AN UGLY END TO IT ALL

By Richard Lacayo

THE IMPOSSIBLY TANGLED ISSUES of the O.J. Simpson trial could best be understood last week by paying attention to the tears. Prosecutor Marcia Clark finished her summation with the chilling sounds of Nicole Brown Simpson's pleading 911 calls to police. While a screen flashed pictures of Nicole's bruised face, followed by her and Ronald Goldman in death, the families of the victims wept. But what may make more of a difference to the verdict is what happened when defense attorney Johnnie Cochran Jr. gave his summation a day earlier. When he reminded the mostly black jury of how often African Americans have been mistreated by racist police, one of the black jurors seemed on the verge of tears.

The Simpson trial was probably destined to come down to race, though maybe it didn't have to come down quite so hard. By the time the case went to the jury last week, careening into its final and most heart-stopping stage, blacks and whites, who often live in separate neighborhoods, were living in separate worlds on the subject of O.J. His trial has generated two utterly opposed views of who is guilty: Simpson for murder, or the Los Angeles police for tainting the evidence against him. That both views might be true is a possibility that threatened to get swept away by the emotions stirred up by the trial.

In her final arguments Clark urged the jurors to ignore "the sideshows." But when it came to the toxic racial elements of the case, there were no clear lines anymore between what was a distraction and what was essential to a fair judgment. It would be complicated enough if Simpson were just a wealthy and charming athlete accused of murdering his wife. But from the start there was more to it: he was black, his wife was white and the police department was the same one that brought the world the beating of Rodney King.

That gave Cochran the opening to put at the center of his case Mark Fuhrman, the Los Angeles police detective who played a critical role in collecting evidence at the crime scenes--and whose mind, judging from the taped monologues he made for a would-be screenwriter, is a storm of racial fury. But Cochran set off his own kind of racial tempest when he used his closing arguments to call Fuhrman and another Los Angeles officer, Philip Vannatter, "twin devils" and to compare Fuhrman to Adolf Hitler. More than that, he urged the jurors to see a not-guilty verdict as an opportunity to send a message against racism and police misconduct. "Fuhrman is a nightmare, but he's America's nightmare, not just black people's nightmare," Cochran told Time last week. "And everybody needs to understand that."

Even before the verdict, it was plain just how passionately the Simpson case pressed upon the sore spots of the American racial psyche. On Thursday Bill Clinton said he was "concerned" about Cochran's play to racial feeling in his final arguments: "I hope the American people will not let this become some symbol of the larger racial issue in our country."

But it already had. In a case in which Fuhrman's racist monologues could have provided a voice-over for the Rodney King beating tape, it wasn't possible to forget race. "The best thing that could come out of this trial is O.J.'s being found not guilty because the jury believes that there was some type of frame-up," says Anthony Taylor, 36, a black Chicago paralegal who carpools to work with a white woman and often discusses the case during their ride. "It would shed light on the racial problems not only in various police departments but in the general population as a whole."

That outcome would appall Larry Miller, a white man who owns a Chicago hot-dog stand. "If white people yell racism, we're bigots. If a black person yells it, it has to be true. I've never known racism to be an excuse for murder."

There may be no verdict that can reconcile feelings so sharply polarized. Never mind that the jury has nine African Americans--a guilty verdict will infuriate many blacks outside the courtroom. An nbc poll last week showed just 2% of blacks would convict Simpson of first-degree murder, which requires proof of premeditation and could send him to prison for life without parole. Only 15% would support even a second-degree verdict, the one appropriate to killings that might be called crimes of passion, which in California would carry a prison term of 15 years to life. Fifty-nine percent believe he should be acquitted.

Acquitted? For the majority of white Americans who think Simpson did it, a cynical reading of that verdict--and cynical readings would be common--would mean that a millionaire jock who beats his wife, then butchers her and another man, can still walk, provided he buys the best lawyers around and they play the race card. For that majority, an acquittal would be the mirror image of the outcome in the first Rodney King beating trial, in which a mostly white jury acquitted four white police officers of what looked to most people like a blatant act of brutality.

As for a hung jury? If it should emerge that it was split largely along racial lines, it would leave most Americans with the impression that black jurors could not bring themselves to convict a black defendant so dear to them as O.J. It would also probably mean another trial, and thanks to a year of saturated publicity, the search for a dozen unbiased jurors is certain to be more difficult than it was the first time. Los Angeles district attorney Gil Garcetti has promised to retry Simpson even if the jury votes 11 to 1 for acquittal. The seminars on dna evidence. The bloody glove. Mark Fuhrman. Kato Kaelin. Could there be anyone, anywhere, who would want to go through that again?

As it awaits the verdict, Los Angeles has been gloomily revisiting some of its worst memories, the ones formed during the riots that followed the first Rodney King trial. The L.A.P.D., which was accused of responding too slowly to the first disturbances that followed the King verdict,will be on low-level alert on O.J.'s verdict day. After Cochran's summation, police chief Willie Williams declared he would hold the entire defense team responsible for heightening tensions in his city: "When this trial is over, they're going to go back to their homes. [But] we're going to have to live with the bile spewed out these last few days."

IN FACT, THOUGH, THERE WILL BE NO place in America where the fallout of the Simpson case will not be felt, especially after the explosive events of last week. There were signs as early as Tuesday, when Cochran showed up at the courthouse surrounded by a crew of muscle in bow ties from Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam. Cochran says he took up their offer to act as his bodyguards because he had received death threats, including one faxed to the courtroom during his summation. "We do get threats, so we have to have protection," Cochran shrugs. "It's just one of those things." But given Farrakhan's reputation for antiwhite and anti-Semitic invective, Cochran's decision could not help but heighten tensions around the court.

Cochran says he has visited Yad Vashem, the memorial in Jerusalem to the victims of the Holocaust. "I understand that no particular race has a corner on misery," he told Time last week. Simpson lawyer Robert Shapiro told a friend he was unhappy about playing up the race issue. But Alan Dershowitz, famously sensitive to anti-Semitism, insists that for putting Fuhrman on the stand in the first place, "the prosecution is entirely to blame for introducing race into this case."

Clark, who has won 20 felony cases and has not lost one in almost 10 years, says the evidence against Simpson is as strong as any she has argued. But it took her too long to understand that Fuhrman's virulent racism, which she recognized early, could poison the entire prosecution case. "Marcia knew Fuhrman was a bad cop, but she felt certain he hadn't planted evidence," says a deputy district attorney in her office. "They felt they could use Fuhrman anyway. Well, you can't use a racist cop. If you know you got a bad cop on your case, you drop him."

Clark dropped Fuhrman hard in her closing remarks when she vehemently rejected him as a racist who had lied on the stand. But it may have been too late to save her case. For his part, Cochran denies that in his summation he was urging "jury nullification"--proposing that jurors set aside the evidence to make their decision on another basis. "What we said is that in this case, where there is such a reasonable doubt, for the prosecution to prevail each link in the chain of things has to be proved beyond a reasonable doubt," he explains. "They didn't do that."

WHAT THE JURY WILL BEGIN TO MULL OVER this week are two versions of events that are in many respects utterly irreconcilable. Some of the main points they must discuss:

THE TIME FRAME The prosecution asserts that the killings occurred at around 10:15 p.m., when neighbors say they heard the cries of Nicole's dog. That would give Simpson enough time--about an hour--to get from his house to Nicole's, commit the murders and return home for the limo that would take him to the airport. The defense presented witnesses--some less credible than others--who said that at 10:15 all was well around Nicole's house. Clark ridiculed the idea that so many witnesses could have been in the same vicinity at the same time without being aware of one another.

The prosecution is on stronger ground with its testimony from Allan Park, the limo driver who went to Simpson's residence to drive him to the airport. He reported that no one answered when he rang at 10:42 p.m., a time verified by a phone call he then made to his boss. During the call, he says, he saw a black person about six feet tall enter the house--after which O.J. answered the intercom to say he had been sleeping. That contradicts the defense contention that O.J. had been hitting golf balls in his yard around that time--an alibi no witness ever confirmed.

THE BLOOD Prosecutors contend that O.J. left blood--his own and that of his victims--around the crime scene, in his car and at his home. Defense attorneys say the blood was either contaminated by police incompetence, making DNA tests unreliable, or planted by Fuhrman and Vannatter. To support the latter claim, they point out that blood disappeared from the lab sample taken from Simpson's arm for comparison purposes in the DNA tests. A nurse originally testified that the sample contained around 8 cc of blood on June 13, but according to defense testimony it lost 1.5 cc of blood during the police investigation. The defense postulates--but without evidence--that Vannatter took the vial of blood in an unsealed envelope and brought it to Simpson's residence, where it was planted on the socks in O.J.'s bedroom--along with some of Nicole's blood. Later, they say, some was also planted on her back gate. In a video taken at his home, the nurse, who was ailing and couldn't testify in court, said he was not really as precise in measuring out the blood as he had earlier testified. It was probably less, he said.

THE BLOODY SOCKS The defense produced a police videotape of Simpson's bedroom with an automatic time mark of 4:13 p.m. It shows no socks. But the work logs of police investigators Andrea Mazzola and Dennis Fung show that they collected the socks there slightly later. The defense suggests that the socks were put on the floor after the video was taken. Neither Clark nor deputy district attorney Chris Darden explained that discrepancy in their final arguments. They did raise the point that even corrupt cops would have no reason to plant socks without blood on them--the defense charges the blood was applied later.

THE GLOVES For prosecutors, the glove found at Simpson's estate is key. It matches the one found at the murder scene. A glove expert testified that the pair is the kind Simpson is seen wearing on TV broadcasts, and credit-card records show that Nicole bought him such gloves. The one found at Simpson's house has both victims' blood on it.

But these are also the gloves that seemed too small for O.J. when Darden asked him to put them on in court. Will the jury care that O.J. was putting them on over latex lab gloves that would have hampered the fit? More important, it was Mark Fuhrman who found the glove in Simpson's yard. More than once, the jury heard excerpts from the letter by Kathleen Bell, a Fuhrman acquaintance, who said he told her if he wanted to arrest an interracial couple, he would invent a charge if necessary.

A second set of DNA tests, done in a lab not affiliated with the L.A.P.D., also showed the blood of O.J., Ron and Nicole in the Bronco. But the defense explains that by saying Fuhrman rubbed the bloody glove around the car. They offer no physical evidence to support their claims, but to the mind of the jurors they may not need to. Their allegations exist in a context of public anger over the L.A.P.D.'S problems with race relations, to say nothing of Fuhrman's.

In the end, it may be that no particular court exhibit will sway the jury. What may matter most is whether the larger notion of a police conspiracy is more compelling than the preponderance of evidence.

Those are the dueling narratives that will be examined by a jury that has spent nine months in captivity--a record for sequestration. During that time, the Simpson 12 (plus two remaining alternates) have been subjected to something like sensory deprivation. Contact with family and friends has been limited to a nightly 15-minute phone call, monitored by sheriff's deputies, and the five-hour conjugal visits on Saturdays. The deputies collect the jurors' room keys each night and routinely search their belongings for diaries or other forbidden items. When a juror got permission to celebrate her wedding anniversary by having dinner with her husband in the hotel restaurant, two security guards watched over them throughout the meal.

THE SIMPSON JURORS HAVE BEEN given no counseling to help them through an ordeal that psychologists warn can induce unique and even dangerous forms of stress. Tracy Kennedy, a juror dismissed in March, attempted suicide two months later with an overdose of sedatives. Tracy Hampton, a flight attendant cut on May 1, struggled with depression so severe that she was hospitalized by the end of the month. After court adjourned on Wednesday, one juror could be seen at her hotel window with an exhausted look on her face, her forehead pressed against the glass pane. "I'm really worried about some of the people still there,'' says Francine Florio-Bunten, a juror dismissed at the end of May. "Some of them are really on the edge."

Meanwhile, most of the lawyers are already thinking about life after Simpson. Darden, who has looked solemn and unhappy much of the time, was asked last week what would be next for him. "Me?" he said with an apparent straight face. "This is my last case." Shapiro, who plans "to reacquaint myself with my family," will also soon be joining a large Los Angeles law firm as a senior partner, dissolving his own. But Johnnie Cochran swears that if O.J. is retried, he will still be beside him. "Despite the fact that I'll probably be in bankruptcy, I'll stay with it until the end."

It may be a favorable sign of the jury's mood that it took the panel only a few minutes last Friday to chose a foreman. Or forewoman--some ex-jurors say that before they left the panel, a black female juror, 50, had emerged as a leader within the group. There is no telling whether their cooperative mood will last for long. Still, the Simpson case, which has inspired so much division, has also offered some scenes of unexpected harmony. There was a remarkable one on the last day of the trial. During the 15-minute morning break, Simpson's mother Eunice, who uses a wheelchair, could be seen next to Nicole Brown's mother Juditha, who was sitting on a hallway bench next to Arnelle Simpson, the defendant's daughter. Dominique Brown, Nicole's sister, knelt by Eunice. All four women were talking and touching each other. If they can find common ground, maybe there is hope for the jury. And the rest of us too.

--Reported by Elaine Lafferty, Jack E. White and James Willwerth/Los Angeles, with other bureaus

With reporting by ELAINE LAFFERTY, JACK E. WHITE AND JAMES WILLWERTH/LOS ANGELES, WITH OTHER BUREAUS