Simpson Lawyers Probe Details Of Dna Testing Defense Tries To Link TV Story With Alleged Police Plotting

Lawyers for O.J. Simpson probed the intricacies of DNA testing and laid the groundwork for a novel aspect of their police conspiracy theory Monday, eliciting testimony about when certain DNA tests were performed in an effort to link a local television station to the alleged police plot.

On Sept. 21, KNBC-TV committed the best-known media mistake of the Simpson case, erroneously reporting that DNA tests of Simpson’s socks had shown the presence of Nicole Simpson’s blood. In fact, no such tests had been performed at that time, and the socks were not submitted for DNA testing until Sept. 26.

Simpson’s attorneys have made much of that mistake, suggesting that the story was fed to the station by police sources who knew the DNA results in advance because those same people were involved in planting the evidence.

But while the defense lawyers have discussed the subject in interviews, Monday marked the first time that the jury has heard testimony about it.

“So on September 21, 1994, you had no DNA results consistent with the DNA typings of Nicole Brown Simpson from that sock?” defense attorney Barry Scheck asked during his third day of cross-examining Gary Sims, a senior criminalist with the state Department of Justice who spent all last week on the witness stand.

“That’s correct,” Sims said.

Scheck was not allowed to pursue that line of questioning, but he did press ahead on other aspects of the alleged conspiracy, asking about the amounts of DNA found in various bloodstains and pointing out that some of the samples collected weeks after the murders had more DNA than some of those collected on the day after the killings.

That, he suggested, was suspicious, since DNA generally degrades when left exposed to the elements. Simpson’s attorneys have argued that the samples were planted, which they say explains their high DNA content.

Prosecutors dispute that contention and Deputy District Attorney Rockne Harmon derided the defense theories in front of the jury Monday afternoon and elicited Sims’ opinion that some elements of those theories struck him as “not really conceivable.”