O.J'S DEFENSE STARTS WITH A BANG

Johnnie Cochran, lead defense attorney forO.J. Simpson, marched through his opening statement today, crisply attacking the prosecutors' case, while portraying his client as a victim of a "rush to judgment" by Los Angeles authorities. "We're going to talk about the trails that they didn't pursue," Cochran said. He hinted of a frame-up by authorities, claiming that the district attorney's office had ignored an account by a woman who was in Nicole Brown Simpson's neighborhood the night of the murder. Cochran claimed the woman informed the D.A.'s office that she had seen four men walking away from the murder scene at about 10:45 p.m. "They didn't want to listen," Cochran said. He said that Deputy District Attorney Christopher Darden's depiction of the Simpsons' marriage as full of violence was "not exactly true." He said there was no evidence his client had hurt Nicole after 1989, when he pleaded no contest to spousal battery. Furthermore, he asserted that experts would testify that the murderer would have been covered with blood afterwards; O.J. was not.