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From: Jasper
Date: 10/14/02
Time: 4:03:47 PM
Remote Name: 66.72.163.117
Charlie,
When we talk about the judge with regard to Daniel Gonzalez's testimony we have to be clear that we are talking about Hiroshi Fujisaki, the presiding judge in the civil trial. Gonzalez was a hostile defense witness in the civil trial. Neither the defense nor the prosecution in the criminal trial called him as a witness and neither side in either trial brought up the fact that his business card was found in Nicole's desk drawer. O.J.'s first lead detective John Pavlic is the one who found it.
My point was that the criminal defense team could have called him as a witness and discovered what he had to say about the card. From what he said or didn't say they could get a better idea of what Nicole was doing with it and whether or not it was linked to Fuhrman or Shipp. They could also have asked Shipp about it considering the fact that he was the one that many LAPD officers went to for moonlighting jobs and Shipp did hire cops as security guards for Nicole's pizza party. They didn't get any names.
I learned about the business card only by reading Lawrence Schiller's American Tragedy (page 547). The sum of what Schiller wrote about it consist of this two-sentence paragraph:
"Walking through the Bundy condo with the defense team in July of 1994, Pavlic had found Gonzalez's LAPD business card in Nicole's desk drawer. He'd never found an explanation for that."
After rereading Gonzalez's testimony this morning it's hard for me to see where to blame Judge Fujisaki for what Baker did and didn't ask him. Baker's focus was on the blood in the Bronco and in suggesting to the jury that either Gonzalez transferred blood to the Bronco from his previous contact with the Akita or that he had been wrong about seeing it when and where he said he did. Baker had already nailed the young cop on his observation and recall skills when he reported that the Bronco's front tire was one or two inches from the cub and the back tire was one or two feet away. The photos showed otherwise and he reluctantly agreed that he was mistaken. His mind's eye recorded what Fuhrman said, not what he saw with his own eyes at the time.
That's what makes Marcia such an important witness. It goes against the defense theory that Fuhrman smeared the bloody glove inside of the Bronco before he planted it, but it supports the testimony of their witnesses who said they didn't see it. Again and again prosecution witnesses told of seeing blood in the Bronco AFTER Fuhrman or Roberts announced that they saw it.
Even if the blood wasn't there, all of these witnesses weren't necessarily lying.
Psychologists have performed many experiments that document the tendency of people to "see" things that weren't there when two or more people insisted that they saw them. This works about 80 percent of the time with 80 percent of the people. That means it doesn't work 20 percent of the time with 20 percent of the people (which is roughly how the testimony on the subject breaks down). Marcia came into the situation on the 13th knowing full well that Fuhrman was manipulating at least some of the evidence with his words. That was her own specialty and why Vannatter called her in on the case. She had to be on alert for what was real and what wasn't just to cover herself, which makes her a probable 20 percenter. --Jasper