European Stars and Stripes (Newspaper) - August 01, 1994, Darmstadt, Hesse Monday August 1, 1994 commentary the stars and stripes Page 17 it s not up to Simpson to prove his innocence James j. Kilpatrick of. Simpson will walk away from a California courtroom a free Man. That confident prediction tvs words reasonable doubt. Unless the prosecution comes up with better evidence than we have read about so far evidence that will be admitted at trial a jury eventually will bring in a. Verdict finding Simpson no guilty. As a matter of Law All that we really know about the Case is that some person or persons murdered Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman on the night of june 12. Evidence will be admitted to establish the place the method and the approximate time. Now we get to the Sticky part. The jury will be instructed that it May consider Only he evidence actually admitted in court. At the preliminary hearing Simp son a counsel raised serious questions about 34 items of evidence seized by police at his Home. Judge Kathleen Kennedy Powell refused to exclude the evidence. For what my opinion May be Worth i believe the judge ruled properly but after Reading a Hundred appellate opinions on the exclusionary Rule i can Tell you that her decision is not a sure thing. It is entirely Possi ble that the California courts will Rule that the police should have obtained a search warrant before they entered Simpson s property. If the evidence thus obtained should be excluded from the jury s consideration there goes the famous bloody Glove. The jury will never know about blood stains found in Simpson s automobile or in his House. Defense counsel will fight to the last citation against the admission of evidence based upon tests of Dan. This is the nucleic acid in our bodies that identifies our genes As if they were bar codes in a grocery. The theory is that each individual s Dan code is unique. The scientific Community accepts this proposition. Courts accept the theory also but that does not get this evidence into this court. Simpson s lawyers will question the Chain of Security protecting the specimens of blood and hair. They will Challenge the methods used by a testing Laboratory. They will scorn the statistical findings. We will see experts standing behind experts in a checkout line. In recent months the trend has seen greater acceptance of Dan evidence. A recent Virginia Case pro Vides an example. On sept. 16, the . Court of appeals for the 4th circuit affirmed the conviction of Timothy Spencer for murdering a woman in 1987. The Dan in Spencer s blood matched the Dan molecules extracted from semen stains on her bed. Two hairs were consistent with Spencer s hair. So fists six experts testified at Spencer s trial. One of them said the Odds against error were one in 705,000,000. The trial court accumulated 380 pages of testimony and argument about the Validity of the Dan tests. The 4th circuit held flatly that the Dan evidence was constitutionally other courts have gone the other Way. Of particular importance in the Simpson Case is that other California courts have gone the other Way. The trial of . Simp son is a California Case not a Federal Case and the Rul Ings of the trial judge on admission or exclusion of the forensic evidence Are just about final. Simpson s jury will be charged with considering Only the evidence admitted in court. The trial judge will Tell the jurors that it is not up to Simpson to prove his innocence. It is entirely up to the state to prove his guilt and that guilt must be proved beyond a reason Able doubt. _ _ just a few months ago on March 22, the , preme court handed Down an opinion that will control the judge s instructions in the Simpson Case. The March decision involved Alfred Arthur Sandoval. A jury found him guilty of murdering three men and a woman in gang related crimes in los Angeles. The key question on Appeal had to do with the trial court s instructions on reasonable doubt. California Law directs trial judges in this re Gard. The Simpson jurors will be told that a condition of reasonable doubt is a state of mind. They should not acquit on a Mere possible but unless they feel an abiding conviction that the state has proved Simp son s guilt they should release him. Doubts i doubt that the greatest actor on Earth could murder two persons in not blood and minutes later ride calmly to an Airport with every outward appearance of equanimity. And that s Only one doubt. . Simpson is entitled to every doubt he can raise. c Universal press Syndicate journalist trading on inside police information in the late afternoon of april 26, in Brooklyn s Prospect Park a 27-year-old woman ran up to a police car and in tears told the officer she had just been raped. Two Days later a daily news columnist wrote that the woman was a hoaxer and her Story a he repeated the accusations in a column in May ignoring the corroborative evidence that had emerged in the meantime from the police lab. Now the unnamed woman has filed a $12 million damage suit against the newspaper and the columnist Mike Mcalary charging defamation. These details Are but the Skeleton of a tangled Story that involves the police department s top officials their close relationship with the col Ernnist and the inability of both his newspaper and the police brass to see the Dan Gers in this kind of personal connection. Mcalary is one of a handful of news staffers who occasionally share the sporting life with police commissioner William Bratton and his sidekicks at the commissioner s table at trendy watering spots. When Mcalary wrote his first hoax column Basing it on unnamed police sources Bratton was embarrassed probably because he knew that insiders in the press would Likely assume that someone at the top had fed it to Mca Lary. So Bratton fearing backlash from women Over the Touchy subject of How the police handle rape victims is sued an apology. He said he regretted that police doubts about the Case had been leaked to the press particularly since some of the doubts have been refuted by the medical evidence that has now been the evidence he referred to was the Laboratory finding of semen in the woman s Vagina and on her running shorts. But the commissioner also apparently feared backlash from Mcalary because in his remarks he care fully never mentioned the columnist or the daily news. Even later when bration went further and said we have physical evidence that a rape did occur this was after Mcalary s second column said flatly that the police lab was wrong the commissioner nonetheless still did not refer to the , the daily news editors citing Mcalary s Long track record of solid authoritative reporting kept saying we stand by his columns. In his first column Mcalary said the woman was kind of vocal about being a of her rape account he wrote it is an outrageous Story really. The woman who is. 27 years old describes herself As a social activist. Ajl we really know about her is that she has an Active his sources Mcalary said told him she invented the crime v to promote. A Gay and lesbian and he suggested she should be arrested herself because a false report of rape by a woman looking for publicity is a crime against All in my reporting on the Case i almost immediately found confusion at police Headquarters and a sense that the brass was juggling several agendas trying to do Public relations damage control in an Effort to mollify All sides. About the lab tests a police spokesman waffled Back and Forth on the reliability of the reports on the semen. Semen need not be present to establish rape in fact it is not present in a majority of rape cases either because the runt did not ejaculate or Wai otherwise dysfunctional. But when it is bund it i viewed As Strong cot look Walton \ at on Post the police spokesman told me that what Sydney Schanberg was found was a substance known As p30. He said this was a fluid common to males and females but does not constitute similarly Mcalary in his Sec ond column said at Best the lab reported the sub stance was saliva male or female. No semen found. no one else however describes p30 in this manner especially not medical experts. For example the new York state health department s directive for collect ing rape evidence describes p30 As a protein Compo nent of semen and says its presence is regarded As a conclusive indication of a 1985 article in the new England journal of Medicine said that the find ing of any p30 establishes that semen is the police lab report itself As revealed by new York Post reporter Murray Weiss described the pres ence of p30 and concluded without any qualification the substance found in the victim s shorts and on the vaginal swab is still daily news editor mar tin Dunn said Mike Mcalary has written twice on the Issue and we stand behind there Are a lot of other nooks and crannies in this Story such As Trudering on in certain quarters of some old police culture attitudes about women Gays and lesbians. That � what probably got this mess started. And then of course we have the problem of i fess ional behaviour being compromised by personal relationships in this Case ties Between the press and the police department. This phenomenon too lingers on. And not solely at the daily news just in Case there Are some at other papers who were about to feet too righteous. The woman who has sued the news saw it this Way i have had the misfortune of being raped twice once in Thor Park and again in the
