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Category: Category 0
From:
Date: 10/24/02
Time: 7:27:28 PM
Remote Name: 66.72.163.104
Miss Marple,
You named two of the essential points in Rosa Lopez’s testimony that utterly destroyed the prosecutions scenario about O.J. driving to Bundy and back again – the time (and place) that O.J. called Paula Barbieri and the position of the Bronco (where and when). To get past those two points and to blunt any questions about her conversation with Fuhrman, there was only one thing to do and Chris Darden did it.
Darden attacked Rosa every way he could to show that she was not a credible witness. He did it by repeatedly asking her questions to which she had to reply “I don’t know” or I don’t remember. He did it by exploiting cultural differences and nuances in translation from one language or dialect to another (lower class El Salvadorian Spanish, Castilian Spanish, colloquial English and standard English). He did it by exploiting her limited vocabulary in any language and by evoking class prejudice. He pulled the same stunt with Robert Heidstra.
Taking Darden’s despicable conduct into account, Rosa struck me as a credible witness all the way around. Even the point where he “caught her in a lie” (or was it that she just said the wrong words and he pounced on them) had nothing to do with the facts in the case and everything to do with he intention to get out of the United States as soon as possible. When the authorities permitted her to leave, she left.
From her testimony about the Bronco, it was clear that she wanted to be as accurate as she could about the essential facts of the case that she witnessed. If she had chosen to lie about it no one could have challenged her. Yet, she said that she saw the Bronco just a shade after 3:00. She knew the time because she looked at the clock before she left.
All Rosa could honestly say about the time she herd the strange noises was that she didn’t know. Her best guess was somewhere around midnight. Darden tried to make it appear that she was changing her story from 11:30 to 12:00 and then to 12:30 but that’s not what she said. She said that she didn’t look at a clock. She said that again and again and again. Depending on who was asking the question and whether it was general or specific she did what everybody does when they are making a guess about the time. She gave it a whole hour of leeway. She picked a midpoint of 12:00 for the general time, 11:30 for her best guess of the earliest time and 12:30 for her best guess of the latest time.
I think it was a reasonable guess based upon how general it was and the highly publicized time that O.J. left for the airport – that was the closest thing she had to a clock. She heard O.J. leaving. From there, she could make a reasonable judgment that she heard the voices and the footsteps begin somewhere after a half hour to an hour had passed. Anything later would have been unreasonable because she would have lost her only peg in time.
You are right, of course, that it doesn’t matter whether she saw the Bronco at 3:02 or 3:15. The essential fact is that it was parked in the same place and in the same manner as it was parked when the detectives arrived on Rockingham the next morning. She said that O.J. ALWAYS parked it that way. That is, he always parked it that way on Rockingham. He usually parked on Ashford and sometimes drove in through the Ashford gate, picked up some things and parked it on Rockingham. We’re talking here about a routine and the way she saw the Bronco parked was the last part of that routine.
One correction on O.J.’s dog. I got it wrong in Iago because I got from Lange and Vannatter’s book instead of the transcripts. The dog at Rockingham was a Chow. --Jasper