In Contempt

Guess who publicly stated that there would have been more prosecutions of bad LAPD cops in the Dalton police scandal in 1991 if more police officers had been truthful. Guess who said this: "Had we had a little more support from the LAPD in terms of ensuring that these officers testified truthfully, I think that might have helped. I think (the officers) lied about what happened, and I think they lied as to why it happened, and I think they lied about who did it." Guess who also complained that the LAPD’s Internal Affairs Division refused to cooperate with him in the Dalton case.Who said all these things? None other than Chris Darden. Yet, just three years later, Darden scoffed at the idea that LAPD detectives and officers would lie or plant evidence against O.J. Simpson.I think Darden knew, or at least suspected, that the police were feeding him planted and altered evidence. He has been one of the most dishonest of the prosecutors in his public statements about the case.For instance, lately Darden has been going around repeating Mike Gilbert’s tale that O.J. stopped taking his arthritis meds in order to make his hands swell, and that that’s why the gloves did not fit him when he tried them on in the courtroom. Darden knows this is a lie. He knows that this claim was debunked during the criminal trial. He knows that the doctor at the jail confirmed that O.J. had not stopped taking his meds and that the defense produced O.J.’s medical records to verify this fact. (Incredibly, the myth that O.J. stopped taking his meds is repeated in the recent ESPN documentary “O.J.: Made in America.” Did the producers of that show not watch the trial?)Darden also continues to peddle the falsehood that O.J. screamed a confession to Rosey Grier in the jail during the trial. Darden got this story from a guard at the jail. Darden knows that Grier himself stated that O.J. never even raised his voice during their discussion.Darden dismisses all indications that evidence was planted by conjuring up a wild conspiracy theory involving dozens of police officers, the detectives, and crime lab personnel. He knows that no such vast conspiracy would have been required to plant evidence, tamper with blood swatches, and suppress or ignore exculpatory evidence. He also knows that the defense never posited any such conspiracy.Amazingly, Darden, as does Marcia Clark, faults Judge Lance Ito for making too many rulings against the prosecution! Darden is especially angry over Ito's decision to allow the jury to hear a few brief segments of the Fuhrman tapes and to hear a couple of witnesses testify that they heard Fuhrman use racial slurs. Darden is not satisfied that Ito did not allow the jury to hear that Fuhrman had bragged, on tape, about planting evidence against minorities in previous cases. How is it “irrelevant” that the detective who “found” so much key evidence admitted on tape that he had planted evidence against minorities in previous cases?Darden repeats so many refuted myths in his book that it's hard to count them all. He even repeats the myth that O.J.'s Bronco was parked noticeably askew from the curb (that was Fuhrman's excuse for searching it), but crime-scene photos taken less than 24 hours after the murders show the Bronco was parked nearly perfectly parallel to the curb. Darden even defends Detective Vannatter's brazenly dishonest search warrant affidavit as "based on the best knowledge he had at the time"! That claim is nothing short of incredible. Even Judge Ito determined that Vannatter wrote the warrant with a "reckless disregard for the truth." For example, Vannatter stated in the warrant that O.J.'s trip to Chicago that night was unplanned, even though he knew that the trip had been planned weeks in advance of the murders. The "knowledge he had at the time" was that the trip was planned, but in the warrant he said it was not. If Darden cannot admit that Vannatter perjured himself in the search warrant, there is little hope that he can be objective on other issues.Darden repeats the excuse that the prosecution decided not to use Jill Shively as a witness because she had sold her story to a tabloid. But the prosecution used another witness who had sold his story to a tabloid. The real problem with Shively's story was that it destroyed the prosecution's timeline for the murders.Darden simply assumes that the sock blood was valid evidence and makes no effort to explain the clear indications that it was planted. He makes no mention of all the experts who examined the socks and found no blood on them in the days following the murders, no mention of the fact that the first evidence reports on the socks said no blood was observed on them, no mention of the fact that the head of LAPD's crime lab excluded the socks from her list of items that had blood on them, no mention of the hard photographic evidence that someone moved items in O.J.'s bedroom at a time when only the police were in the room, and no mention of the fact that the sock blood contained far more EDTA than is naturally found in human blood. And Darden does not care that the sock blood was not “found” until nearly eight weeks after the murders--after several experts had examined the socks and had found no blood on them. Reading Darden's book, I am not sure how well he understood the scientific problems with the sock-blood evidence.Darden suggests that the blood that the LAPD claimed they found on the back gate three weeks after the murders was on the gate the day after the murders, even though the crime-scene photo of the back gate that Barry Scheck used to cross-examine Dennis Fung did not show any blood in that location. Darden implies that there was something wrong with how that photo was taken. He doesn't mention that the photo was an enlargement and that it showed a clear view of that part of the back gate. Nor does Darden address the fact that the back-gate blood miraculously contained far more DNA than the five blood drops that were collected from Nicole's house the day after the murders, in spite of the fact that it had supposedly been exposed to the elements for three weeks.Darden cites the Bundy blood evidence collected on June 13 (the day after the murders) without saying a word about any of the problems with that evidence, such as the wet transfers on the swatches, the failure to book this evidence until four days after the murders, the fact that the bindles for this blood did not have the criminalist's initials on them when they arrived for testing (indicating that they had been switched), and the wildly varying amounts of DNA in those blood drops even though they were supposedly deposited within seconds of each other. He notes that one of those drops "had a one in 170 million chance" of not being O.J.'s blood--that was Item 52. Darden doesn't care that when Item 52 arrived for testing, it arrived in a bindle that had no initials on it, which suggests that the blood in the bindle was not the same blood that was collected at the crime scene. Nor does Darden care that Item 52 had vastly more DNA than did any of the other blood drops. Darden is immune to the indications that the O.J. DNA in Item 52 came from the blood that was missing from O.J.'s blood vial. Again, he does not mention any of these issues.Reading Darden's spin on the glove demonstration is revealing. For starters, I guess he will always claim that they "fit" O.J., albeit very tightly. Well, they clearly did not "fit" him the way that most people would normally define "fit." They were very tight. Nobody would wear gloves that fit them so tightly. Predictably, Darden argues that the latex gloves that Simpson was wearing during the demonstration made the gloves fit so tightly, but Darden does not bother to inform the reader that he could have had Simpson take off the latex gloves and re-try the gloves. The latex gloves were so thin that they made no substantive difference in how the gloves fit. The gloves were simply and obviously too small for Simpson's enormous hands, and anyone who watches the video of the glove demonstration can see that with their own eyes.But what is especially revealing about Darden's spin on the glove demonstration is his interpretation that O.J. showed such visible relief when he realized that the gloves were too tight because he was thinking "I'm getting away with it." Really? If O.J. had worn those gloves when he allegedly committed the murders, he would have already known that they were super tight on him and would not fit. If you watch the video of the demonstration, you can see that a visible look of relief came over his face as soon as he realized that the gloves were too tight. Some of the people in the courtroom who were closest to O.J. during the demo commented on how his facial expression changed from one of worry and concern to one of obvious relief. A perfectly reasonable interpretation of this event is that O.J. was relieved when he realized that the gloves did not fit because he had not worn them before and did not know how they would fit him until he tried them on. But Darden cannot accept this reasonable interpretation because it means that O.J. did not murder anyone and that the gloves were planted.Of course, Darden says nothing about the fact that the blood on the Rockingham glove could not have been moist when Fuhrman said he found it. It was and is scientifically impossible. Numerous tests have confirmed that any blood on that glove would have been bone dry by the time Fuhrman "found" it. Rather than deal with this obvious indication that the glove was picked up from the Bundy crime scene and planted at O.J.'s house, Darden just ignores the scientific impossibility that blood would still be moist after seven hours. The prosecution had no rational answer for this problem during the trial, and they still have no answer for it.Any objective person who reads the criminal trial transcript and reads Darden’s book will see that he frequently misrepresents evidence and ignores a great deal of other evidence. Google these two articles to get some idea of the other side of the story: “Joseph Bosco and 10 Myths in the O.J. Simpson Case” and “Where Did All that Blood Come From? Problems with the Blood Evidence Against O.J. Simpson.”

I have read widely on the famous OJ Simpson trial, and I was very interested in seeing what Christopher Darden had to say about it. Like many Americans, I knew very little about Mr. Darden other than something about his role as a co-prosecutor in the famous trial.This book did not disappoint. It begins with Darden giving the reader a frank and candid summary of his hardscrabble past. Mr. Darden's childhood did not involve anything like a privileged upbringing, and he bootstrapped himself into college and law degrees in a manner that can only be described as commendable. Clearly, to accomplish what he did and get where he was, Mr. Darden is a bright guy with a lot of drive and intelligence.Mr. Darden's observations and narrative concerning the Simpson trial are on-point in my opinion. The Judge in this trial allowed the defense to take control of the courtroom, and there is plain evidence of bias that Darden discusses here frankly but without a lot of rancor. The jury selection and the decision to allow television cameras in the courtroom all combined to almost guaranty a travesty of justice. As Robert Shapiro of the defense team later famously said, not only did the defense team play the race card, they dealt it from the bottom of the deck. Darden explains the famous glove incident in the trial, and while I (like almost all attorneys) still regard it as a mistake on his part, he at least explains the logic underlying his decision to have Simpson try on the gloves.Overall, I found this book to be a gripping and informative read that any student of the Simpson trial, or of criminal justice in general, will not want to miss. As entertainment this one is first rate.

When the news came blaring through that O.J. Simpson was the suspect in his ex-wife's recent murder, and all the speculation that came with that was interrupting tv and radio programming, I decided not to pay any attention until all the evidence was in and it was a "settled" case. The next year astounded me. It was impossible to not be aware of the trial, and even though I still made no effort to follow the case, the people involved became household names and many of the facts of the case imprinted upon my mind. Once the verdict was announced I was shocked at the stark divide between the way black people and white people in this country reacted and, as time revealed, thought about things in general. I was busy with life and relieved that it was finally over and just hoped we'd heal, as a nation. I never looked into it as a "settled case."Then the tv miniseries aired recently and I caught it. I was amazed how familiar it all felt, and very curious about what was accurate and not, so I started looking at books about the trial in Amazon. I liked what the blurb said about Darden's. It's the first book I've ever read on the subject and I found it remarkably fresh and informative. In addition I found it incredibly insightful about race relations and I feel that is helpful today in a way I never expected from a book about a twenty year old trial. Christopher Darden is a passionate and poetic soul, who tells his own story as he weaves the tale of the trial, so that you're getting an autobiographical insight into his fundamental outlook on life, specifically as it relates to justice and to race, and more specifically racial justice. If you're looking for "just the facts" of the case, you probably won't want to wade through all the extra in this book, but if you like a good read, with depth and subtlety and nuance, you'll enjoy this book. You'll get the nitty gritty of the case and the trial, but you'll be treated, in addition, to the deep insights of a fine mind and a truly decent outlook.

This book published in 1996 shortly after the acquittal is actually a book about Darden and his life before and after the verdict. So readers looking for a sustained thesis with supporting details why the jury was wrong should look elsewhere.This book begins with his childhood and it is only at chapter 10 at page 159 that Darden talks of him getting assigned to assist Marcia in the prosecution. The book is short on details why OJ should be convicted save for some bold assertions, unsupported.The glove evidence is frankly against the prosecution. The knife murder weapon was never found or produced in court. The lack of bruises on OJ despite the altercations is not explained.If one is interested in the trial itself, a better book is The run of his life ; The people v OJ Simpson by Jeffrey Toobin.

A lengthy but interesting book which takes you behind the scenes of the trial and reveals that what should have been a virtually watertight case was diverted along the race issue. Darden really believes in justice but on this occasion the system failed. Would highly recommend.

After watching People v O J Simpson I read "In Contempt" and found the book to be a page turner.Chris Darden is definitely a wordsmith.

A great insight to the case and into the tactics used by the defence. Also interesting to read exactly how much evidence there against OJ and the struggles that the prosecution had to convince a blinded jury.

Really enjoyed. Less overall details of case than other books but some unique insights.