Word: cochrans
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...black rights, and the fact that he has become a symbol of racial oppression seems paradoxical. When the race card become his ticket out of jail, he played it. It was not out of a quest for racial equality that the defense team crucified Mark Fuhrman or that Johnnie Cochran spent more time talking about blacks in America than he did about the evidence. It was simply a tactic...
Moreover, as inflammatory and cynical as Cochran's tactics may seem to whites, there is little proof that black jurors go easy on black defendants solely due to race. In heavily black jurisdictions such as Washington, mostly black juries routinely send African-American defendants to prison when the evidence merits it. History shows that from Mississippi during the civil rights era to Simi Valley in the '90s, it is all-white juries that tend to exonerate defendants of their own race despite the evidence...
Which is not to say Simpson's lawyers have not crossed the line into cynical exploitation of blacks' sense of racial aggrievement. Case in point: Cochran's acceptance of security guards from the Nation of Islam, which strikes many as being like a white lawyer's taking on bodyguards from the Ku Klux Klan. Cochran and I have been friends for years, but we never discussed the Simpson case until it went to the jury last week. That was in part because I think the evidence points to Simpson's guilt, as well as to police corruption...
...Prosecutors Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden told jurors to follow the trail of blood, hat, gloves, socks and other physical evidence in the case. That methodical approach, they said, would lead straight from the crime scene to Simpson's bedroom and to only one conclusion: Guilty. Defense attorney Johnnie Cochran delivered a fire-and-brimstone assault on the Los Angeles police. He accused the department of plotting a frame-up of his client, who he said was innocent and had been targeted by a deceitful and ruthlessly racist detective, Mark Fuhrman. Defense attorney Barry Scheck said blood-DNA tests...
...Johnnie Cochran denied a report that O.J. Simpson had planned to wed his girlfriend, Paula Barbieri, next Sunday in the Dominican Republic. Listin Diario, a newspaper in the Dominican Republic, said Simpson was preparing to fly to the Caribbean country for a ceremony at the Casa de Campo, the exclusive resort where singer Michael Jackson secretly married Lisa Marie Presley last year. But Cochran today said that Simpson was at his California home. Reporters staked out a Dominican airport in vain on Sunday, but the rumored aircraft never materialized. Day of Judgment: Photographs from the Simpson Verdict