In the latest recap for The People vs. OJ Simpson, the jury gets restless as the trial extends to more than half a year and Marcia Clark watches as her DNA slam dunk ends up as an air ball….
By Damon Martin — Editor/Lead Writer
There’s not a person in America who has checked their mail one day and received a jury summons who didn’t cringe two seconds after reading the note about civic duty.
It’s the kind of notice that reads more like a sentence rather than a privilege but for the dozens of potential jurors who volunteered to be part of the OJ Simpson trial, it started out like the dream job. Here was a chance to be part of the trial of the century — to play an integral role in the outcome and determine whether the former NFL running back would be acquitted or go to jail for the rest of his life for the brutal murder of his ex-wife and her friend Ron Goldman.
So it’s not all that surprising to see the jurors ultimately selected who were then sequestered into a four-star hotel, walk into the lobby and then their rooms with anticipation in their eyes and a spring in their step. This was doing to be a civic duty vacation filled with free TV, all the food you can eat, swimming pools and a few hours a day listening to testimony before cashing in when the trial was over on interview requests and book deals.
But eight months later as the prosecution and defense teams sniped at each other over witnesses, motions and day after day filled with cross examination, the jurors on the OJ Simpson trial went from elated to enraged.
Before long the jury was revolting while the lawyers were picking off members of the panel like snipers at a shooting range and as the numbers started to get dangerously low, word of a mistrial started to spread like wild fire.
With that said, let’s recap the latest episode of American Crime Story: The People vs. OJ Simpson titled ‘The Jury in Jail’….
Sequestered
Following month after month of testimony and cross examination, we get a look inside the jury room for the first time and it’s clear this is an unhappy bunch of people attempting to stay focused on the task at hand when really just looking for an escape from this trial.
The jurors are arguably treated worse than prisoners with the way they are herded from one place to the next, unable to talk about the only thing they have in common, cut off from the outside world with no news or television not to mention limited contact with their families. When a different group of sheriff’s deputies are brought in as supervisors, the jurors have had just about enough.
It gets so bad that a mere argument about whether it’s time to watch episodes of Martin or Seinfeld nearly sparks an explosion between the jurors. Of course back at jail, OJ is busy explaining the latest exploits of Cosmo Kramer to his all white chorus line while playing poker for Skittles in the middle of a ‘character witness’ meeting. It’s a subtle jab at Simpson, as the defense continued to argue race in his favor while those who knew OJ best would say that he was most comfortable around his country club golf buddies and not the people he grew up with as a kid.
To make matters worse, background information on jurors starts to surface in the middle of the trial that begins picking them off one by one. Whether it’s a history of domestic violence, kidnapping or just posing for a picture with ‘The Juice’ — this jury pool is murky at best.
The prosecution and defense aren’t helping much either as they start targeting jurors for execution to hopefully sway the verdict one way or another in their favor. Johnnie Cochran winces as some of his best jurors are eliminated while those sympathetic to the prosecution are put in their places.
The constant elimination of jurors ends with a big problem — they are down to the 12 people in the box and only four more alternates. If the jury gets too thin, the judge would be forced to stop the proceedings and declare a mistrial and that would be disastrous for the defense. Considering how many breaks they’ve gotten thus far — Mark Fuhrman’s ill timed testimony, the botched evidence collection and of course the glove debacle — Cochran knows that this case is winnable right now but there’s almost no chance they could try it again and come away with the same result.
So Cochran is forced to play nice with Marcia Clark, even buying her a coffee at one point, so signal a cease fire. Cochran is an astute, brilliant attorney but his legal maneuvering might be so crafty that he could be working his way right into a mistrial and that would almost certainly result in Simpson’s eventual conviction. So he dials it back, plays the hand he’s dealt and realizes there are other ways to win this trial than by eliminating the potentially bad jurors.
He just needs to find a way to sway them in his direction.
The DNA Testimony
After District Attorney Gil Garcetti lambastes Marcia Clark and Chris Darden for the disastrous glove incident, it certainly looks like the prosecution’s case is slipping away.
Clark is banking on the mountains of DNA evidence collected that no one can dispute — Oj’s blood at Nicole’s house. Nicole and Ron Goldman’s blood stained in OJ’s car, house and seemingly everywhere else he went in the hours after the murders took place. That’s the smoking gun for the prosecution — the way Clark tells the story, it’s like this is even better than a murder weapon.
Unfortunately for all the courtroom acumen and witness questioning expertise she carries around like a loaded Smith and Wesson pistol, Marcia Clark struggles to convey the DNA evidence in a way to the jury that doesn’t have them all looking down at their notepads like the kids who are called on to answer a question in class when they clearly have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about.
Marcia doles out information that seems indisputable but when cross examination begins — five days worth when it’s all said and done — Barry Scheck pokes enough holes in forensics expert Dennis Fung’s testimony that the jury is left wonder what exactly did happen on the night of those murders. Did someone actually plan evidence? Was evidence even collected in the proper manner?
Scheck doesn’t need to talk about the perfect science behind the DNA testing — he just needs to explain things in a way that makes the jury question whether or not Dennis Fung is a co-conspirator or just an average idiot. Either way, Fung’s testimony leaves him flustered and then after he’s done on the stand, he proceeds to do the most inexplicably stupid thing of all — he proceeds to walk around to all of the attorneys on the prosecution and the defense and shakes their hands as if he’s saying ‘good game, you guys got the win’.
Cochran smirks with a huge smile creeping across his face while Clark looks like she’s the one on trial for double murder. The case is shifting momentum and it’s going to be awfully hard to swing things back for the prosecution.
Take the Stand
While the defense is toasting champagne and celebrating what looks like a victory, problems begin to arise when OJ Simpson insists that he wants to take the stand.
Robert Shapiro vehemently argues against that idea considering what Marcia Clark could and would do to him on cross examination, but Simpson is confident he can pull it off. Like a parent attempting to appease a child, Cochran comes up with a happy medium.
They will do a mock question and answer with Simpson in jail with an attorney posing as Clark while asking him the same kind of inquiries he would likely get while sitting on the witness stand in front of the jurors.
Shapiro’s worst nightmares come true when Simpson tries to charm his way through every question and instead shows the innate hubris he’s carrying around like a man who has no chance of being convicted. Things have gone so right for Simpson that at this point he feels he can do no wrong.
His attorneys know better.
And while the prosecution watched the jury flutter and fade when trying to present their compelling case about DNA evidence, a few people were paying attention — namely Robert Kardashian and OJ’s golf buddies who now have better plans than sitting around a jail cell playing poker for candy
Kardashian has been wavering for weeks in the face of evidence that convinces him more and more that Simpson is guilty and he’s standing up for the man responsible for butchering an innocent woman and her friend. While visiting his ex-wife Kris to pick up his kids, Robert finally breaks down and admits that with all the DNA evidence that was presented, he’s no longer sitting on side of people who blindly supported Simpson throughout the trial. Now he’s starting to believe that maybe Simpson did do it but because Kardashian has been cemented by his friend since the beginning, there’s no way he can abandon him now.
What he can promise, however, is after this trial is over OJ Simpson will no longer be part of their lives whether he’s convicted or set free.
We all know the result but the prosecution’s job gets even harder next week after an anonymous tip comes into the OJ hotline that gives the defense the weapon — a recording where Mark Fuhrman can be heard saying the ‘N’ word after testifying that he’s never used that epithet before — and it’s the proof they needed to show that he’s not only a racist but also a liar who perjured himself on the stand.
The People vs. OJ Simpson returns next Tuesday night at 10pm ET on FX
