Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, August 9, 1995 TAG: 9508090094
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: B-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES LENGTH: Medium
Most of the day's developments happened outside the jury's presence, including testimony from Simpson's friend, Gretchen Stockdale, who confirmed that Simpson left her a phone message a few hours before the murders of his ex-wife and her friend.
Prosecutors want the tape recording of the message in which Simpson reportedly says, ``Hey, Gretchen, sweetheart, it's Orenthal James, who is finally at a place in his life where he is like, totally, totally, unattached with everybody. Ha haaaah!''
Stockdale, a former Los Angeles Raiders cheerleader and lingerie model, said she met Simpson in 1988 and they became friends. She said they ran into each other at social events and she consulted him about a business investment.
Prosecutor Marcia Clark seized the opportunity to try quizzing Stockdale whether her relationship with Simpson was intimate, but the judge cut off such questioning.
Stockdale said she turned over the voice-mail tape of Simpson's message to a defense investigator last year and kept an extra copy on her own tape recorder. But she said she later taped over that copy because ``it was no longer of any importance to me.''
Superior Court Judge Lance Ito ordered Prosecutor Marcia Clark to have her investigators contact Stockdale's answering service to determine whether it kept a copy of the message.
Sequestered jurors were sent back to their hotel after only two hours of testimony while Ito considered a plethora of legal issues before him and another judge briefly took over Ito's bench. Testimony wasn't expected to resume until this afternoon at the earliest.
The motion for a special prosecutor was aimed at Detective Mark Fuhrman and the LAPD. Analysts said it might be nothing more than a defense ploy to unnerve its opponents.
``One has to wonder whether the defense really wants this or is just using it to put the prosecution and police on a little more of a defensive mode and distract them from the issues of the case,'' Loyola Law School professor Stanley Goldman said.
The defense contends a special prosecutor is needed because of the prosecution's ``evident disinterest'' in investigating perjury by its own witnesses and the judge's ``failure to remedy the evil addressed herein.''
The motion suggested that Ito erred in limiting defense access to Fuhrman's police and Marine Corps personnel records as well as Fuhrman's words to a psychiatrist more than 10 years ago about alleged feelings of deep racial hatred.
Simpson's lawyers have labored to show the detective was consumed by racial bigotry and motivated to frame the black football star. Fuhrman has denied the allegations.
This week, the assault on Fuhrman picked up steam when the defense won access to a North Carolina professor's tapes on which the detective uttered the word ``nigger'' 27 times. Fuhrman testified at Simpson's trial that he hadn't used that word with regard to blacks in the past decade. The interviews with Fuhrman were recorded from 1985 to 1994.
If jurors find Fuhrman lied on the stand, they will be entitled to throw out all of his testimony. But admissibility of the tapes at trial has not been decided.
by CNB