"Stop this coverup! Stop this coverup!'' Johnnie Cochran bellowed to jurors. "It has to be stopped by you.''
Cochran also warned jurors against a second rush to judgment, telling the panel to be patient and carefully weigh evidence because "a man's life is at stake here."
The former U.S. football star faces life in prison if convicted of the June 12, 1994, knife murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman. Simpson has pleaded innocent, and defense attorneys allege a conspiracy by white police to frame their black client for the crimes.
"Please don't compromise your principles or your consciences. ... Don't rush to judgment. Don't compound what they've already done in this case," Cochran told the 10 women and two men sitting in judgment of Simpson.
Cochran accused the lead detective, Philip Vannatter, of lying about testifying that he did not initially consider Simpson a suspect in the slayings.
Cochran then noted the testimony of former detective Mark Fuhrman, who claimed he found the bloody glove on Simpson's property and denied he had used a racial epithet.
"The two of them have to be paired together because they are twins of deception -- Fuhrman and Vannatter,'' Cochran said.
Cochran started his condemnation of Fuhrman on Wednesday.
"Mark Fuhrman is a lying, perjuring, genocidal racist. ... This man is an unspeakable disgrace. ... He is sinful to the prosecution," he said.
Fuhrman's festering vendetta against Simpson, Cochran contended, began in 1985, when Fuhrman responded to a domestic violence call between Simpson and Nicole, then his wife. The couple sickened Fuhrman, for it was a black man married to a white woman, Cochran said.
"From that moment on, any time he could get O.J. Simpson, he would do it,'' Cochran said.
The golden opportunity arrived early on June 13, 1994, when Fuhrman was called at home and dispatched to a double-homicide at 875 South Bundy Drive in Brentwood, Cochran suggested. At the scene were the slashed bodies of Ms. Simpson and her waiter friend.
"He knew what he was going to do on this particular night,'' Cochran said. And what he was going to do was carry a bloody glove from the crime scene to Simpson's house a few kilometers away, a house Fuhrman remembered from that 1985 call, Cochran said.
The proof of Fuhrman's racist views was clear, Cochran said, from a tape played to the jury, through the testimony of the woman who interviewed Fuhrman on the tapes. Fuhrman has since retired from the department.
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