Judge, in Stunning Move, Voids Grand Jury Probe of Simpson : Courts: Jurist says panel has become aware of possibly prejudicial material and seals all records. Preliminary hearing is set for Thursday.

In a stunning and apparently unprecedented legal development in the O.J. Simpson double murder case, the supervising judge of the Los Angeles Superior Court on Friday stripped the grand jury of its role, closing off a possible indictment of the jailed football legend.

Judge Cecil J. Mills ruled that some people on the 23-member panel had “become aware of potentially prejudicial matters”--presumably tapes of emergency calls to 911 in which a man identified as Simpson is heard screaming obscenities after kicking in the door of ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson’s home. Mills issued the order after O.J. Simpson’s attorney Robert L. Shapiro filed an unusual motion to halt the secret legal proceedings.

Citing the unique circumstances of a compelling case blanketed in media attention--and saying he must “protect the due process rights of Mr. Simpson and the integrity of the grand jury process”--Mills ended the panel’s involvement in the case, sealed all related records and ordered jurors not to discuss any details about the case learned in five days of closed-door hearings.

The latest, extraordinary turn in the 13-day saga that has captivated the nation means that Simpson, who has been charged with two counts of murder, will proceed to a preliminary hearing scheduled to begin Thursday.

The supervising judge, who took the unusual step of personally intervening in proceedings under the purview of other jurists, said he acted after conducting a personal inquiry, apparently interviewing grand jury members. In nationally televised proceedings in which Simpson made his third court appearance this week, Mills said he found that jurors had been exposed to possibly prejudicial information “not officially presented to them by the district attorney.”

One juror who requested anonymity acknowledged that he heard tapes of the 911 calls while watching TV at home, and he believed that other jurors had too. But he said the tapes were never brought up in the jury room, or among fellow jurors in casual conversation, at least in his presence.

“I would be surprised if there weren’t any who did not see it,” he said. “The only way you could avoid it was not watch TV.”

Mills’ action followed a morning hearing in another court where Shapiro cited erroneous reports about a bloody ski mask supposedly found at the crime scene as an example of law enforcement creating innuendo about his client, who has pleaded not guilty.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Marcia Clark acknowledged in court Wednesday that no such mask was recovered. But on Friday she disclosed that “a blue knit cap was found” at the foot of one of the victims outside Nicole Simpson’s Bundy Avenue townhouse.

Clark accused Shapiro of grandstanding for holding numerous news conferences and trying to win sympathy for the ex-football star by having his friend Robert Kardashian read what appeared to be a suicide note June 17, while Simpson was a fugitive.

With the case continuing to play out in the free-for-all jury room of public opinion as well as the staid courts of law, both sides put a favorable face on Friday’s developments. Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti called a news conference to insist that the dismissal of the grand jury was not a setback for his office. “I don’t see any loss,” he said.

But the balance of victory Friday clearly appeared to be Simpson’s. His lawyers had been angling to avoid a grand jury indictment, which would preclude a speedy preliminary hearing where witnesses and evidence could be challenged. Shapiro and his team want to gauge the strength of the case against the 46-year-old actor and sports commentator, who stands accused of killing his Nicole Simpson and her friend Ronald Lyle Goldman in a knife attack the night of June 12.

“We are very pleased the judge agreed with our position,” Shapiro told reporters packed in the hallway outside Mills’ courtroom. “We look forward to finally presenting this evidence in a public courtroom . . . to hearing live testimony under oath from the witnesses.”

Later at a news conference, Garcetti said that in his 25 years in the district attorney’s office, he had never heard of or seen the recusal of a grand jury. He insisted that he initiated the process that led to Mills’ order, saying he did not learn of Shapiro’s motion until half an hour after his meeting with Mills on Friday morning.

Garcetti said he went to the supervising judge about the same time Shapiro filed his motion because he was concerned about the pervasiveness of the coverage in the case.

“I did this because I’m interested in justice,” Garcetti said. “I wanted to be sure the grand jury proceeding was going forward fairly.”

He said he was particularly concerned about heavy coverage of the chilling tapes of the 911 calls, even though grand jurors had been told not to view, listen to or read any reports about the Simpson case.

Garcetti acknowledged that he had another motive as well. If the grand jury issued an indictment, and later it was revealed that members had been exposed to prejudicial information, it could undermine the indictment, he said.

Shapiro declined to discuss Garcetti’s portrayal of the events.

The grand jury is scheduled to be disbanded Thursday, when its term expires. The judge’s order applied only to the Simpson case; the panel presumably will be allowed to conclude any pending work on other matters.

At times Friday, the already remarkable case appeared to be careening through a new zone of confusion and miscommunication.

Superior Court Judge Lance A. Ito, who heard the arguments on Shapiro’s motion at a morning hearing, was not aware that Judge Mills, at that very moment, was holding another hearing to determine if the grand jurors knew things about the case that had not been formally presented to them by the district attorney’s office, Garcetti said.

Ito and Mills did not return calls to their offices seeking comment.

During the hearing before Ito, Simpson’s team went on the offensive. Shapiro accused prosecutors of misconduct in releasing information that he contended prejudiced grand jurors, including the release of the tapes of calls to 911.

“Clearly, everything that was said on the tape . . . would be inadmissible,” Shapiro argued. In court papers, Shapiro went on to cite other examples of what he called “prejudicial and improper expressions of personal opinions by prosecutors, and uncorrected false and misleading descriptions of evidence uncovered in the investigation of this case.”

Shapiro recounted Clark’s categorization of Simpson as the sole murderer and Garcetti’s speculation that the former football star might admit killing his ex-wife and her friend but would claim a defense similar to that of the Menendez brothers.

“The district attorney’s office has improperly released, and massive publicity has been given by the media, to inadmissible evidence in this case, the best example of which was the massive airing on virtually all television and radio stations in Los Angeles of the 911 tape,” Shapiro said.

“Before any charges were brought or conclusive tests could be run, the public was made aware of bloodstains on driveways, matching blood types, bloody gloves and the alleged weapon that was revealed to be a military shovel that was later dismissed and called a knife, which has never been found,” Shapiro argued in papers filed with the court.

Simpson defense co-counsel and constitutional law expert Gerald F. Uelmen, appearing at Shapiro’s side in Ito’s courtroom, said “the barrage of publicity” surrounding the Simpson case has been “unprecedented.”

But Clark said the district attorney’s office had done nothing improper. “Robert Shapiro has lost no opportunity to exploit coverage in this case to get sympathy for his client,” she said. “He has been no stranger to the spotlight.”

Famed defense attorney F. Lee Bailey said Friday that Shapiro and Uelmen consulted with him before filing the motion to dismiss the grand jury. Bailey said the first case cited was a 1966 case he handled, Sheppard vs. Maxwell, involving Dr. Sam Sheppard. In that case, Bailey said, the prosecution “repeatedly made evidence available to the news media that was never offered at trial.”

What Shapiro argued Friday, Bailey said, was that “it’s just as bad to do that with a grand jury as with a trial jury.”

Shapiro also has consulted Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz on the case, Bailey said.

The controversy over the release of the tapes, which has prompted outraged calls from the public to police and prosecutors, also continued. Garcetti said he was surprised by the release of the tapes and disagreed with City Atty. James Hahn’s decision to comply with news media requests under the state Public Records Act.

Sources close to Hahn’s office indicated that there had been some miscues. They said the city attorney’s office--before authorizing the tapes’ release--thought that police had spoken with officials of the district attorney’s office, and determined that the tapes of calls to 911 would not be used in the current murder investigation, and could therefore be released.

“I think we thought that had been done, that this had been run by them and that the D.A.’s office had no problem with the release of the materials,” said a source within the city attorney’s office. “I think we were given bad information by the LAPD.”

Officially, the Police Department tartly declined to join in the finger-pointing. “James Hahn’s office can blame it on whoever they want to blame it on,” said Lt. John Dunkin, an LAPD spokesman. “The Los Angeles Police Department has no further comment on the matter.”

But privately, police sources angrily placed the blame on their counterparts in the district attorney and city attorney’s offices. One said that police were vehemently against releasing the 911 tapes despite media pressure. The source said police officials asked the district attorney’s office to give them a good reason not to release them--such as the ongoing murder investigation--but said prosecutors supported their release.

Garcetti said that someone from the LAPD informed Deputy Dist. Atty. David Conn that the department planned to release reports from past incidents involving Nicole and O.J. Simpson. Garcetti said no mention was made of the explosive audiotape, and said Conn referred the police to the city attorney for advice on what they should release.

Garcetti did not fault Conn’s actions in the matter.

The release of the tapes--one from an incident in 1989, the other from 1993--also triggered speculation about why law enforcement authorities had retained them, and whether they were part of some ongoing investigation of Simpson’s turbulent relationship with his wife, which had prompted many domestic dispute calls to police over the years.

But police and city officials said Friday that under the city’s records retention schedule, audiotapes of emergency calls to 911 must be saved for a minimum 15 months before they can be reused. So the tape-recording of an October, 1993, call from Nicole Simpson was in department storage, they said.

The tape documenting her call during a 1989 incident came not from the Police Department, which had destroyed its copy, but from the files of the city attorney’s office, which keeps case records for a minimum of five years, department representatives said. The incident recorded was prosecuted by city attorneys, resulting in Simpson pleading no contest to spousal abuse.

The grand juror interviewed by The Times could not say whether the tape had any impact on his colleagues, but said it had no effect on him. “But I didn’t understand it except you could hear him shouting in the background,” the juror said. “The quality of the tape was poor.”

The juror said that grand jurors were not admonished by their deputy district attorney adviser not to watch TV. “We weren’t warned against it. . . . They told us not to watch any programs about the grand jury activities. This was just news. It was a surprise to us when it came on.”

The juror would not say how close the jury was to an indictment, nor would he offer his opinion on the case.

Asked about the evidence presented to the jury, the juror declined to discuss any specifics, but said: “Almost everything that the jury knows has been reported in the paper.

“I would say if you read the papers, you know everything the grand jury knows.”

The juror said that he was not polled by the judge before his decision to dismiss the jury. But the jury said that the judge’s order was read privately to the jury before being read in the courtroom.

“It’s a real relief to be off the case,” the juror said. “The character of the case was so distasteful.” Asked why, he said: “Because they were vicious murders.

“I’m glad it’s over.”

Times staff writers Leslie Berger, Frederick M. Muir, Richard Lee Colvin and Josh Meyer contributed to this story.