Chapter 2
In the Beginning
News reporters and television producers began to filter into the cavernous nineteen-story Criminal Courts Building in Los Angeles soon after Simpson’s arrest for the June 1994 murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. They came to cover his initial arraignment and subsequent preliminary hearing, which is a sort of mini trial at which prosecutors present a summary of their case. The preliminary hearing judge must determine if the district attorney has enough evidence for the defendant to stand trial. Los Angeles Municipal Court Judge Kathleen Kennedy-Powell ruled that to be the case with O. J. Simpson.
Media coverage of Simpson’s four-day preliminary hearing and some of the attorneys’ behavior at that and at an evidentiary hearing that preceded it foreshadowed the media debacles and lawyers’ grandstanding that were to play out for all the world during the trial.
Four months before the Simpson and Goldman murders, an article by defense attorney Robert Shapiro on how to manipulate the media to benefit a client or a case had appeared in a statewide legal magazine.1Whether he followed his own advice in the early stages of the Simpson case, or whether he was effective, remains debatable. He did, however, collude with what he called the “legitimate” press—which consisted of such newspapers and wire services as the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Associated Press—to meet for postproceeding interviews in out-of-the-way spots on various floors of the courthouse away from the Simpson courtroom. If TV or tabloid crews showed up, he would duck out and scoot down the corridor to resume the interview on another floor. Then the chase was on.
The result was a Keystone Kops-type farce with people—many hauling bulky shoulder-mounted TV cameras—popping on and off elevators that rise from the building’s bowels. They scurried through the grim, high-ceilinged corridors that branch to the left and right of the elevator bays. They peered around corners, then doubled back in search of the elusive Shapiro. The commotion also caused great consternation among sheriff ’s deputies, who tried to play catch-up, maintain order, and keep the noise below a dull roar.
Shapiro’s attempts to deal exclusively with the press he considered legitimate led to a discussion with Ito. Shapiro wanted to use Ito’s courtroom for interviews. After all, he argued, the prosecution team could stage their interviews and press conferences in the DA’s headquarters on the courthouse’s eighteenth floor. Ito refused. He wouldn’t be party to partiality, perceived or otherwise.
Eventually, the roving interviews stopped after other judges complained that noise in the hallway was disrupting and delaying proceedings in their courtrooms and that jurors, witnesses, and attorneys couldn’t get through the throngs clogging the corridors. The building’s two supervising judges jointly issued an order in September, which was amended and expanded several times during the trial, designating specific out-of-the-way spots for interviews and cameras. Everywhere else in the building was off-limits.
Although it targeted the media, the order also helped disperse the crowds of curious onlookers and camp followers who milled around inside the building and skirted the fringes of the hallway interviews. Simpson’s celebrity seemed to heighten the intensity of the reaction, and people orchestrated ways to grab the spotlight, to profit from or to be part of the Simpson case.
Overnight, proselytizers carrying “Jesus Saves” signs and vendors hawking T-shirts and buttons blossomed on sidewalks around the courthouse. Inside, sketch artists peddled drawings, and a woman from Washington State, apparently hoping for a very public suicide, had to be hauled in from an upper-floor ledge, not once, but twice during the course of the trial. Members of the public, lawyers, judges’ spouses and relatives, judges from other states and even other countries, television actors, movie stars, yesteryear athletes, wackos, and, of course, the media clambered for courtroom seats. The daily wrangle was interrupted only by building evacuations for the increasingly frequent bomb scares called in by pranksters.
One of the first judges to attend a proceeding as a spectator was Cecil Mills. Mills, who was criminal division supervising judge at the time of the preliminary hearing, attended a lower-court hearing as a spectator before the case even got to the superior court. A few days later, he interrupted the preliminary hearing to hand Kennedy-Powell a manila envelope. That mysterious package would be widely rumored to contain either the murder weapon or a knife similar to the murder weapon. Mills’s action raised an eyebrow or two. Judges didn’t normally give messages or deliver packages directly to a hearing or trial judge in open court. If something was urgent enough to interrupt a proceeding, a message would be conveyed via the judge’s clerk or bailiff so a meeting could take place in chambers.4
Mills also conducted Simpson’s second arraignment, a proceeding that follows a preliminary hearing when the defendant again hears the charges against him and enters a plea. Although Mills had passed most of his courtroom duties over to the assistant supervising judge soon after becoming supervising judge, his decision to conduct Simpson’s arraignment himself became understandable once the name of the trial judge was made public.
Ito, then the assistant criminal courts supervising judge, had planned to conduct that arraignment, but the day before the proceeding, the court’s top judicial leadership had selected him to serve as the trial judge on the case, and in a master calendar court system like that used at the time in the Los Angeles Superior Court Criminal Division’s Central District, the arraigning judge almost never served as the trial judge.
Before Ito’s selection became known, a frenzy of premature reporting on who the trial judge would be set the stage for how the media would cover the trial. They speculated endlessly. They called my office repeatedly for updates, for photographs, for news of an announcement, for confirmation of their rumors, and for our best guesses. Finally, based primarily on rumors and inside tips, the press reported its best guess: Judge Paul Flynn. That speculative headline pretty much reflected court scuttlebutt.
Then came the official announcement. Lance Ito would try the case. I wasn’t surprised. Shortly before I learned about his selection, he had asked my opinion about a location for a change of venue because of the publicity the case had gotten in Los Angeles. I jokingly suggested Nome, Alaska, then told him about the massive coverage of the case I had seen on recent trips to northern California and the East Coast. Although a change of venue was briefly mentioned in court, the lawyers never seriously pursued it, knowing In the Beginning that the media blitz had saturated the entire state as thoroughly as it had Los Angeles.
Knowing Ito is imperative to understanding how the trial unfolded and what shaped the media’s treatment of him. My encounters with him had been few and brief before he got the Simpson case. The first was in mid-1993 when, as assistant supervising judge, he presided over the felony master calendar. That included defendants entering pleas and judges assigning cases to trial courts. I was in the hall outside the thirteenth-floor master-calendar courtroom with several television camera crews and print photographers who wanted to cover an arraignment.
As I gathered their camera-request forms, I told them they would probably have to pool. “Who was here first?” I asked. “Or do you want to pick someone?” A photographer and a camera man elbowed their way forward while the rest asked if they could all go in.
“Not likely,” I said. Although judges much more routinely allowed cameras in their courtrooms in those days, seldom did they permit more than one from TV and one from the print media.
Ito was on the bench in the large dark-paneled courtroom, so I gave the requests to the bailiff, who took them to the court clerk. I sat on a wooden pewlike bench in the spectator section and waited while a dozen or more people milled about chatting with one another, the bailiff, and the court clerk. A bank of lawyers sat in seats along one wall, which in any other courtroom would have been the jury box. Others came and went, lugging heavy briefcases and armloads of files. A woman sitting at the prosecutor’s table murmured into a telephone. Clerks hustled about with messages and yet more case files. The constant motion and low hubbub permeating the air didn’t seem to faze the judge.
He addressed an attorney who was standing in the dock with a defendant. As I watched, the bailiff came over and said the cameras could come in but couldn’t start shooting until the case they were there for got started—and they were confined to the front two rows of a side section of spectator seats.
“All of them can come in?” I asked. Surprised that they didn’t have to pool, I went to fetch them, wondering when Ito had approved their requests. They padded in, set up tripods, and clicked cameras into place.
“Quiet or I’ll clear the courtroom,” Ito snapped, shooting them a warning glance.
The photographers froze, the lawyers paused, and Ito turned back to the defense attorney.
Several weeks after that, Ito phoned my office and instructed me to call a local TV station’s news director. A cameraman in his courtroom had been clipping his fingernails while court was in session. Ito, his indignation clear, said he had tossed the miscreant out. I was to tell his supervisor that the man was banned from his courtroom for good and that no one else from that station was welcome until Ito got a written apology. It was almost funny, yet it was puzzling. Why was nail clipping, which Ito probably couldn’t even hear above the stir in his courtroom, so egregious?
But what seemed like inconsistent behavior turned out to be far more complex. It involved etiquette, sensitivity rooted in a cultural upbringing that emphasized impeccable manners and graciousness, and a close-knit profession with clearly defined rules and protocols, all set against a backdrop of coming of age in a permissive, rebellious era and attending law school in the liberal environment of Berkeley.
Ito accepted the buzz of attorneys and court staff as part of the courtroom fabric. As a former deputy district attorney, he understood lawyers’ tight schedules and need to get last-minute information by phone. The media, however, were without portfolio, and a cameraman clipping his nails violated acceptable courtroom decorum so far as Ito was concerned.
My next encounter with him was just four months before that fateful night in June when the bloodied bodies of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were found outside the front entrance of her Bundy Drive condominium. Ito and I were fellow panelists at a California Judicial Education and Research program on the courts and media in February of 1994.
Asked what words of advice he had for the program attendees if a highprofile trial were to come their way, Ito said, “I would say, be careful because the press is a very competitive enterprise and they will create disruptions in your courtroom that essentially disrail [sic] what’s going on in your courtroom.” The steps he listed to minimize those and to keep the attorneys in check were measures he instituted for Simpson.
As to what power a judge had to rein in attorneys, Ito said he had some of the same reactions other people did when attorneys acted out, attempted to try their cases in the media, and were openly critical of judges’ rulings and of judges themselves.