In the latest The People vs. OJ Simpson recap, the Mark Fuhrman tapes take center stage as the prosecution and defense battle over some potentially explosive audio that could change the entire course of the trial…
By Damon Martin — Editor/Lead Writer
Everything comes full circle in the latest episode of American Crime Story: The People vs. OJ Simpson as Mark Fuhrman’s early testimony blows up in his face along with destroying the credibility of the prosecution thanks to tapes that surface this week, which put the LA cop directly in the spotlight after he utters racist epithets for the better part of 13 hours.
Fuhrman was a dicey proposition to land on the stand in the first place, but Marcia Clark was confident he would be the picture of professionalism. She wasn’t wrong in how composed he was under cross examination — except for the fact that he was lying the entire time.
Add to that, Judge Ito finds himself in a precarious position this week as well thanks to his wife signing off on a disclosure that she never had any previous work experience or interaction with Fuhrman while she was a commanding officers with the LAPD. Don’t forget back to those early episodes when Ito’s wife certainly remembered Fuhrman and working with him, but opted to sign off on the form that would allow her husband to land the biggest case of his life. Unfortunately she had no clue that Fuhrman mentioned her by name and their interactions on those inflammatory tapes.
It was an explosive episode that ultimately saw both the prosecution and the defense take massive hits on both sides, but when Fuhrman took the stand for the second time, the momentum shifted dramatically towards OJ Simpson walking free when the trial was finally over.
With that said, let’s recap the latest episode of The People vs. OJ Simpson titled ‘Manna from Heaven’
The Fuhrman Tapes
It turns out years before OJ Simpson was on trial, Mark Fuhrman allowed himself to be taped by a wanna-be screenplay writer, who used him as a subject to help navigate a movie she was writing set in the world of the Los Angeles police department. 13 hours of audio footage was captured and the language used by Fuhrman was not only damaging to his credibility as a police officer, but the amount of hate speech he used would land him directly in the crosshairs of a perjury conviction while single handedly destroying any testimony he made about evidence or discovery in the case.
Johnnie Cochran secures a subpoena to get the tapes, but the real trick is finding a judge in North Carolina where the screenwriter currently lives who will sign off on the same order to allow the tapes returned to California for trial.
Cochran may have a silver tongue and debonair flare in LA, but his tone and flashy style doesn’t play in the Tarheel State and his motion is shot down like a duck during hunting season. It’s up to F. Lee Bailey, who was the original author of the Fuhrman cross examination, to then save the day as he lays on enough Southern charm to grease the ego of every judge in the appellate court and seconds later, they have permission to take the tapes.
Once the defense secures the evidence, the real problem becomes the argument of whether or not Judge Lance Ito will actually allow them to be played for the jury. On one hand it proves Fuhrman was a liar and he perjured himself on the stand when he claimed to never use the ‘N’ word in his life. On the flipside, the defense argues that these tapes are being played solely to illicit an emotional response from the jury, which then renders them unable to return an impartial verdict when the trial is over.
It’s a boiling kettle as Cochran lashes out publicly, turning the battle of the Fuhrman tapes into his own personal soapbox where he incites the rage of an entire community in LA, who he believes deserve to hear this vile hate speech. In a way, Cochran abandons his singular goal of getting OJ Simpson out of jail and instead points both barrels at the corrupt institution known as the LAPD.
Cochran’s anger seems to cloud his judgment but the same could be said for both Christopher Darden and Marcia Clark, who are both nearly held in contempt during the fight to get the tapes thrown out. It’s a volatile mixture in the courtroom over these few days and it only gets uglier from here.
Conflict of Interest
In the midst of the prosecution and the defense pouring over hours of tapes while listening to Mark Fuhrman drop one horrendous word after another while admitting to tampering with evidence, beating suspects and a whole myriad of conduct misdeeds, the team finds one more thing that’s particularly damning. Fuhrman is heard on tape insulting Lance Ito’s wife — who is a high ranking officer with the LAPD — and admitting that he never liked taking orders from her while she was his acting supervisor.
This key piece of evidence could bring the entire trial toppling over because Ito’s wife signed off at the beginning of the trial that she had no memory of ever interacting with Fuhrman yet they’ve now got rock solid proof that they not only knew each other, but had direct contact while she was his superior.
The ramifications could be disastrous or celebrated depending on the final ruling on whether Ito is now in a conflict of interest by being involved with the case.
On one hand, Chris Darden sees this as a chance to get a mistrial and despite DA Gil Garcetti watching his mayoral campaign go down the drain as a result, he sees this as a golden opportunity to rectify the mistakes of the past and make for a better case the second time around.
Meanwhile, Cochran needs to the tapes to prove Fuhrman is a racist and a liar, but if Ito is ruled a conflict of interest and the case is declared a mistrial, he has to do this all over again and the chances of the dominoes falling in his favor twice are almost impossible.
A second judge steps in to issue an order on the ruling and much to Clark and Darden’s chagrin, Ito is allowed to continue and he’ll be the one to make the final call on what gets played from the tapes.
A Matter of Language
Tempers are already at a fevered pitch when Judge Ito declares that the tapes are public information and therefore will be played in their entirety to the public, which means all 13 hours on display for the entire world to hear as the despicable Mark Fuhrman spews hateful and incriminating language throughout his conversation with the screenwriter.
Cochran feels vindicated because he now has a smoking gun that proves that the LAPD is full of secretly racist, bigoted cops — but the tapes that are being played aren’t being heard by the jury, only the rest of the world.
In reality, Judge Ito’s final ruling opts for the tapes to be cut down to only two total lines where Fuhrman can be heard saying the ‘N’ word on back-to-back occasions to prove the defense’s claim that he perjured himself on the stand. Cochran is livid but Robert Shapiro and the other lawyers on the team remind him that the end result is still the same. Fuhrman is branded as a racist and a liar and his previous testimony now casts doubt on every piece of evidence or judgment he made that night when Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman were murdered.
Also, Cochran and the dream team have done a bang up job painting the entire LAPD as a goon squad capable of any manner of wrong doing and one bad apple in the bunch just means that the rest of them could be just as rotten.
As for Clark and Darden, they are turning from best friends into bitter enemies as they snipe back and forth at each other while doing everything short of pointing fingers about what they’ve done wrong thus far. Darden is particularly perturbed this week because any time he plays the race card against Cochran, Clark is sitting there with a disapproving look on her face. As he tells her in the episode — she wanted a black face on her defense team, but doesn’t want to hear his black opinions.
Darden also erupts at Clark after the Fuhrman tapes are exposed because he told her from the first day he interviewed the cop that he was bad news and she shouldn’t put him on the stand.
Cooler heads eventually prevail — Clark admits her wrongdoing, Darden apologizes for lashing out and the glove incident and the defense team is back on the same side.
Unfortunately, all the wonder twin power in the universe won’t stop what happens next when Fuhrman returns to the stand.
I Plead the Fifth
Fuhrman’s day in court is where the trial truly turns against the prosecution as he takes the stand under cross examination from Johnnie Cochran and drops a few words that will forever brandish him a liar, a racist, a conspirator and a corrupt cop no matter how much of all that is actually true.
“I plead the fifth”
Fuhrman invoked his fifth amendment rights for any and all questions, which means he’s protected under the Constitution from testifying to anything that may be self-incriminating. The real nuclear hit comes when Cochran asks one final question with Fuhrman on the stand — did he fabricate or otherwise tamper with evidence in the case against OJ Simpson?
“I plead the fifth”
And with those four words, Fuhrman single handedly obliterated his entire testimony and likely the rest of the testimony from anyone associated with the case from the Los Angeles Police Department. Clark and Darden are stunned. Cochran and his crew are celebrating. OJ Simpson is laughing and convinced that his days dressed in prison blues are coming to an end. Of course, Robert Kardashian is the one person on OJ’s side who still feels conflicted about this entire nightmare of a case, but ultimately the pendulum is swinging hard towards a not guilty verdict any day.
As Ron Goldman’s father erupts in anger over everything that has happened, most importantly that the trial has now become about race and a dirty cop rather than the brutal murder of his son, Chris Darden and Marcia Clark can only watch with shame.
They’ve failed that family as well as Nicole Brown’s family and without nailing a Hail Mary pass during the final days of the trial, OJ Simpson is going to leave that courtroom a free man.
Marcia does get one piece of good news that day — her divorce is finalized and she receives primary custody of her kids. It’s a win.
But that’s about the only win Marcia Clark, Chris Darden or the entire District Attorney’s office in Los Angeles will feel as testimony will soon close, final arguments are made and the jury decides whether or not to convict Orenthal James Simpson of murder.
And we already know how that turns out.
The season finale of The People vs. OJ Simpson airs next Tuesday night at 10pm ET on FX.
