Defense Attack on Investigators’ Credibility Holds Echoes of the Past

In attacking the credibility of the Los Angeles police and the county coroner’s office, O.J. Simpson’s attorneys are playing to suspicions of the investigative ability of both agencies.

As former district attorney and state Atty. Gen. John Van de Kamp told me recently, “There is greater skepticism about the veracity of police. Police are being treated more as regular witnesses today rather than coming in with a presumption of total integrity and honesty.”

As for the coroner’s office, Van de Kamp said: “We had very mixed experiences when I was D.A. . . . Their ability to testify is not first-rate.”

The defense attack has been taking place since the case began. But it became clearer and sharper Monday in the first of a series of pretrial hearings that Superior Court Judge Lance A. Ito is holding this week. Among other things, the purpose is to decide whether to toss out evidence collected by the police prior to obtaining a warrant to search Simpson’s home.

After hearing a morning of arguments, Ito rejected the defense’s request for dismissal of murder charges against Simpson for the killings of his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman. The former football star has pleaded not guilty.

Ito’s decision was expected. Defense attorneys Robert L. Shapiro and Gerald M. Uelman had asked for dismissal on the grounds that police work was allegedly sloppy and that the prosecution’s case doesn’t make sense. It is a rare judge who goes along with such motions.

The broad issue of investigatory competence will arise later this week in connection with other defense motions, and during the trial itself.

On Monday, Shapiro blasted homicide detectives for waiting too long to call the coroner. Then he went on to assail the coroner’s office. “We are forever excluded from knowing the time of death,” he said. “The coroner simply threw away the contents of the stomachs, which is one of the best ways of determining time of death.”

Deputy Dist. Atty. Marcia Clark sharply defended the investigation. Speaking of the homicide detectives, she said: “We have investigators. They are not lawyers who nit-pick their way through every nuance.”

But she might have done better with a more thoughtful reply. For, as Van de Kamp said, neither the LAPD nor the coroner’s office are given automatic credibility on the witness stand these days.

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This feeling has been particularly strong in the Latino and African American communities, where activists have long criticized the criminal justice system here for what they say is unfair treatment of minorities.

The feuds between the LAPD and other police agencies and minority communities have been well-publicized. What is not as well-known is that both communities have also strongly attacked the way the coroner investigated two cases that remain burned into the memories of members of both groups.

One is the death of journalist Ruben Salazar, who was killed when sheriff’s deputies fired tear gas into an East Los Angeles bar during an anti-war demonstration in 1970. The missile struck and killed Salazar. Latino activists said that Salazar, a powerful advocate for the Latino community, was assassinated. The cops said it was an accident. Three members of a coroner’s jury supported the accident theory, while four others said only that Salazar died “at the hands of another.” It was a result that left many in the community suspicious of law enforcement.

The second involved Leonard Deadwyler, a black man who was shot and killed by a Los Angeles police officer. The cop had stopped Deadwyler’s car while he was rushing his pregnant wife to a hospital in 1966, a year after the Watts riot. A coroner’s jury agreed with the police version, that the death was justified. The decision came in a televised inquest that further polarized a racially divided city and left the black community more embittered against law enforcement.

In a third well-known case, however, a coroner’s jury sided with African American residents suspicious of the police. That involved the death of Ron Settles, a black Cal State Long Beach football star who was found hanged in his cell in the Signal Hill jail after being arrested for speeding. The Signal Hill cops insisted that Settles hanged himself. But the jury ruled that Settles had died “at the hands of another.” His family was awarded $760,000 in a wrongful death suit settled in 1983.

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The lawyer for the survivors of both Settles and Deadwyler was Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., one of the lead attorneys representing Simpson.

In fact, Cochran made his name in the Deadwyler case. An African American community still traumatized by Watts watched with pride as the young black lawyer tore into the law enforcement establishment.

Now, older and smarter, Cochran is going after the Simpson case investigators, both in the courtroom and in the media. This attack has been heard in African American and Latino neighborhoods, many of whose residents remember or have heard of Ruben Salazar and Leonard Deadwyler.

Knowing the history helps explain the direction of the attack.