Word: cochrans
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Even without his jury consultant Dimitrius, Cochran would have relished jury selection. "When the prosecutors kicked off 10 of the first 11 jurors, the [peremptory challenges] they used were against blacks. But every time they would do it, we would get other blacks. We had 18 [prospective] jurors in view. So I knew when they kicked one off, I could see who the next one was coming, and the next one after that. So I'll tell you quite frankly, when we got to the point where I had eight black jurors, and the alternates were so good also...
...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...