Lately, Marcia Clark, who led the OJ Simpson prosecution team into the swamp of defeat and set a murderer free, has been getting a lot of publicity.
There was a story about her in the L.A. Times yesterday (18 April 2011) and one on NPR this morning. She has written a mystery novel.
I hope it's better than her prosecution of the OJ case. She made so many errors it's hard to remember them all.
Her biggest mistake: Ms. Clark and her boss, Gil Garcetti, moved the trial from Santa Monica, where it would have had a mostly white jury, to downtown, where it had a mostly black jury.
It looked like this jury would have acquitted The Juice even if they had seen him do it. They seemed to be taking revenge on the criminal justice system for decades of discrimination.
Ms. Clark did a focus group with potential jury members, or people who fit their demographic, and found they had no respect for her. Yet, she went ahead to lead the team anyway, knowing the jury was biased against her. I guess she couldn't resist the call of fame.
At one point, she got caught at the Burbank airport with a gun in her purse, when she should have known better.
Obviously, she was in over her head.
She and her team spent months presenting the DNA evidence, when it should have been done in an afternoon. That arcane mumbo-jumbo would put anyone to sleep, and the more they went on about it, the more the jury thought they were trying to hide something. They dug a hole for themselves and kept on digging.
Ms. Clark allowed Chris Darden to use the shrunken leather glove, which in turn gave a huge gift to defense attorney Johnny Cochran: "If the glove doesn't fit, you must acquit." The jury understood that, where they didn't understand the DNA evidence.
Cochran told OJ not to take his arthritis meds, so it would be even harder to get his big hand into the skin-tight leather glove, which had gotten soaked with blood during the murder. When leather dries, it hardens and shrinks. So did the prosecution's case.
I recommend Vincent Bugliosi's writing on the subject. Prosecutor Bugliosi famously put away Charlie Manson for life, even though Manson was not at the scene of the Tate-LaBianca murders.
That was a masterful prosecution. Oh, what he could have done with more concrete evidence.
In the OJ case, police found Nicole Simpson's blood in OJ's shower drain at his house, and they found OJ's blood on Nicole's dead body.
It was a slam-dunk case, or should have been. It took a series of colossal errors to set that killer free.
So Marcia Clark is famous for all the wrong reasons. She keeps coming back, like the Swamp Thing in the old horror movie.
-- Roger
© Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle
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