Anatomy of a Trial: Public Loss, Lessons Learned from The People vs. O.J. Simpson

Chapter 12. Aftermath

Chapter 12 Aftermath    It’s history now Jurors were unanimous The public is not It was over so fast.1 The day after the verdicts, everyone was pulling up stakes. Trash littered the courthouse media center. Broadcast equipment left for future trials, in vain as it turned out, sat idle like ghosts wondering who to haunt. The place resembled a postwar battlefield—except the only dead soldier was Ito. And, indeed, more than a decade later, he remains the primary casualty—he and a public that has become more shut out from objective, unadulterated court proceedings via what could be a great medium. Television.2 Television could have informed and educated,could have brought people unable to physically attend the trial into the courtroom. Instead it used the trial for entertainment and unabashed commercial promotion. Reporters, commentators,pundits,and comedians used it to advance careers and agendas and to create cartoon caricatures. Los Angeles Times television critic Howard Rosenberg passed judgment in his column the day after Simpson’s acquittal: The Simpsonizing of TV news in the mid-90s affirms that the people going into the business are dumber and dumber,the people directing them 163 are dumber and dumber and, as a consequence, the public is dumber and dumber. Except about the O. J. Simpson case. We know everything about that. If these protectors of the airwaves would invest in their coverage of other news the same energy,resources and commitment they continue to apply to the Simpson case, we’d be much smarter about ourselves and the world around us. Instead we are getting telecoptered, skycammed, team covered, live stand-upped and exclusived into a state of mental numbness. TV news having found a way to shrink the brain as if it were a malignant tumor. . . . It couldn’t get worse. Yet it gnaws at you that it will, that 20 years from now things will have gotten so bad that Americans will recall the Simpson period of 1994–95 as the golden age of journalism, as many now look back with misty nostalgia at the era of Edward R. Murrow.3 Many of the judges in Los Angeles—including Reginald Denny–beating trial judge John Ouderkirk and Presiding Judge Gary Klausner—were predicting weeks before the Simpson verdicts that his trial more than any other single factor would spell the demise of televised trials. “We are going to see more and more instances in which judges are not going to allow cameras in the courtroom,” Ouderkirk said. Not because of Ito,necessarily,but because of the way cameras were used or,from the judges’ perspective, misused. About three weeks before the Simpson verdicts, Ouderkirk said that as he watched the trial, he reflected on his decision two years earlier to allow camera coverage of the Denny case. “I did it at the time because of the mood of the community,” he said, recalling the racially charged riots that devastated Los Angeles the previous year after the acquittals of four white police officers in the Rodney King– beating trial. Four African American men arrested at the height of the riots were charged in the near-fatal beating of white trucker Reginald Denny,who unwittingly drove into a South-Central L.A intersection at the wrong time. “I didn’t want anyone claiming that I was trying to cover up or hide anything ,” Ouderkirk told me.“I didn’t want anybody to be able to charge that anyone got railroaded. I wanted it to be open so people in the community could see that it was being handled as fairly as possible.” Ouderkirk conceded that the presence of cameras probably did affect some trial participants’ behavior. Both pilot/reporter Bob Tur, who shot footage of the beating from his helicopter, and Denny himself, for instance, 164 Anatomy of a Trial were perhaps more dramatic on the witness stand and after testifying than they would have been had cameras not been rolling, he said. “Like, maybe Denny wouldn’t have gone over and hugged [defendant] Damian Williams’s mother in the courtroom when he left the stand?” I suggested. “Right,”Ouderkirk said.“I doubt that he would have done that.” The lawyers in that trial, however, seemed oblivious to the cameras. That almost certainly would not have been true had Ouderkirk not ordered a separate trial for one of the defendants,Antoine Miller,who had a much smaller...