlier, it was still on many people’s minds.

On March 3, 1991, around 12:30 am, officers with the California Highway Patrol attempted to stop a speeding white Hyundai. The driver of the car failed to pull-over and instead led a high-speed chase. When the driver eventually stopped on the corner of Osbourne Street and Foothill Boulevard in the Lake View Terrace neighborhood of Los Angeles, several units of the LAPD had joined the chase. The motorist and his two passengers were ordered out of their car and onto the ground.
Across the street, a witness caught the following events on camera. Though the footage was grainy and shaky, it showed a group of mostly white LAPD officers violently beating the African American motorist, Rodney King. For the next several minutes, they repeatedly struck him with batons, kicked him, and shocked him with a Taser. It resulted in multiple skull fractures, a broken leg, and brain damage, among other injuries.

The brutal footage aired on local television stations, leaving viewers shocked and furious. Television stations around the world quickly picked it up. Four of the officers involved were charged with excessive use of force. In response, the Mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley, formed an Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department, nicknamed the “Christopher Commission.” It found that the Rodney King incident was not an aberration in the LAPD, that there was “a significant number” of officers who repeatedly used excessive force in recent years, and that this was a symptom of larger cultural and structural problems in the department.

Due to the charged nature of this case, a state appellate court panel ruled that the four officers would not receive a fair trial in Los Angeles. They moved the trial to nearby Simi Valley. During the trial, the defense argued that what the video didn’t show was that King was under the influence of alcohol, was in violation of his parole, was resisting arrest, and had charged at one of the officers. The footage showed King attempting to get up several times, which officers said they thought was a threat. On April 29, 1992, the majority-white jury sided with the defense and acquitted all four men.

After the verdict, people started pouring into the streets of L.A., angry and in disbelief. Protesting and rioting ensued, which led to one of the largest civil disturbances in U.S. history. Over the next five days, the city burned, resulting in over one billion dollars in damage. More than 60 people died. The LAPD was not prepared to respond to this level of disruption. The governor of California placed the City of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County under a state of emergency, calling in the California National Guard.

The riots officially ended several days later on May 4, but racial tensions and mistrust in the police continued to run high. It was within this background context that the 1995 O.J. Simpson trial took place. While this was just one factor adding to the outcome of the trial, it was an important one. In the end, despite the wealth of forensic and circumstantial evidence pointing to Simpson, the majority-black jury acquitted him of double homicide.

Hansen: “So what do you think the legacy of the O.J. Simpson case has been for the LAPD?”

Lange: “Depends on who you talk to. We did our job. We got more evidence in that case than any other case we not only worked on but ever heard of. That’s what cops do. We can’t be the jury, we can’t be the judge, we can’t be the media, we can’t be the prosecutors. We’re only the cops, and the cops assemble the case, they find the evidence. Much of the evidence that we found wasn’t put on by the prosecution, because they knew, in essence, we were on trial. This is two years after Rodney King; this is right after the riots in L.A. This is a minority jury who didn’t necessarily like the LAPD. They had a lot of negative contacts, right, wrong or indifferent. We were on trial, essentially.”

The LAPD went through a great deal of change since the events of the 1990s. This included restructuring, new training, and a consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice. In 2002, Bill Bratton joined the department as Chief of Police and helped initiate a lot of this reform.“To avoid federal takeover…of the Department, the city entered into a consent decree…And it was and still remains the largest consent decree in the United States. And I addressed it in the same way I addressed all the other issues I’ve oftentimes been challenged to deal with: corruption, inefficiency. You set goals, you work on developing strategies to meet the goals, and you empower people in the organization to assist them in meeting those strategies, implementing those strategies.”

The results were impressive. In 2009, Harvard University published a study showing that the LAPD had undergone a monumental task—it had instituted new leadership and police oversight, new community policing initiatives, training, and hiring practices. The result was a drop in crime, better morale, more accountability, and a staggering 83% approval rating from the public. This included a significant increase in hope expressed by black survey participants. The report concluded that “the LAPD of today is a changed organization.”

Looking back on the nationally televised trial of O.J. Simpson, it is easy to see how the verdict was influenced by the context of the world around it. Recently, I spent some time with Tom Lange when he spoke at a conference about the investigation that propelled him onto the national stage. His obvious and understandable frustrations about the conduct and outcome of the trial are mitigated by an understanding of where the LAPD stood with the African American community at that time. An issue that he still sees today:

“Later the jury in the criminal case said, “Yes, he probably did do it and maybe he did do it, but we’re not going to find him guilty because we don’t like racist LAPD cops who plant evidence. And unfortunately, a lot of that hasn’t changed. There’s a PR problem there… Maybe we ought to take another look at all that. Is that true? Do all of them do that? No.”

[1] Tom Lange. Oral History Interview with the National Law Enforcement Museum, October 4, 2016.[2] Report of The Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department, pg.III.[3] Tom Lange, Oral History Interview with the National Law Enforcement Museum.[4] Bill Bratton. Oral History Interview with the National Law Enforcement Museum, December 12, 2013.[5] Stone, Christopher, Todd Foglesong, and Christine M. Cole. “Policing Los Angeles Under a Consent Decree: The Dynamics of Change at the LAPD.” Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management Working Paper Series, Harvard Kennedy School, May 2009, pg. 68.[6] Tom Lange, Oral History with the National Law Enforcement Museum.
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