O.J. Simpson Prosecutors Finally Focus On Tangible Evidence
Hairs from humans and from dogs, as well as fibers from automobile carpets and from items of clothing finally took center stage in the O.J. Simpson murder trial late Monday, as prosecutors embarked upon the last major phase of their case, nearly five months after they first got under way.
Prosecutors called Denise Lewis, a laboratory technician for the Los Angeles Police Department. Lewis, who spoke of the care with which she had handled hair and trace evidence, will be followed by two expert witnesses. They are expected to testify for the rest of the week and, perhaps, a few days beyond.
After three days of an ethereal - and, for large stretches of time, excruciatingly abstract - discussion of statistics and probabilities pertaining to blood mixtures on key exhibits, the 56th witness in the double murder trial brought the case back to real, tangible evidence: caps, gloves, hairs, and fibers, and how they migrated between Simpson’s former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald L. Goldman, and the person or people who killed them.
Prosecutors may be concluding their case with such evidence because of its relative unassailability. Simpson’s lawyers have argued that some fibers may have originated from a blanket thrown thoughtlessly - from an evidentiary, if not a humane, standpoint - by the police on Mrs. Simpson’s lifeless form, but they have not so far suggested that hairs or fibers incriminating Simpson were planted, as they have with the defendant’s blood.
Earlier, a chastened prosecution expert on genetics and statistics offered revised figures Monday on the makeup of crucial blood stains in the case, providing new calculations that more than halved the likelihood that mixtures found in the Ford Bronco and on a leather glove included Simpson’s blood.
Dr. Bruce Weir of North Carolina State University in Raleigh once more conceded that he erred by omitting a possible component of Simpson’s blood in his calculations, an oversight that tended to implicate Simpson in the killings more dramatically. “I’m going to have to live with that mistake for a long time,” the doctor testified. Throughout the completion of his testimony, the doctor seemed a shell of his formerly combative self.
Weir had spent the weekend recalculating his probability statistics after agreeing to do so when defense lawyers pointed out an error in them. And on Monday, near the end of a laborious and very technical crossexamination during which reporters and jurors alike put down their pens, he offered his revised findings.
For instance, the chances that two unknown people contributed to a blood mixture found on the steering wheel of Simpson’s Bronco went from 1 in 59 to 1 in 26.
According to DNA analysis, Simpson’s blood could not be excluded from the samples found on either of those exhibits. But Peter Neufeld, the defense lawyer questioning Weir, said on Monday that the revised statistics demonstrated that mixtures containing Simpson’s blood were “certainly significantly less rare” in the general population than Weir had testified.