TV, Legal Wrangling Bog Down Simpson Trial : Courts: More than 430 sidebars, being on televised stage, large contingent of lawyers are cited by experts.

Think of one of those remodeling jobs from hell: The homeowners take their contractor’s bid on that new kitchen, double his estimates on cost and time and figure they’ve got a budget they can live with.

A year later, the house is in ruins, the kids are still living on fast food, the clients are in divorce court and the builder is suing everybody in sight.

That’s about the way O.J. Simpson’s double murder trial is beginning to look to many observers. When opening statements began Jan. 24, prosecutors and defense attorneys estimated that the case would go to the jury within two to four months. Last week, Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti said he thought prosecutors would wrap up their case sometime next month. Defense sources say they expect to take two to three months to put on their case.

Most analysts customarily take lawyers’ projections of time with a grain of salt, but almost nobody was prepared for what several legal experts call this trial’s snail’s pace. Some knowledgeable observers now believe the case may stretch into September. By then, the jurors--assuming enough of them are left to decide the case--will have set a California record for continuous sequestration, and, according to county auditors’ conservative estimate, their $7,500-a-day tab for room and board will have helped push the trial’s costs beyond all expectations.

Why is it taking so long?

Friday’s court session was a case study in the obvious explanations. More than two hours of a short court day were consumed by acrimonious, sometimes vituperative wrangling outside the jury’s presence. Once the jurors were seated, the proceedings were frequently interrupted for lengthy, whispered conversations among the lawyers and the judge--called sidebar conferences because they are held to one side of the bench. By the time an obviously frustrated Judge Lance A. Ito sent the jurors back to their hotel for the holiday weekend, they had heard a little more than an hour of testimony.

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And Friday was hardly atypical. In slightly less than three months of trial, according to The Times’ calculations based on court transcripts, Ito had allowed 436 sidebars through Tuesday--an extraordinary number, most legal experts agree. Meanwhile, about 41% of all the available court time has been consumed by proceedings for which the jury was not present.

By week’s end, Ito’s exasperation with all this was about as apparent as judicial dignity allows.

“It seems to have finally dawned on Ito that the jurors and everyone else don’t have the rest of this millennium to try the case,” said Peter Keane, San Francisco’s chief deputy public defender. “He seems to be pushing it somewhat now, but he’s still not moving it along as quickly as most judges would.”

Defense attorney Danny Davis, who represented Raymond Buckey in the McMartin Pre-School case, the longest criminal trial in California history, said that “at the rate it’s been going, I would predict the case would total out at seven to nine months.”

Davis also believes that Ito will soon “pick up the pace” and extend the length of his court days. “In the McMartin case, we learned that if we started at 8:30 and went to 4:30 or 5, we tripled the amount of evidence we put before the jury,” he said.

But to many legal experts, the factors that really determine the Simpson trial’s pace have little to do with conventional issues, such as court schedules.

“Why is it taking so long? The answer is contained in one word: television,” said defense attorney Gerald L. Chaleff, who represented Angelo Buono, one of the defendants in the Hillside Strangler case, in the longest murder trial in the state’s history. “Everybody involved in this trial knows that everything they do or say is being seen or heard by millions and millions of people.

“The Hillside Strangler took two years. But we had 15 murders to deal with and we only worked four days a week. But we didn’t have television. Had our proceedings been televised, who knows how long it would have taken?

“I am a strong advocate of televised trials because I believe that the public is better served by seeing what goes on, so they can form their own opinions about the result. Secret proceedings are undemocratic and frequently unjust,” he continued. “But openness has a price, and longer trials may be part of it.”

San Francisco attorney Dennis Riordan, one of California’s top appellate lawyers, concurs and cites the large number of sidebars as only one example of the camera’s impact. “The sidebars in this case are held not only to deal with certain things outside the jury’s presence,” he said, “but also outside the media’s presence. The media’s all-pervasive presence definitely slows the process in other ways too.

“For example, the lawyers feel the case is going to the jury every day,” Riordan said. “Examinations are being lengthened because there’s a sense that the cumulative effect of the commentators will seep through the process, and winning those daily reviews matters.” Moreover, Riordan said, “there doesn’t seem to be any question that the surfeit of lawyers involved and their need to make an impression means that legal issues are being argued at much greater length than in another proceeding.”

Retired Municipal Judge Warren Ettinger, a former deputy district attorney and defense lawyer, takes a similar view. “I’m sad to say that in this case--and maybe in all cases--television brings out the worst in lawyers,” he said. “Television causes people to be more combative, more acrimonious. If it were not in the courtroom, the lawyers would do less posturing, less confrontation, less nit-picking. A judge who wants to keep this from overwhelming a jury is going to have sidebars.

“We are not seeing the justice system at its best. When you get to the point where the lawyers are the show, then the justice system suffers.”

Simpson’s wealth and the willingness of the district attorney’s office to commit unusual resources appear to be other factors governing the trial’s pace.

“I would say this case is more typical of a well-financed civil case than of a criminal case,” said Georgetown University law professor Paul Rothstein. “With big companies on both sides or in a large personal injury case in which the plaintiff’s lawyers expect a large recovery, there’s a lot of money involved. So no stone is left unturned: There are glossy charts, lots of witnesses, lots of motions, lots of sidebars.

“Antitrust cases are even slower than this. So are class-action cases, mass-disaster cases--like an airplane crash--or toxic torts. This is a piker in comparison to them.”

Retired Superior Court Judge George M. Dell, who served on the bench for more than 20 years, agrees: “There are people on Death Row with far less evidence than there is in this case. This is a case that demonstrates that if you have enough money or enough potential to generate money, the trial will go differently. There is a fight every millimeter of the way. No one will stipulate to anything. The prosecution is having to prove every milli-fact. This is something you normally just don’t see in criminal cases.”

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The level of acrimony among the lawyers--with each side frequently accusing the other of some ethical breach--also is playing a significant role in the trial’s halting pace, said Southwestern University law professor Karen Smith.

“There is zero trust on either side,” Smith said. “That makes them feel the need to investigate everything the other side proposes.”

Like nearly everything else about the Simpson case, even the question of whether the trial is taking a particularly long time is in dispute.

Riordan, for one, thinks “people need to remember that by the standards of the criminal justice system as (a) whole,” the Simpson case is proceeding “like a rocket.”

“Here we have a double murder case that is getting close to the end of the prosecution’s case and we haven’t yet seen the first anniversary of the crime,” he said. “I can’t think of any case with equally severe allegations that has moved so quickly.”

To San Diego defense lawyer Elisabeth Semel, the speed with which Simpson went to trial is simply one of many factors that make his case “atypical.” She notes that “in the normal course of events, when you have a legally and factually complex double murder, motions and issues pertaining to the admissibility of evidence are litigated before the trial and not while the jurors are in the next room twiddling their thumbs.”

“In this case, the constant production of new evidence and test results causes the parties to fight over their admissibility and discoverability--all of which usually happens before the trial starts.”

Even the much moaned-over sidebars are not necessarily something at which the public should look askance, said San Francisco defense lawyer Paul Harris, a professor at New College of Law. “Judge Ito should be complimented for taking the lawyers’ arguments seriously and giving them a full and fair hearing,” Harris said. “Most criminal cases are an exercise in assembly line justice; this case is not.”

But to Vincent Bugliosi--who successfully prosecuted Charles Manson in a case that set the California record for jury sequestration at 8 1/2 months--the Simpson case is just “too slow, and there’s no justification for it. If there is any case that does not require a short court day, it’s Simpson. There are two reasons for that:

“First, the jury is sequestered, which is highly unusual. Shorter court days mean longer sequestration. In Manson, some of our jurors were stir-crazy.

“Second, we have an enormous staff of lawyers on both sides. I’ve never seen such a case where you have so much compartmentalization. You see a lawyer handling one witness and then you don’t see the lawyer for a couple weeks. It’s kind of difficult to paint a Mona Lisa when one person is doing the hand, another is doing the head. To paint a masterpiece, one person has to handle virtually everything. You don’t need all these lawyers. I think it detracts from the perfection of what you’re trying to do.”

But, looking beyond the courtroom, veteran defense attorney Harland W. Braun believes that Ito has set a correct pace for the trial. “Most of the people who are criticizing Ito,” he said, “weren’t here for the Latasha Harlins (manslaughter) case or the first Rodney King (beating) trial. They weren’t here when 53 people were killed in a riot. No one is criticizing Ito for giving O.J. Simpson an unfair trial, even though most of his rulings go for the prosecution. The reason is he is patient, and that’s important if you’re in a city sitting on a powder keg.

“This trial involves a horrible intra-family tragedy, but Ito’s conduct of the case may prevent it from becoming society’s problem.”