Word: cochrans
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...Marcia Clark was steaming, too angry even to listen to her favorite blues tapes as she drove home that night. After 20 murder trials--almost all of which she's won--she thought she had seen it all. Of course she had expected a little razzle-dazzle from Johnnie Cochran Jr. during his opening arguments, but, she says, the surprise unveiling of 14 new witnesses by O.J. Simpson's defense lawyers stunned even her. ``This was plain sleazy,'' Clark said in an interview with Time. ``I was floored. They disregarded the judge's orders...
...plan, says Clark, is to research and impeach the new witnesses--witnesses the prosecution believes Cochran mentioned merely to create a fog of reasonable doubt in the minds of the jurors at the outset of the trial, even though he knows their testimony will not survive cross-examination. ``Let me tell you this,'' says a bemused Clark. ``This was not the typical first week of a murder trial...
...Simpson case was the first time a good friend had asked for Cochran's legal assistance, and the lawyer agonized over taking the case. Cochran says what finally made up his mind was his sense of justice--a sense honed perhaps more on one particular loss than on all his dramatic victories. In 1972 Cochran's client, Elmer (``Geronimo'') Pratt, a Black Panther accused of murdering a white schoolteacher, was sent to prison for life; 23 years later, Cochran still maintains that Pratt was framed by the FBI, and is still fighting for his release. ``It taught me that...
...jurors that the defense had violated the law in withholding information from the prosecution, and had caused delays in the trial. He forbade the defense team from calling the new witnesses until the end of their case. Among the witnesses described in court last week by Simpson attorney Johnnie Cochran was a woman who allegedly will testify that she saw four men running away from the crime scene the night of the murders...
...final leg of Cochran's opening statement today, he questioned the existence of the so-called "trail of blood" that the prosecution says extends from the bodies of the two murder victims to the bloody socks at the foot of Simpson's bed. "The evidence will be shown to be contaminated, compromised and corrupted," Cochran said. "The gathering of evidence was a complete disaster."The O.J. Files