Wednesday, June 19, 2024

June 19, 2024: Simpson Trial Figures: Johnnie Cochran

 [On June 17th, 1994, O.J. Simpson was arrested by the LAPD. The subsequent trial featured a number of individuals whose stories have a great deal to tell us about America, then, now, and overall, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Simpson trial figures. Leading up to a special weekend post from one of my favorite young AmericanStudiers!]

On two distinct and even opposed sides to a legal career, and how they complicatedly came together in the OJ trial.

In his autobiography A Lawyer’s Life (2001), Johnnie Cochran (1937-2005) writes about how Thurgood Marshall’s victory in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) helped inspire his lifelong legal activism. Marshall, Cochran writes, “confirmed that a single dedicated man could use the law to change society.” As Cochran’s own legal career began to take shape in the 1960s and 70s (particularly after he left the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office to start his own private practice), he consistently represented African American clients who were also underdogs, fighting against institutional racism and other layers to the white justice system and power structure. Whether he lost those cases (as with Leonard Deadwyler, killed by the LAPD while driving his pregnant and in-labor wife to the hospital in 1966) or won them (as with Ron Settles, a college athlete who died while in police custody in 1981 and whose family received a sizeable settlement from the city), Cochran established himself over these decades as a preeminent voice using the law for both civil rights and challenges to the powers that be.

At the same time, that evolving career gained Cochran prominence as a successful defense attorney, a role that offered him opportunities to defend celebrity clients. One of the most famous and controversial such clients in the years before the OJ trial was Michael Jackson, whom Cochran defended when he was accused of child molestation in 1993; Cochran was instrumental in helping Jackson settle that case out of court with the accusers’ families. (Cochran’s final case was another such famous celebrity trial, helping get Sean (P. Diddy) Combs acquitted on bribery and weapons charges in 2001.) The vast majority of those celebrity defendants were likewise African American, a clear and important throughline in Cochran’s legal work and career to be sure. Yet by nature of their celebrity, wealth, networks of influence, and other factors, those defendants were much more part of the power structure than opposed to it, and in a case like Jackson’s it’s fair to say that Cochran also used the power structure to help Jackson reach that private settlement and avoid any legal repercussions to the troubling charges levied against him.

Any defense attorney who practices for decades is going to have multiple, varied, and even opposed types of clients, of course. But these layers to Cochran’s career were particularly complicated in their relationship to each other, and nowhere was that complexity more noteworthy than in the OJ trial. As I highlighted in yesterday’s post, Cochran and the team based a significant portion of their defense on the LAPD’s histories of institutional racism and police brutality, linking Cochran’s legal activism to OJ’s status as a Black man accused (and potentially, they argued, framed) by that power structure. Yet at the same time, as I wrote in Monday’s post, by the 1990s OJ was a wealthy celebrity, and one who had a famously friendly relationship with the police prior to his arrest. Cochran famously noted that he worked “not only for the OJs, but also the No Js,” a statement that both reflects his overarching career ambitions and yet acknowledges (or at least implies) that this particular case diverged from those goals. Did the OJ case also undermine those broader and inspiring civil rights efforts of Cochran’s? That’s a much bigger question than a blog post—one of many crucial ones raised by this case.

Next figure tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Simpson trial figures or stories you’d highlight?

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