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Gerald Uelmen, the Santa Clara University law dean who served on the O.J. team, agrees that the trial was a much needed crash course in Fourth Amendment rights. "I think there's just a sense out there of, 'I'm never going to be charged in a criminal case, so what the hell should I care if the police go over my wall and search without a warrant?' I think we've got a job to do in terms of convincing people that we really are all winners when that system is respected." Peter Barnett of Forensic Science Associates, a DNA lab in Richmond, California, acknowledges the nightmare created by attacks on incautious handling of blood specimens. "People in the profession now recognize the necessity of increasing their own professional standing and activities," he says.
THE LAWYERS. The carnival atmosphere surrounding the courtroom led to so many antics that the case's substance of a horrible double murder was often lost in the din. West Los Angeles public defender James Bendat believes judicial gag orders on lawyers in spectacular cases are the best remedy. "That would have been the right decision in terms of dealing with the media and preventing this buildup of frenzy," he says.
Some reformers would go further and put new restrictions on lawyers' conduct inside the courtroom as well: California Governor Pete Wilson wants to restrict an attorney's right to use political rhetoric in front of the jury, like Johnnie Cochran's urging them to "send a message" about racist misconduct. This sort of jury nullification, wrote syndicated columnist George Will, in which the panel is motivated by something other than the particulars of the case, amounts to "approximately what Groucho Marx said in the movie Duck Soup: 'Who are you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?'" Legal scholar Kamisar notes that juries now and then will use latitude to ignore law and free a defendant on principle, "but as a general proposition, you can't tell them when they can exercise it." Prosecution consultant Martel agrees that Cochran went "somewhat over the top in terms of a lawyer's duty as an officer of the court."
THE JUDGE. Aside from Judge Lance Ito's lax hand on the whip, which allowed the lawyers to grill witnesses endlessly and argue and reargue points of law, Professor Barbara Babcock of Stanford Law School observes that Judge Ito was often late to arrive and took time to usher celebrities into his chambers. "If you sequester a jury, there should be pressure on everyone to go as fast as you can," she says. "I've never seen a sequestered jury treated this way. I think the message they got was that neither their time nor they were important." Motions should be heard "before court starts, and after court, and on Saturdays," says Babcock, who believes that in the Simpson case "the jurors became a little band with their own agenda, in opposition to the court and the system." Kamisar agrees that Ito "simply didn't take charge. There's no way you should let a witness stay on the stand for eight days."