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From: Jasper
Date: 5/4/03
Time: 10:27:15 AM
Remote Name: 68.73.57.83
Rose,
Two things:
Going back to the trial tapes I have, I have also found that the critical parts I wanted to clarify were often not on them. This could be one of the reasons we sometimes got the wrong impression of what we saw and heard during the trial before someone else pointed out our mistakes or we checked the transcripts on our own.
I don’t think that any grand conspiracy is responsible for these omissions. One of the most frustrating things for me when I was watching the criminal trial was that the people responsible for the broadcasts had a different sense of what was important than I had. They would sometimes go to a commercial break or run their talking heads thing into the testimony when I thought that something significant was happening and the moderator didn’t. I switched back and forth from Court-TV to E! but all I ended up doing was trading one incomplete broadcast of “gavel-to-gavel coverage” for another.
Don’t you think it’s strange that neither Court-TV nor E! offered tapes of the complete trial for sale? I had to go to work every day so I couldn’t set my VCR to record everything. I didn’t worry about it because I was sure that someone would make the complete tapes available. Eventually, I went to the net to find them. Someone was offering the tapes for sale but when I tried to buy them they were unavailable….
The observation you made about the portion of Phillips testimony concerning the Jeep license is so odd that I don’t see how I could have missed it. Hadn’t someone already run that license plate number to get a preliminary ID on Nicole? If so, that’s how they would have known that the Jeep had a Rockingham address although they might not of paid attention to the exact address at that time. This may not be a big deal.
Phillips could have confused the two events (getting the name in one instance and getting the address in another) and wrapped them into one event in his memory. This sort of thing happens all the time in normal conversation. We mention something that happened and latter on we say to ourselves, wait a minute; that’s not what happened. But the error is so minor that nobody gives a damn unless it comes up again in another context.
Another thing that struck me about that exchange was the skillful way in which Fuhrman used the people around him to establish something that he wanted others to believe (looking ahead to the trial). In this case, he wanted to convey the idea that it had been so long since he visited O.J.’s Rockingham estate that he needed his memory jogged to find it. Phillips’s testimony on this point also leaves out the highly suggestive issue of domestic abuse – the event that Fuhrman wrote in his ’89 letter to the city attorney was “indelibly imprinted” in his mind. Did Phillips forget that part? I don’t think so. --Jasper