ITO ADMITS FUHRMAN EXCERPTS

Judge Ito emerged from his chambers this evening with a middle-ground solution to the Mark Fuhrman problem: allow the Simpson jury to hear just a smattering of the former LAPD detective's racially-charged, taped remarks. Among them are two instances in which Fuhrman says the word "nigger," despite having testified that he had not used the slur in a decade. But Ito barred the defense from using any of Fuhrman's 18 statements about police misconduct and attacked the defense theory that Fuhrman had moved a glove from the murder scene to Simpson's house to engineer a frame-up. "This assertion is not supported by the record," Ito said. "The underlying assumption requires a leap in both law and logic that is too broad to be made based upon the evidence before the jury."