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Moreover, by the time Johnnie Cochran addressed the jury on Wednesday, it had become clear, not only to the increasingly agitated prosecutors but also to legal analysts, that the Dream Team is more than just highly paid, highly qualified and highly dedicated. Cochran & Co. unveiled an unexpectedly strong defense. They also demonstrated--by their stealth-witness gambit--that they are prepared to push this case to the very limits of legality. Says Gigi Gordon, a leading Los Angeles defense attorney: ``Those jurors are all sitting around in their little hotel rooms right now thinking, Wow, four guys in watch caps! And whose blood is under her fingernails? Doubting. Doubting.''
In their opening statements, Clark and Darden hammered at two key points: the horrific crime and the motive. Darden handled the personality aspects of the case, speaking of the popular O.J. Simpson from movies and Hertz commercials and warning the jury of the defendant's ``private side.'' Simpson, he argued, was obsessed with Nicole, obsessed with control and jealous to the point of violence. ``If he couldn't have her, he didn't want anybody else to have her,'' Darden said. Simpson, who had been warned by his lawyers to refrain from his customary eye-rolling and grimacing, observed the proceedings impassively, occasionally scribbling notes or shaking his head.
Although Darden--a soft-spoken, studious lawyer who joined the prosecution team on Nov. 7, after supervising the grand jury investigation of Simpson's friend Al Cowlings--performed well, the most dramatic moment of the opening day came later, when Marcia Clark displayed graphic photographs of the bodies. Judge Lance Ito ruled these pictures off limits to television viewers, and the reactions of those present in the courtroom explained why. Ron Goldman's father Frederic wept at the sight of his son's slashed and bloody corpse up on the 87-in. video monitor, while Nicole Brown Simpson's three sisters cried quietly; Simpson's mother Eunice could not look. When Ito at last called a recess, the Browns and the Goldmans clasped hands.
Clark, whose trial demeanor can be both intense and compassionate, walked the jury through the murder scene, telling of hairs matching Simpson's, of telltale shoe prints and trails of blood--blood, she intoned repeatedly, that ``matches the defendant'' in dna tests. As she finished, after several interruptions from Ito, admonishing her not to argue her case in her opening statement, Clark appeared close to tears as she reminded the jury to remember the victims.
For the mostly African-American jury of eight women and four men, this was the day's denouement. They were out of the courtroom by the time Judge Ito--informed that a hapless Court TV cameraman had slipped and televised the face of one alternate juror for a fraction of a second--excoriated the press and threatened to shut down the television cameras altogether. But as has happened before, Ito brandished a stick that he ultimately declined to use: he relented the next morning and let the show go on.