New DNA Test on Blood From Bronco Revealed

In a revelation that rocked an otherwise slow court session, Deputy Dist. Atty. Rockne Harmon disclosed Friday that a new DNA test suggests that O.J. Simpson’s car was smeared with a mixture of his blood and that of murder victim Ronald Lyle Goldman.

The latest DNA test, which still is under way, could offer some of the prosecution’s most telling evidence against Simpson, in part because he had no known contact with Goldman, making any mixture of their blood inside his car very difficult to explain. In addition, the latest analysis is an RFLP test, the most definitive type of DNA testing, so the results could produce highly significant statistical probabilities that the mixture came from Simpson and Goldman.

“We have now produced a three-probe RFLP match which shows a mixture which is consistent with the blood of the defendant, Mr. Simpson, and the blood of Ronald Goldman,” Harmon said during a brief hearing outside the jury’s presence Friday. The analysis still is being performed to see if the sample contains more markers belonging to the defendant and Goldman, one of two victims in the June 12, 1994, murders.

If confirmed by the further analysis and allowed into evidence, the RFLP test from the blood in Simpson’s Ford Bronco would have an extra advantage for prosecutors: A defense expert has testified about contamination problems with another form of DNA analysis, but the RFLP test is far less susceptible to contamination, so the new result probably would not be as vulnerable to that defense attack.

Simpson has pleaded not guilty to the killings of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Goldman. Both were slashed and stabbed to death outside Nicole Simpson’s Brentwood condominium.

Outside court, Simpson’s attorneys downplayed the significance of the latest DNA disclosure, saying they may fight the admission of the results because the prosecution already has rested its case and because, the defense lawyers contend, the state Department of Justice laboratory has dawdled in performing tests to keep them at a disadvantage.

“After [prosecutors] have rested, they are offering not new evidence, but evidence that they’ve had for a year,” said Robert L. Shapiro, one of Simpson’s lawyers. “We’ll wait and see what it says, but it doesn’t seem to be in the spirit of fairness.”

Superior Court Judge Lance A. Ito was not asked to rule on the admissibility of the DNA test on Friday, but said, “I still have the concern about the delay in the start of the testing. Whether or not any RFLP results will be admissible before this jury, that is an issue that has yet to be resolved.”

In addition, the stain being subjected to the RFLP test was gathered from Simpson’s Bronco in August, not on the day after the murders, when most of the blood evidence was recovered. Simpson’s car was broken into while in police custody, and if Ito allows the jury to hear about the new DNA test results, defense lawyers say they could attempt to shake the jury’s confidence in them by reminding the panel about the lax security that was given to the car during that period.

The DNA disclosure overshadowed a highly technical court session in which Deputy Dist. Atty. George Clarke chipped away at the testimony of a key defense witness for a jury that was at first attentive but later seemed bored.

Although the cross-examination dragged on, Clarke elicited testimony that some of the contamination the witness said afflicts the LAPD crime lab would not have compromised samples in the Simpson case.

Using slides and moving one methodical point at a time, Clarke illustrated that point despite the resistance of the witness, John Gerdes, the clinical director of a Denver medical laboratory.

Gerdes had testified under questioning by defense attorney Barry Scheck that the LAPD’s crime lab was plagued by chronic contamination and had said that many of the samples in the Simpson case could have been compromised. One area of possible contamination was in the extraction of DNA from various blood samples by police technicians.

But Clarke reminded Gerdes that many of the samples were sent directly to other laboratories--one in Berkeley, the other in Maryland--before the DNA had been extracted. That would rule out the LAPD as a possible source of contamination in those samples, Gerdes reluctantly conceded, at least during the extraction phase of the process.

That admission was hard-won, however, as Gerdes seemed to sense the trap that the prosecutor had laid for him. At first, Gerdes insisted that it would not make a difference whether the LAPD personnel had extracted DNA from the samples or had sent them along without first performing that work.

But Clarke would not let up. He posed his questions time and again, and when Gerdes dodged rather than responded directly, the prosecutor frequently asked Ito to strike the witness’s answers from the record. Ito usually granted those requests, and at one point went so far as to direct Clarke to ask his question a third time and pointedly ordered Gerdes to answer it.

Faced with the prosecutor’s persistence, the scientist eventually conceded Clarke’s main point--that the samples the LAPD merely sent along to other labs avoided many possible opportunities for contamination during their stay at the Police Department lab.

“Dr. Gerdes, when you pick up a sample from storage, put it in a box, and send it to another laboratory, you don’t add any chemicals to it?” Clarke asked.

“No,” Gerdes answered.

“You don’t add chelex to it?” the prosecutor asked.

“No,” he said again.

“You don’t put it in a microcentrifuge and spin it around, do you?” Clarke continued.

“No,” Gerdes responded yet again.

“You just put the sample in a container and ship it?” Clarke asked.

“That’s true,” he said.

With that, Clarke triumphantly moved to his conclusion: “It’s never exposed to the DNA extraction process . . . under the situation I’ve just described?”

“Under what you’ve described,” Gerdes answered glumly, “that’s true.”

Later, Gerdes acknowledged that some of the samples in the Simpson case never were touched by various LAPD criminalists and never were subjected to typing by the Police Department--further undermining the notion that the evidence could have been compromised while in police custody.

That testimony helped the prosecution repair some of the damage that many analysts said Gerdes had done to its case with his scathing description of the LAPD crime lab and its personnel. Many jurors appeared to take notes as Gerdes grudgingly admitted that the way the samples were handled limited their exposure to contamination at the Police Department, but the panel’s interest seemed to wane as Clarke went on to challenge some of Gerdes’ review of the LAPD’s work on other samples that did not come from the Simpson case.

Hampered by an equipment breakdown that temporarily put the courtroom’s projection system out of order, Clarke questioned the witness in detail about DNA typing sheets without benefit of being able to illustrate his examination with the sheets themselves. One at a time, jurors put down their pens. One fiddled with her jewelry, another studied her fingernails, and one of the alternates yawned and drank from his bottle of water.

Shortly before noon, one juror abruptly got up and left the courtroom during a break. A sheriff’s deputy allowed him to leave through a back door, but he returned a few moments later and retook his seat.

As the session ended, however, the restless panel broke into wide smiles when Ito took a moment to thank one of his clerks, who is departing for law school in two weeks and whose last day was Friday. The clerk, Tasia Scolinos, had been responsible for arranging the jury’s entertainment, and the panelists glowed as Ito effusively thanked her for her work.

“I know that you join with me in wishing her good luck with her studies,” Ito said to the jurors. “We all know that given her demonstrated talents she will obviously be highly successful in whatever it is she chooses to do in her career. And, in fact, I suspect that in my years of retirement, my claim to fame will be that she was one of my law clerks.”

With that, the courtroom, including all 14 jurors and alternates, loudly applauded.

Both sides, meanwhile, postured and maneuvered for advantage regarding the expected testimony next week of another defense witness, Nobel Prize winner Kary Mullis. Simpson’s lead trial lawyer, Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., said Thursday that he and his colleagues had not yet decided whether Mullis will be called, but the scientist has been in court for most of the week, and he said Friday that he expects to take the stand sometime next week.

“I can’t wait to testify,” Mullis said outside court. “I like to talk. I enjoy it.”

Defense attorneys said they expect to file a motion urging the judge to preclude prosecutors from asking Mullis about his unorthodox scientific views and his admitted drug use, among other things.

Mullis, who mugged for photos and signed autographs as he left the courthouse, is known to question whether HIV causes AIDS--a premise accepted by most scientists familiar with that virus. His boasts about using LSD and his fondness for sexually explicit material also have drawn the attention of prosecutors, particularly Harmon, whose aggressive courtroom tactics have made him a prosecutor whom defense attorneys love to hate.

Harmon has been preparing for months for the chance to question Mullis in front of the jury and says the full range of the scientist’s controversial behavior should be fair game. Mullis’ opinions and credibility are at issue, Harmon said, and thus the jury should be allowed to evaluate whether he can be taken seriously.

But Cochran said Friday that topics such as Mullis’ views about AIDS are irrelevant to the Simpson trial. Cochran did not state unequivocally that Mullis will testify--he has long hedged on that question--but he did say the defense will file a motion seeking to limit the cross-examination in the event that Mullis does take the stand.

For his part, Mullis insisted that he looks forward to the faceoff with Harmon and in some ways wishes he could debate a full range of issues with him.

“I wouldn’t mind talking about all that stuff, but the courtroom doesn’t seem like the place to do it, does it?” Mullis said.

As for Harmon, Mullis described him as a “spirited public employee” and dismissed the prosecutor’s oft-repeated desire to question the scientist in front of the jury.

“He’s just puffing himself up,” Mullis said.