IS THE END NIGH?

By ELIZABETH GLEICK

Now that the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman are more than a year old, now that the O.J. Simpson trial has brought the jurors to the edge of exhaustion, and now, especially, that the end of the trial glimmers on the horizon like some incredible mirage, one might expect the lawyers to simmer down and get on with it. But last week a series of procedural wrangles, surprise rulings and endless bickering proved once again that conventional wisdom never applies in this epic case.

For starters, the defense is saying it may not be ready to rest this week. The defense at first thought it had won a key round when Judge Lance Ito decided to instruct the jurors that they could take into account ex-detective Mark Fuhrman's "unavailability" to testify a second time. Even without telling the jurors that Fuhrman had invoked the Fifth Amendment, calling attention to his absence could further raise their suspicion of him. Prosecutor Marcia Clark appealed the ruling and, in a surprise decision, the Second District Court of Appeals ordered Ito to abandon his proposed instructions. Now it is unclear whether the defense will continue fighting to have Ito make some reference to Fuhrman. Still, the prosecution is scrambling. "The prosecution's case has been reduced to a pile of rubble," says former L.A. district attorney Ira Reiner. "They have nothing less to do than rebuild their entire case. If they don't, they can kiss away any chance of a hung jury-forget a conviction."

The chain reaction set off by Fuhrman's taped conversations with Laura Hart McKinny created unusually tense and tendentious proceedings last week, both in and out of court. Last Wednesday, for the first time, the L.A. County courthouse was picketed in O.J. Simpson's defense. During a noontime rally by the N.A.A.C.P., demonstrators chanted, "No justice, no peace," waving placards that attacked the prosecution's evidence, the L.A.P.D.'s tactics and Ito's ruling on the tapes. "We are not deaf, dumb, stupid, blind or living in denial," declared protester Morris Griffin. "We have seen this case. We have seen contamination, corruption, conspiracy." Vendors sold T shirts bearing pictures of Ito and Fuhrman in the cross hairs of a rifle.

The emotions of the players inside Ito's courtroom were only slightly less inflamed. Although disappointed that Ito would allow the jury to sample just two morsels from the Fuhrman tapes, the defense roared back with a potent parade of witnesses. Kathleen Bell, who claims she met Fuhrman at a Marine recruiting station in the mid-1980s, testified that he said, "If I had my way, all the niggers would be gathered together and burned." Natalie Singer, who met Fuhrman and his partner in a hospital emergency room, said he told her, "The only good nigger is a dead nigger." Roderic Hodge, whom Fuhrman arrested on drug charges in 1987 (Hodge was acquitted), described the cop snarling from his patrol car, "I told you we'd get you, nigger."

For the most part, the prosecutors handled these witnesses like the hot potatoes they were, cross-examining them only briefly. But with McKinny, prosecutor Christopher Darden set himself up for what defense attorney Johnnie Cochran later termed "another glove day"--a reference to the prosecution's disastrous move to have Simpson try on the leather glove found at the crime scene. "When Mark Fuhrman used those words in your presence," Darden asked, "why didn't you tell him to stop?" McKinny replied: "For the same reasons I didn't tell him to stop when he told me of other procedures, cover-ups." The jury was left to contemplate just what she meant by "cover-ups."

No doubt the defense was also delighted by the jurors' reactions. Ordinarily dazed and unreadable, they came to life last week. Upon hearing Fuhrman's ugly language, several jurors recoiled and scribbled furiously in their notebooks. Many of the nine African-American jurors looked enraged, while a white woman in the second row, usually placid, appeared upset.

They were denied, however, a final face-to-face encounter with Fuhrman. With the jury out of earshot, the former detective three times impassively invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege against self- incrimination, refusing to say whether his original testimony was "completely truthful."

Prosecutors have said their rebuttal case will take five days, but that seems highly optimistic, given a potential witness list of 59--from photographers who took pictures of Simpson wearing the leather gloves to DNA experts to Dr. Don Dutton, who according to Clark has conducted a study on "pre- and post-homicidal conduct of murdering spouses," to a flight attendant on Simpson's flight to Chicago. The defense has already found much to contest on this list. Still, Ito keeps trying to keep things moving. At one point, the judge sternly warned the lawyers, "Delay is something that will be anathema next week." Surely by now even the judge must realize that delay is, in fact, second nature.

--Reported by James Willwerth/Los Angeles

With reporting by James Willwerth/Los Angeles