June 19, 2024: Simpson Trial Figures: Johnnie Cochran

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

On two distinctand even opposed sides to a legal career, and how they complicatedly cametogether in the OJ trial.

In his autobiographyALawyer’s Life (2001), Johnnie Cochran (1937-2005) writes about how ThurgoodMarshall’s victory in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) helped inspirehis lifelong legal activism. Marshall, Cochran writes, “confirmed that a singlededicated man could use the law to change society.” As Cochran’s own legalcareer began to take shape in the 1960s and 70s (particularly after he left theLos Angeles District Attorney’s office to start his ownprivate practice), he consistently represented African American clients whowere also underdogs, fighting against institutional racism and other layers to thewhite justice system and power structure. Whether he lost those cases (as with LeonardDeadwyler, killed by the LAPD while driving his pregnant and in-labor wifeto the hospital in 1966) or won them (as with RonSettles, a college athlete who died while in police custody in 1981 and whosefamily received a sizeable settlement from the city), Cochran establishedhimself over these decades as a preeminent voice using the law for both civilrights and challenges to the powers that be.

At the sametime, that evolving career gained Cochran prominence as a successful defenseattorney, a role that offered him opportunities to defend celebrity clients. Oneof the most famous and controversial such clients in the years before the OJtrial was Michael Jackson, whom Cochrandefended when he was accused of child molestation in 1993; Cochran wasinstrumental in helping Jackson settlethat case out of court with the accusers’ families. (Cochran’s final casewas another such famous celebrity trial, helping get Sean (P. Diddy) Combs acquittedon bribery and weapons charges in 2001.) The vast majority of those celebrity defendantswere likewise African American, a clear and important throughline in Cochran’slegal work and career to be sure. Yet by nature of their celebrity, wealth, networksof influence, and other factors, those defendants were much more part of thepower structure than opposed to it, and in a case like Jackson’s it’s fair tosay that Cochran also used the power structure to help Jackson reach that privatesettlement and avoid any legal repercussions to the troubling charges leviedagainst him.

Any defenseattorney who practices for decades is going to have multiple, varied, and even opposedtypes of clients, of course. But these layers to Cochran’s career were particularlycomplicated in their relationship to each other, and nowhere was that complexitymore noteworthy than in the OJ trial. As I highlighted in yesterday’s post, Cochranand the team based a significant portion of their defense on the LAPD’s historiesof institutional racism and police brutality, linking Cochran’s legal activismto OJ’s status as a Black man accused (and potentially, they argued, framed) bythat power structure. Yet at the same time, as I wrote in Monday’s post, by the1990s OJ was a wealthy celebrity, and one who had a famouslyfriendly relationship with the police prior to his arrest. Cochranfamously noted that he worked “not only for the OJs, but also the No Js,” astatement that both reflects his overarching career ambitions and yet acknowledges(or at least implies) that this particular case diverged from those goals. Didthe OJ case also undermine those broader and inspiring civil rights efforts ofCochran’s? That’s a much bigger question than a blog post—one of many crucialones raised by this case.

Nextfigure tomorrow,

Ben

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