Books like The Run of His Life : The People v. O.J. Simpson

I was fifteen years old when the OJ Simpson verdict was handed down, on October 3, 1995. I watched his acquittal live on television, during homeroom. I hadn’t followed the trial at all, since like most teenagers, I had my head deep up my own ass. I do recall, however, cheering the acquittal. I think there was a part of me that wanted to see the bad guy get away. Also, I loved OJ in The Towering Inferno, where his contribution to San Francisco’s greatest fictional disaster is to save Jennifer Jones’s cat. It is now many years later, and FX has turned the trial into a fantastic miniseries, of which Jeffrey Toobin’s The Run of His Life forms the basis. The OJ-backing high schooler I used to be has turned into a criminal defense attorney, so it was with some professional interest, along with a lot of 90s nostalgia, that I finally picked up this book. A lot of words have been spent on OJ Simpson. I have not read all of them. I haven’t the notion to try. Despite this, I feel comfortable saying that Toobin has probably written the best book on the subject. He not only has the necessary background (Harvard Law, Assistant US Attorney, a number of bestselling books on legal topics) but the ability to write clearly and well. This latter talent is not to be undersold. If you read a book by famed prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, for instance, you’ll know what I mean. The Run of His Life is written by a legal analyst, one who thoroughly understands the byzantine system he is describing. It answered questions that popped into my head as a lawyer, yet, it never seemed inaccessible to a layman who’s never watched a trial before. Most important to a reader is Toobin’s ability to combine his research and knowledge into something that reads propulsively. This is an all encompassing, fly-on-the wall look at every aspect of the People of the State of California v. Orenthal James Simpson, from detectives to prosecutors, defense attorneys to jurors. From Larry King to Judge Lance Ito. (As Toobin recounts, the talk show host and the presiding judge had a nice conversation in Ito’s chambers during a break in the trial. This doesn’t break the top 1,000 strange things that happened in this case). My edition of this book, which includes a short chapter on the civil trial, runs 458 pages. That’s fairly lengthy, but barely up to the task of containing the many incidents in this quintessentially American saga. All the touchstones are here: the Bronco Chase; the leaked 911 tapes; the testimony of court jester Kato Kaelin; the infamous “bloody glove” that did not “fit”; and the virulent racism of Detective Mark Fuhrman (who, as Toobin notes, spent only 30 minutes as lead detective on the case). It is fascinating to have a replay of all these events that linger in the fog of my memory. The book is at its best, however, when dealing with the behind the scenes details. Prosecutor Marcia Clark’s refusal to heed the advice of pro bono jury consultants. Clark’s decision not to use important witnesses who had already sold their stories. DA Gil Garcetti’s decision to have the trial heard downtown, rather than in Santa Monica where the murders occurred. The many trials of Christopher Darden, a black prosecutor who was goaded by Johnnie Cochran into some terrible blunders. Topping this all is the story of Simpson’s “Dream Team”, his spare-no-expenses stable of lawyers that included Robert Shapiro, Johnnie Cochran, F. Lee Bailey, noted blowhard Alan Dershowitz, DNA expert Barry Scheck, and OJ sycophant Robert Kardashian.Shapiro, the plea bargainer to the stars, was initially the lead attorney in Simpson’s case. He actually developed the theme of the defense, to wit: that OJ was framed by a racist LAPD. He received an assist from none other than Jeffrey Toobin, who had done some snooping in Fuhrman’s file that revealed the detective to be a bigot. Shapiro was not a litigator – that is, he did not have a lot of experience conducting actual jury trials. To make up this deficit, Johnnie Cochran came into the case. He took the race angle and ran hard with it (during closing arguments, he called Detective Fuhrman “a lying, perjuring, genocidal racist”, an apt description that fails to have any relevant bearing on OJ’s guilt or innocence). The defense worked in a deviously beautiful way. There is an old saying among lawyers. If you don’t have the law on your side, argue the facts. If you don’t have the facts on your side, argue the law. If you don’t have either, call the other side a liar. This, in a crystalline form, is what Cochran did. He clouded the issues, clung tenaciously to the irrelevant, and played to the sympathies of the majority black jurors. As Cochran came to dominate the defense, Shapiro fell into a sulk. By the time the trial ended, he was openly ruing the tenor of the defense he crafted. One of his last acts was to go on Barbara Walters and admit that the defense had played the race card “from the bottom of the deck.” This is true, of course, but you’re his lawyer and you can’t say that! Simpson’s trial lasted nine months, meaning that Toobin has to pinpoint the most relevant testimony to describe. He devotes a chapter to Barry Scheck – who he calls the defense’s best trial lawyer – and his efforts to discredit the State’s abundant DNA evidence. (Anyone who has watched Netflix’s Making a Murderer will enjoy Scheck’s attempts to show the presence of EDTA in the crime scene blood). Fuhrman gets two chapters. The first details his initial testimony, in which he denied using the n-word; the second chapter deals with the taped interviews between Fuhrman and a screenwriter, in which Fuhrman does indeed use the n-word. A lot. Toobin also has a chapter on the machinations in the jury room. The jurors were sequestered for the entirety of the trial, and were only allowed minimal access to the outside world (and only one conjugal visit a week!). The tight quarters, bad food, and conflicting personalities made for a lot of squabbling. Several jurors were kicked out for inappropriately prejudging the case. It seems that this worked to both side’s advantage. The racial divisions within the jury perfectly mirrored the racial divisions of the nation as a whole as it watched the trial unfold. All things considered, it’s a minor miracle that there were any jurors left at the end. (It’s a sign of the case’s ridiculous omnipresence that one dismissed juror went on to pose for Playboy). The Run of His Life is not a polemic. It does not seethe with anger and righteous indignation. To the contrary, it is cool and unaffected by the strong emotion that still cocoons the trial. It is admirably free of all the sensationalized tabloid nonsense that helped obscure the brutal knife murder of two innocent people. Toobin states at the outset that he thinks Simpson is guilty; however, he isn’t out to prove this with some prosecutorial brief pinpointing all the evidence against Simpson, or the impossibility that Detective Fuhrman was able to concoct a wide-ranging conspiracy to frame Simpson during the time it took Fuhrman to drive to OJ’s house. This is a good literary choice. Toobin doesn’t have to prove anything. OJ is guilty. He is factually guilty. That is a truth woven into the tapestry of the universe. No one’s opinion changes that. Still, Toobin is a curious enough person to wonder why twelve people took only two hours (two hours! On a nine-month trial!) to render judgment. In doing so, they ignored their charged duty to look at the evidence, and instead sent a message to the LAPD. As context, Toobin documents the terrible racial history of the LAPD, which had trampled on minority rights (and lives) for years. (See, e.g., King, Rodney). I think it’s important to point out that Simpson’s trial does not tell us anything about our criminal justice system, either then or now. It is, in fact, an inversion of everything that typically happens in today’s criminal courtroom. OJ wasn’t targeted because he was black; he was guarded because of his celebrity. The cops loved him. They hung out at his house. They looked the other way when he beat his wife. When his wife died, they “questioned” him for 30 minutes, never once asking him to answer for his evasions. When it finally came time to arrest him – on a double murder, no less – they allowed him to turn himself in. This is special treatment, California style. I tell you from experience – that’s not typical. Then we come to the uneven courtroom brawl. I’m a defense attorney, so I seldom feel sorry for the prosecution. After all, the State has all the resources – police officers, detectives, crime lab, a panoply of available experts from the FBI, ATF, etc. The full force of the government brought to bear on an individual citizen. On top of all that, the judge is usually a former prosecutor (as was Lance Ito). We’re talking David and Goliath, but David can’t afford a sling. Or a rock. Not here. Here there were times I cringed at how overmatched Clark and Darden were in comparison to Cochran, Scheck, and the others. The high-priced defense that OJ purchased was able to turn all those officers and experts into stumbling, bumbling, racist fools. The Dream Team, to quote Wigmore, made “the truth appear like falsehood.” Again, that’s not typical. So, this is not the representative American crime story, where a poor, young black man is run up before a jury with a single court-appointed attorney who might have the budget to hire one or two investigators. It is, however, a very American story. A trial for the 21st century that took place in the final years of the 20th. It prefigures so many of the cultural issues that we face – and wrestle with – today. Race. Class. Police brutality. Instant fame. Celebrity. Media-driven narratives. The never-ending news cycle. The Run of His Life was first copyrighted in 1996. There were dozens of times while reading it that I could’ve sworn it was written yesterday. It tells of a verdict delivered over twenty years ago. It still speaks to us today.