Twenty years ago this week, a horrible crime occurred in front of a Los Angeles-area condo. Two people were stabbed to death. One of them was the former wife of a football legend; the other was her friend.
The football legend, O.J. Simpson, went on trial for the deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman and was acquitted after an eight-month circus presided over by LA County Superior Court Judge Lance Ito.
Ito made a fateful decision early on: He allowed TV cameras to record the event. I guess it’s OK to allow the public in on these kinds of proceedings, but only if the judge sets some rules for the conduct of the lawyers who’ll take the stage.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/13/justice/o-j-simpson-where-are-they-now/index.html?hpt=hp_c2
Ito apparently didn’t do that. The trial went on for eight months. The 12 jurors were sequestered, kept away from their families and friends and left to talk only among themselves.
The trial dragged on and on and on.
I bring this up to relay a point made to me during the trial by the then-chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court, who came by for a visit at the newspaper where I worked at the time. Chief Justice Tom Phillips — a former trial court judge in Houston — and I talked for a bit about the Simpson trial and he told me something fascinating.
He said Ito had the power to limit the time the lawyers needed to make their case. He said Texas trial law gives judges here that kind of power and he said he was quite certain California law had similar provisions that gave the presiding judge the power to keep the lawyers on a tight leash.
Ito gave the so-called Simpson “Dream Team” of lawyers and the prosecution’s Team of Nincompoops all the time they requested to prance, preen and pontificate in front of the jurors — and, of course, millions of the rest of America watching on television.
As one who generally favors televised court proceedings, I prefer instead to watch a more tightly controlled event than what we got two decades ago with the Trial of the Century.
Lance Ito is going to retire from the bench next January. I’d love to read a memoir, should he write one, that explains the “logic” behind letting those lawyers run wild in a public courtroom.