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From: Jasper
Date: 4/25/03
Time: 1:41:14 PM
Remote Name: 68.73.193.9
Kari,
I’m sure that you meant to write, "I am not now nor have I ever been Mark Furhman's Partner." I copied it from your previous post and when I read it I have to admit that it sounded damned familiar.
I see two possibilities:
1) The “nor have I ever been Mark Fuhrman’s partner” was indeed edited out.
2) Phillips insistence on stopping Cochran in mid-sentence to say emphatically that he was NOT Fuhrman’s partner may have left that impression.
The second answer seems more likely to me. Phillips said several times before then that he WAS Fuhrman’s partner. He made a point of it. He said that he and Fuhrman had been partners for five years. That statement alone says that the partnership was ongoing. If he had turned around and said that he had never been Fuhrman’s partner it is inconceivable to me that the defenses wouldn’t have called him on it.
Cochran was obviously surprised to hear that Phillips and Fuhrman did not go to Bundy as partners. Both of them had the TITLE of “Detective” and Cochran’s attention was focused on Phillips as the senior partner. All of his preparation to cross-examine Phillips was made with that idea in mind. This is the perjury that Fuhrman should have been charge with. But to do so would have subjected Marcia Clark to a charge of suborning perjury. I don’t think that the defense was prepared at that stage to deal with issues like that. The case was messy enough as it was.
Moreover, between the time Phillips said that he and Fuhrman were partners and the time he said that they weren’t, he blurred the issue with his testimony about working as detectives at the same desk. He said then that they were not official partners but partners in the sense that they helped each other. I got the feeling that Cochran thought he had simply misunderstood what Phillips meant about him and Fuhrman being partners. In his summation he called Phillips “a nice man.”
When I was working on the fist Smoking Gun I wrote several chapters in which I said that Fuhrman identified himself in Murder in Brentwood with Gene Hackman’s role as Popeye Doyle in the French Connection. I was so sure that I read it MANY TIMES that I didn’t “recheck” it until I tried to find something about the French Connection Murder in Brentwood to quote.
To my dismay there was no mention of the French Connection in Fuhrman’s book. It was all an impression – a deep impression – that I got from the things that he did write. I was not wrong about the French Connection in Murder in Brentwood. But Fuhrman only implied it. He didn’t WRITE it. Furman is very good at leaving strong impression that don’t match the evidence. Maybe he learned it from Phillips. --Jasper