Word: cochran
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...high ethical standards" and what appeared to them a tremendous circumstantial case. "When I would suggest they should perhaps be preparing their witnesses very carefully, they would say, 'We don't want to be telling witnesses what to say,' " he recalls. "They were playing cricket in an alley fight." Cochran agrees: "See, they had convinced themselves they had this slam-dunk case. They really believed that. But every day things would go wrong for them...
...JOHNNIE COCHRAN MAY BE THE QUARTERback, and Bob Shapiro is a running back, but O.J. Simpson is the team owner," Alan Dershowitz, a defense consultant, told TIME last spring. Says Cochran: "If we were taking a break for 15 minutes, we would spend the whole break talking to O.J. I mean, he knows the facts and certain things he wanted...
...with O.J. and Nicole--at Nicole's request--to warn O.J. that he fit the pattern of an abuser. Worse, Shipp told the court he had been with Simpson the night he returned from Chicago and had listened as his friend described dreaming of killing Nicole. On cross-examination, Cochran's associate Carl Douglas attempted to bully Shipp into submission, bringing up his history of alcoholism and suggesting he was merely one of O.J.'s hangers--on rather than a friend...
...Still, Cochran acknowledges that this was a turning point in the case. "If you look back," he says, "people at that time understood this is gonna be a war. When it came to issues of race it was not gonna be any patty-cake." The war would climax over the Fuhrman tapes, a pyrrhic victory for the prosecution. Says defense lawyer and Santa Clara University law-school dean Gerald Uelmen: "When I think of how close we came to not having those tapes, it sends shivers down my spine...
DARDEN WANTED HIS FACE-OFF WITH Cochran. And he got it. "I know Chris is a mano-a-mano guy," says Cochran. "He likes to one-up you. He likes to put it away. He likes to be real tough in trial and really impressive." Cochran says. During a break in testimony about Simpson's purchase of the leather gloves from Bloomingdale's, Shapiro and Cochran decided to try the gloves on for themselves. "They felt small to me," Cochran says, "and we both told [Simpson], 'They're going to ask you to put the gloves...