Justice Blinded By Bailey’s Show

They say that F. Lee Bailey is one of the greatest defense attorneys of all time, a flesh-and-blood Perry Mason.

One of America’s most celebrated lawyers, Bailey has defended Patty Hearst, the Boston Strangler and Capt. Ernest Medina, the defendant in the My Lai Massacre trial. His name has been a household word across the country for nearly three decades as he racked up fame and fortune with each new win and loss.

The legend began when the then-33-year-old Bailey persuaded the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse the murder conviction of Dr. Sam Sheppard in 1966. The Ohio osteopath had been convicted of murdering his wife.

But if I were on the jury hearing the O.J. Simpson case, my assessment of 61-year-old Bailey, a member of the former football hero’s legal “Dream Team,” wouldn’t be so charitable.

What I see when I watch his courtroom theatrics - and I wonder if the jurors do, too - is a condescending, pompous lawyer caught up in his own celebrity and flamboyance.

His voice lifts and drops. He raises his hands to the heavens. He booms. He hisses. He weaves and bobs.

He points and licks his chops. Sometimes, right after firing off a question, he folds his arms and leans back, as if to say, “I gotta hear this. This ought to be good.”

Meanwhile, the little devil sitting on my shoulder keeps tugging on my ear and asking: Is this guy for real?

Consider this: Beyond the drama, what has Bailey brought out about the case that truly seems significant? Invisible footprints? Who made those, the Invisible Man?

Still, courtroom commentators keep gushing about Bailey’s flashy oratory style, noting how reminiscent it is of a Hollywood movie.

“He’s certainly more dramatic than any of the other attorneys,” University of Southern California law professor Erwin Chemerinsky told the Los Angeles Daily News. “He fulfills a juror’s expectation of what a defense attorney should be. For a while there, I thought I was watching Perry Mason.”

But this is not Hollywood and too many seem to have forgotten that the victims, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman, are really dead.

Commentators are calling the high drama “classic Bailey,” but he sounds like a bully to me. Why, for instance, does he keep asking officers on the stand about parts of the investigation that they keep saying weren’t part of their jobs?

Is it really helping O.J. Simpson when Bailey lectures officers about the “cardinal rules” of crime-scene investigation? Of course the officer knows what a footprint is. Of course we all know what happens to ice cream that is left unrefrigerated.

And then there’s the invisible footprints, which Bailey brought up while cross-examining police Sgt. David Rossi, the first supervisor to arrive at Nicole Brown Simpson’s condo that night. Bailey asked if Rossi had stepped on any footprints at the murder scene.

What footprints? asked Rossi.

The invisible footprints, detectable only through dusting for fingerprints and forensic techniques, Bailey answered.

Rossi, a soft-spoken veteran with 25 years with the Los Angeles Police Department who wasn’t easily shaken, said he didn’t think he had stepped on any footprints.

Bailey’s eyes lit up. Then he pounced, voice laced with sarcasm:

“Would you explain to the jury how you could not believe that you obliterated something that you couldn’t see in the first place?”

And, “Did it occur to you that by you and (Officer Robert) Riske, who’s got pretty goodsized feet, walking up that walkway, you could be obliterating evidence?”

The questions, of course, weren’t really questions. Instead, Bailey hoped the jury would hear what he meant, and hear it loud and clear: You messed up the evidence, you bumbling goofs.

Later, while questioning the likelihood of a particular event, Bailey’s tone implied he believed the scenario was about as probable as a flying pig.

Using his trademark combative style of rapidfire questioning, he continued to try to plant that seed of reasonable doubt as he painted a picture of inept officers trampling over the bloody crime scene, destroying valuable evidence.

I expect it won’t be long before Bailey accuses the officers who responded to the scene that night of committing the murders themselves.

Of course, he’d do it with flair:

You, in fact, had ample time to commit these heinous crimes yourself, did you not?

The commentators will oooh and ahhh. Theatrics, after all, seem to be increasingly what this case is all about.

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