Mark Fuhrman, R.I.P.

In the summer of 1995, as the vulgar carnival that was the O.J. Simpson murder trial ground on in downtown Los Angeles, I was called to testify in one of the many little-noted cases being heard elsewhere in the Criminal Courts Building.

During the noon break, I accompanied the deputy district attorney in my case to her office on the 17^th floor of the building so we could discuss our evidence over lunch. In walking the hallway in the D.A.’s office, I came face to face with the prosecution team in the Simpson trial as we headed in opposite directions. There they were, Marcia Clark, Christopher Darden, and all the rest of them, and what a grim-faced bunch they were that day.

“They must have had a rough morning,” I said to my DDA when the Simpson team was safely out of earshot.

I would come to learn that they had indeed. After finishing with my case, I went home to turn on the television news, which on that day, even more than had become customary that summer, was given over to the Simpson trial. It was the day LAPD detective Mark Fuhrman was confronted with his own recorded voice and revealed to have perjured himself regarding the use of the “N-word,” arguably the death blow to a case that began as an all but guaranteed conviction only to unravel and conclude with the ignominious acquittal of the man who very obviously—beyond reasonable doubt, beyond any doubt—had butchered two people, one of whom was his ex-wife and the mother of his children.

I recalled that day on Monday, when I heard the news that Mark Fuhrman had died of cancer on May 12. For a brief time in my LAPD career, I worked at the same patrol division and on the same shift as Fuhrman, and though I can’t claim to have known him well, I knew him well enough to be confident he was not the racist villain he was portrayed to be in the media. If he had been, I would have seen evidence of it.

Fuhrman was not a man who suffered fools gladly, and sadly for him, fools were easy to find in the LAPD during his career, as they are even today. He was excoriated in the press for what were claimed to be racist and misogynistic opinions on minorities and women in the LAPD, but in truth he was simply frustrated by a shift within the department that placed a higher value on increasing “diversity” than in maintaining high standards, a frustration that was shared by many, including women and minority officers hired before this shift occurred. I recall the case of a black female rookie officer assigned to the station where Fuhrman and I worked. She had clearly demonstrated a lack of aptitude for the job, yet she was allowed to complete her probationary period despite receiving unsatisfactory ratings from a variety of training officers (which did not include Fuhrman). Such cases were sadly common all across the department.

Where I did find fault with Fuhrman was in his failure to recognize that F. Lee Bailey, in his cross-examination, was laying a perjury trap for him, a trap he blithely walked into only to see the Simpson case and his own career go down in flames. Better to concede an unpleasant truth on the witness stand than deny it and have it served up to the jury on a skewer with cream sauce. Someone of Fuhrman’s experience should have recognized that Bailey had something up his sleeve, and though it may sound shocking given today’s sensibilities regarding the N-word, there were few on the LAPD during Fuhrman’s tenure who could credibly claim not to have ever used the word.

It’s important to note that the until early ‘80s, “negro” was still the official LAPD term used to describe a black person, and the N-word, when it was said, was used among cops—even and especially among black cops—to describe gang members or other criminal suspects who made life miserable for their law-abiding black neighbors, some of whom would call the police and request that we “get these damn [N-words] away from the front of my house.”

That said, I saw Fuhrman interact with many black people, sometimes under very fraught circumstances, and never saw him treat any of them with less than professional courtesy, nor did I ever hear any of the cops who worked around him more than I did say otherwise.

And still, as he was mantled in life with accusations of racism in the cause of freeing a double-murderer, so he has been in death. “Mark Fuhrman,” the Los Angeles Times story begins, “the former Los Angeles police detective whose testimony, credibility and incendiary racist language became central to the O.J. Simpson murder trial, has died at 74.”

And as one has come to expect of the L.A. Times, the story gets some key facts wrong. Fuhrman was not the “lead case detective” in the Simpson case, as the first bullet point atop the story states. In 1994, when Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman were killed, Fuhrman was working homicide at the LAPD’s West L.A. station and was among the first detectives to arrive at the Bundy Drive crime scene. The case was soon assigned to Robbery-Homicide Division, which handles most high-profile murders in L.A. It was then and remains today common practice for the first responding detectives to remain at the scene to brief and assist RHD personnel when they arrive.

Later in the story, attorney Carl Douglas, a member of Simpson’s defense team, is quoted discussing Fuhrman’s invoking the 5^th Amendment on the witness stand. “I’ve been a lawyer 45 years,” Douglas said, “never had I heard of a detective from the Robbery-Homicide Division taking the 5th Amendment in a murder trial. That will likely be one of the stains of his life that will always be remembered.”

Again, Fuhrman was assigned to West L.A. Division, not Robbery-Homicide. Granted, the error was Douglas’s, not the reporter’s, yet the reporter and the editor (if there are such people at the L.A. Times these days) allowed it to go uncorrected.

Yes, Mark Fuhrman’s memory may be stained by his role in the Simpson case, but Carl Douglas, Johnnie Cochran, F. Lee Bailey, and the other members of the so-called “Dream Team” will forever be known as the people who devoted their considerable talents to the cause of freeing the man the entire world knows was guilty of murdering two people.

I know which of these stains I’d prefer to bear.

Editor’s Note: The American people overwhelmingly support President Trump’s law and order agenda.

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