All right. Back on the record in the Simpson matter. Mr. Simpson is again present before the court with his counsel, Mr. Shapiro, Mr. Cochran, Mr. Blasier, Mr. Neufeld, Mr. Scheck. The People are represented by Miss Clark, Mr. Darden, Mr. Yochelson and Mr. Harmon. The jury is not present. First order of business, counsel, I scheduled a hearing on the Prosecution's motion to admit certain testimony concerning the Defendant's activities, I guess we would call it, on June 17th. That hearing was set for 8:30 this morning. The court was here, Defense counsel was here and the Defendant was here. We were ready to proceed. The Prosecution did not choose to appear in court until nine o'clock. Is there an explanation for this?
Yes, your Honor. The person designated to argue this segment of the case had an emergency at home and was unable to make it. And I apologize to the court, but the time has not been wasted. I have been in conference with other members of the team. At this time, your Honor, we would like to indicate to the court that we will not be asking to admit the events of June the 17th at this time; however, I repeat "At this time," because we have not yet heard the end of the Defense case. We have not yet heard surrebuttal. And I would like to reserve the option of asking to renew our request to admit that evidence depending on what we see in the balance of the Defense Case in Chief and Surrebuttal.
We would like to--we are trimming this case so that we can get it to the jury and we are hopeful that we can rest the People's rebuttal case tomorrow.
KEY QUOTEYes. Well, we certainly accept that withdrawal. We think it is appropriate and saves you having to waste your time on that, and we accept that obviously, your Honor. No problem. I would like to raise a couple of issues if I might, your Honor.
All right. The offer is accepted; however, for the failure to appear in court in a timely manner and failure to advise the court, sanction will be $250.00 to the District Attorney's office. That is to be paid by the close of business today.
Excuse me, your Honor. May I remind the court that Mr. Shapiro kept the court waiting for twenty minutes, showing up at twenty after 9:00 when it was his witness on the stand, and suffered no sanction.
May I proceed, your Honor, now? Your Honor, with regard to--at the end of yesterday your Honor asked us not to waste your time. Miss Clark on the record indicated certain witnesses. You will recall she said People like the modified Thano Peratis video which you talked about and Deedrick and Bodziak and the Bronco fiber issue and the Ackards and all those kind of things, and you said don't waste my time, get together. Mr. Douglas went over and talked to Mr. Darden who told him I don't know who we are going to call. They gave us no proffer, no offer of proof, no cooperation, no nothing. So we don't want to waste your time, Judge, but when they won't talk to Mr. Douglas, so what are we going to do? They say they don't know who they are calling. If, Judge, they are saying they are going to finish the case by Thursday or Friday, we are entitled to all rest of the witnesses and all we are trying to get is get somebody to talk to us so we can resolve this matter. If they really want to get this case to the jury, we would like our proffers and we would like to know who they are really going to call. The 17th is now out and that is fine and so we would just like to have--would you direct them to meet with Mr. Douglas right so we can get this done?
Good morning, your Honor. I met with Mr. Douglas yesterday afternoon. I gave him approximately six names. That included Sims, Deedrick, Bodziak, Lawrence Ackard, Nancy Ackard. What other names did I give you, Mr. Douglas? I don't know what he is talking about. I have given him the names.
I gave him the names. If Mr. Douglas says that isn't correct, he was writing on his pad, I was standing right here late at noon. Was that true?
I asked him what order is going to be called following Sims. Mr. Darden said, "I do not know." I asked him this morning. He gave me these names. I asked what order, who is next after Sims? This morning he said, "I do not know," if I'm mistaken. Please correct me.
He did, your Honor, and I asked who follows Sims so I can have the person who does that witness ready after Sims.
In other words, your Honor, what we are saying is he gave us the names in court. We want to know who is up next? What is the offer of proof?
They have given you the names. We know who Bodziak is. We know who Sims is. We know who Deedrick is.
I can tell you this about the Ackards. We are trying to get the Ackards here from out of the country to testify tomorrow, so they won't be here today.
All right, your Honor, and may I inquire, are they still planning to rest then by tomorrow or Friday, because then we would be entitled to anybody else they have. It is within the three days and we are trying to find out.
I assume that is their case. They tell me that they are going to rest tomorrow or Friday.
All right. That is fine then, your Honor. The last thing, your Honor, is--the next thing I would like to--we are going to have to address at this point on Bronco fiber issue which we think shouldn't take the court very long, speaking of no brainers, but we are ready to do that whenever you want to. The last thing is we would like to have Agent Martz, FBI Agent Martz back here. We need this court's assistance, if they are going to rest truly on Thursday or Friday, for our case on Monday, September 18th. We would like to request that now so we will have him here. And in addition to that, we expect to call Special Agent Whitehurst of the FBI and we expect that hopefully Mr. Scheck has started a procedure, but hopefully Justice will make this person available. He is a critical witness in this case and it will tie in with the Martz testimony so there is no delay in that regard.
All right. If there are interstate subpoenas that need to be issued, submit them to Mrs. Robertson as soon as you can.
Trying to save down time. We will work on that day. The last thing is, your Honor, on this whole issue, if the Ackards anyone called with regard to Robert Heidstra's testimony, we need Detective Dennis Payne who we understand is retired and we want to put him on notice now. We need Payne.
We need him right away and we want to put them on notice we need Payne so there will be no down time on that. Might as well have him here on Monday.
They should contact the LAPD. In any event, they marked Mr. Heidstra's statement. I'm not sure but I think you admitted it into evidence.
Penal code section that would preclude us from giving them the address of retired police officers.
Well, counsel, what we will do is I don't care about this fight between the parties. I will have my staff contact the LAPD and make them--
Well, as with the other witnesses, we don't want to delay this trial, we will pay for him to come back.
Your Honor, with respect to Agent Deedrick, if I understand it correctly, he is supposed to be here arriving here at 12:30, the last representation. And Mr. Morton is going to be able to get here at 12:30, one o'clock. I at least would like the opportunity to look at the underlying data from the report that they just gave us. I do get that opportunity.
As soon as the exemplars or the impressions are here, you are entitled to look at them, to see them. You are entitled access to that. We dealt with that issue yesterday.
No, I understand that, but I just wanted to make clear we are going to get that opportunity, and this includes, the jeans, the envelope, the shirt.
Your Honor, we need to--no. 1, we need to be heard with respect to the admissibility of the Whitehurst issue and we are prepared to argue that so that we do not waste time trying to locate a witness who I believe has testimony that has nothing to do with this case and is irrelevant, so you know, we are going to go into down time to make him available when he has no admissible evidence. Secondly, I would like to argue the Bronco fiber motion.
Well, let's do this: Let's proceed with your next witness this morning with the jury, because the jury is expecting testimony now. As soon as we complete that phase of your presentation, where do you anticipate going after that?
Well, we had wanted to go with the Ackards. Since they are not available immediately, I would like to--we may have a little down time because we have to fly witnesses in. We have the Peratis tape presented with the testimony of Steve Oppler, and we have--which we have edited and we will show to the court, and then we intend to call Doug Deedrick, any fiber witnesses that we are allowed to call, and Bill Bodziak, but they won't be ready for testimony until tomorrow morning, so we might have--
All right. So then the point of my asking you that question is that we don't need to resolve that issue now. If there is going to be down time for witnesses, we can use that time to argue the motion.
Well, the problem is I don't know whether to notify the witness to come in or not until the court rules.
I didn't want to fly them out if the court was going to--they are on standby, I have them on call, but I'm not going to spend the money to have them out until you say that they can testify.
May I remind the court that Mr. Shapiro kept the court waiting for twenty minutes, showing up at twenty after 9:00 when it was his witness on the stand, and suffered no sanction.
Thank you. The sanction will be a thousand dollars.
The whole enchilada.
We are trimming this case so that we can get it to the jury and we are hopeful that we can rest the People's rebuttal case tomorrow.