RICH JUSTICE, POOR JUSTICE

• Share

A peculiar scene is playing out in lawyers' offices around the country, reports Joseph Rem Jr., a defense attorney from Hackensack, New Jersey, who has been practicing criminal law for 20 years. These days the people who walk into his office expect an O.J. Simpson-style defense. "They want to contest all the scientific information against them," he says, and they talk about impaneling a mock jury, just as O.J. did. "They're now asking, 'What kind of jurors are you looking for?'" reports Rem, who has to break it to each new client, gently, that O.J. is different.

True, like everyone else in this country, Simpson is entitled to the best defense he can pay for. He just happens to be much richer than the average murder defendant -- hence the never-ending parade of big-name lawyers, sub-lawyers with DNA specialities, jury consultants, investigators and experts. Though exact figures are hard to come by, one person close to the case will reveal this much: Simpson has spent $100,000 on a jury consultant; Robert Shapiro's contract entitles him to $100,000 a month for 12 months; Johnnie Cochran Jr. is working for a large flat fee. Simpson, whose net worth was reported to be $10 million on the day of his arrest, has taken out a $3 million credit line on his Brentwood home, and according to one of his lawyers will have spent $5 million to $6 million by the end of the trial.

In the year since the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, the case has been transformed into a spectacle gone terribly awry. Prosecutor Christopher Darden recently spoke with disdain of "this supposed truth-seeking process." One thing is certain: if Simpson were poor and unknown, it all would have been over months ago. "If O.J. were [represented by a public defender] in Jones County, Mississippi,'' says Robert Spangenberg, co-author of a 1993 American Bar Association report on indigent defense, "it would be a two-day trial, an open-and-shut case.'' Instead, if the bulletins from dismissed jurors can be believed, the Simpson millions have so far succeeded in purchasing a reasonable doubt.

Yet the accelerating rate of jury attrition has raised the specter of a mistrial. It is unlikely that Simpson can afford to mount such an elaborate defense again (though a celebrity client will never lack for glory-seeking legal help), and that may well affect the outcome. For the Simpson case has demonstrated perhaps more starkly than ever before that in the American justice system, as in so much else in this country, money changes everything -- and huge amounts of money change things almost beyond recognition.