Attorneys Fight Over Glove Evidence : Simpson trial: Issue centers on jury seeing pictures of defendant purportedly wearing gloves like bloodstained ones.

No matter what defense attorneys do, the jury weighing murder charges against O.J. Simpson should get to see evidence that he owned and wore gloves resembling those linked to the killings of his ex-wife and her friend, Deputy Dist. Atty. Marcia Clark said in court Tuesday.

Simpson’s lead trial lawyer, Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., argued that the defense has presented no evidence that would allow prosecutors to introduce pictures or videotapes of Simpson wearing leather gloves during their rebuttal case.

“They are never going to prove our client wore those gloves,” Cochran said in a morning hearing before the jury was brought into the courtroom.

But Clark insisted that the glove evidence is admissible no matter what the defense does. The defense’s conspiracy theory--specifically its suggestion that one of the gloves was planted--makes evidence that Simpson owned and wore a nearly identical pair admissible and relevant, she said.

“The People’s position is that those gloves and those photographs . . . of Mr. Simpson wearing those gloves will be relevant on rebuttal regardless of what the defense does,” she said.

In court Monday, Clark hinted that the prosecution could show that Simpson wore the very gloves found after the murders, one at the scene of the crimes, another outside his Brentwood home. She declined to elaborate Tuesday, even after Cochran told Superior Court Judge Lance A. Ito that a spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office had said the prosecutor meant only to say that the gloves were nearly identical, not that they were the exact same pair.

Despite Clark’s refusal to say more about the pictures and videotapes, Ito announced that new evidence recently had arrived from the FBI and suggested that the prosecution would try to show that the gloves were the same by showing the jury similarities in the stitching, among other things.

Tuesday’s brief debate about the glove evidence came on a grab-bag day in the Simpson trial--one featuring more testimony from a blood spatter expert and a ruling by Ito permitting the defense to present evidence about the extent of contamination in the LAPD crime lab, evidence Simpson’s lawyers hope will cast doubt on DNA test results. It also marked the latest flare-up in an issue that has overshadowed much of the trial since late in the prosecution’s case, when Simpson wrestled to try on the blood-stained gloves in front of the jury and announced that they did not fit. Defense attorneys, whose client has pleaded not guilty to the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman, were ecstatic, and Cochran has cited that demonstration repeatedly as evidence that Simpson could not have been the murderer.

Seeking to rebound from that electrifying moment, prosecutors have offered a number of different explanations.

But those explanations lack the wallop of the demonstration itself. Photographs or videotapes of Simpson wearing nearly identical gloves during winter football games where he was working as an announcer might have such an impact, and prosecutors say the district attorney’s office has received at least a dozen such items.

That evidence is all the more valuable to the prosecution because it is not obligated to share it with the defense, at least for now. That is because the evidence being received now would be offered to cross-examine defense witnesses or to present the government’s rebuttal case, and evidence-sharing rules do not force the prosecution to turn over the material until they are about to use it.

Forced to present their case without knowing for sure what the prosecution might have in store, Simpson’s lawyers have tried to avoid topics that would open the door to that evidence being offered during the prosecution’s rebuttal case. Despite Clark’s insistence that they already have made the photographs and videotapes relevant, Cochran said Simpson’s defense team will object to any effort to put that evidence in front of the jury.

“We’ve opened no doors on this [and] they have no information, Judge,” Cochran said. “If they did, they would have put it in their case in chief. They didn’t. And we’ll vigorously oppose any attempt on rebuttal.”

Journalists as Witnesses

The defense, meanwhile, tried to bolster its conspiracy theory by questioning the director of the LAPD’s crime lab about news reports, specifically a Sept. 15 story in The Times accurately disclosing DNA test results and a Sept. 21 story on KNBC-TV inaccurately purporting to contain more results.

Simpson lawyer Peter Neufeld also tried to question the director, Michele Kestler, about a section of the Sept. 15 article in The Times disclosing that a hair found on Goldman was being analyzed to determine whether it came from O.J. Simpson. Ito cut off that line of questioning, however, ruling that it was irrelevant.

In a hearing held outside the jury’s presence, Kestler vehemently denied she was the source of either report and said she assumed that a private Maryland laboratory was the source of The Times’ story.

“I just feel that our employees have too much integrity and honesty and have been involved in many, many cases before,” Kestler said. “We have never been a source of any leaks.”

She did not venture a guess as to who provided the erroneous information to KNBC, but defense lawyers implied that it had to have been someone inside the Police Department who heard about a conventional blood test performed on a pair of socks found in Simpson’s bedroom and misinterpreted that test as a type of DNA analysis.

The defense has aggressively sought to boost its conspiracy theory by using the circumstances surrounding the KNBC report and its source or sources. On Tuesday, Ito corrected Neufeld when the lawyer referred to it as a “leak.”

“I don’t think it’s appropriate to refer to it as a leak because it is misinformation,” the judge said. “It is not a leak. A leak is something that is, in fact, correct.”

Simpson’s lawyers have argued that someone within the LAPD planted Nicole Simpson’s blood on one of the socks and then told KNBC that DNA tests had confirmed that it was her blood--thus answering how the report could have predicted the results of tests that had not even been initiated when the story ran.

The reporter on that story, Tracie Savage, refused Monday to disclose sources except to confirm that they were knowledgeable.

But the defense, trying to get at the information another way, Tuesday filed a motion seeking access to internal LAPD files relating to the department’s search for the source of leaks--accurate and inaccurate. The defense said those records were relevant to its conspiracy theory, but a Police Department spokesman said the LAPD was not inclined to turn over its records.

“We have a longstanding position that internal affairs investigations are confidential,” Cmdr. Tim McBride said.

Even if the defense comes up short in that campaign to put information from news reports in front of the jury, it has another option--trying to elicit similar testimony from free-lance author Joseph Bosco. Bosco, his neck in a brace from a diving accident, Tuesday became the second journalist in two days to take the stand.

Bosco wrote a story for Penthouse magazine in which he accused a Los Angeles police officer--whom he did not name--of shopping around the false story that KNBC eventually put on the air. Under gentle questioning by Simpson lawyer Robert L. Shapiro, Bosco nervously attested to the accuracy of his article.

The questioning got testier as Bosco resisted Deputy Dist. Atty. Hank Goldberg’s efforts to probe the reliability of the material. Time and again, the author invoked his right not to reveal his sources, declining to say whether he would characterize certain sentences as opinions as opposed to facts.

Finally, he left the stand, subject to recall to testify in front of the jury if Ito rules that his testimony is admissible--the same decision that the judge is weighing with respect to Savage.

Clark Questions Expert

The wrangling over the news media and the police conspiracy theory all unfolded outside the jury’s presence, and despite the occasionally spirited arguments, prosecutors appeared lighthearted during that morning session.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Christopher A. Darden playfully snatched from Clark a white baseball cap, the latest of many gifts that the prosecutor has received from admirers since the Simpson case began. This one bore the logo: “Marcia Clark, Lady Shark.”

Clark, joking about false tabloid reports romantically linking her and her colleague, grabbed the cap back and commented: “That’s it. We’re breaking up.”

Both sides settled into a more sober mood as jurors were brought back into the courtroom for the final rounds of questioning Herbert MacDonell, a blood-spatter expert called by the defense. MacDonell testified that blood on a sock discovered in Simpson’s bedroom appeared to have been pressed into the material, not splashed up from the sidewalk near where the victims’ bodies were found.

On Tuesday, he elaborated further, saying he did not believe that a leg was inside the sock when the blood was deposited on it. That testimony skirted the edges of an order by Ito barring the defense from introducing an experiment that MacDonell performed and that he mentioned at one point despite the judge’s order.

Glowering, Ito sent the jury out of the room. The panelists got up impassively, and once gone, Neufeld apologized to Ito and said he had not expected that MacDonell would mention the experiment as part of his answer.

MacDonell’s testimony offered benefits for the defense, but subjected him to an arch cross-examination that began Monday. It continued Tuesday morning with the same intensity as Clark bore down on him, insinuating that he runs a mom-and-pop crime lab out of his home and that his work is not subjected to rigorous testing or review by any outside agency.

MacDonell met Clark’s accusing questions with gentle bemusement, and jurors seemed to sympathize with the white-whiskered former professor.

When Clark homed in on his plans for billing Simpson for his services, four or five jurors smiled warmly at him. He never raised his voice despite Clark’s sharp-tongued queries.

The jury returned just briefly after lunch to see a re-enactment of the grand jury testimony of an LAPD nurse, Thano Peratis, who is too ill to appear in person. One of Simpson’s lawyers played the part of Peratis, theatrically taking the witness stand and even raising his right hand when the transcript called for him to take the oath.

Carl Douglas, another of Simpson’s lawyers, played the part of Clark, and a few jurors snickered as the Peratis player addressed Douglas as “ma’am.”

Defense attorneys put on that evidence to show that Peratis had said he withdrew about eight cubic centimeters of blood from Simpson, part of their campaign to show that some of the blood is unaccounted for.

Fuhrman Ruling Appealed

While the jury heard yet another abbreviated day of testimony--this one cut short by a juror’s appointment and by the defense’s juggling of witnesses--Simpson’s team filed an appeal in North Carolina. The legal papers asked a court there to overturn a judge’s decision not to force a potential witness to come to Los Angeles and to turn over tapes in which LAPD Detective Mark Fuhrman allegedly uses repeatedly a racial epithet that he specifically denied uttering at any point during the past 10 years.

The North Carolina Court of Appeals denied the request for an immediate hearing, and instead gave the lawyer for Prof. Laura Hart McKinny until Monday to respond.

In their motion asking the appellate court to force McKinny to testify and to turn over her tapes, Simpson’s lawyers argue that the North Carolina judge erred in refusing to enforce the subpoena on McKinny, a move that they said jeopardized Simpson’s constitutional right to a fair trial.

McKinny’s attorney, Matthew W. Schwartz, responded that the judge made the correct decision.

“Hypothetically,” Schwartz said, “even if they can establish that Fuhrman lied and is a racist, they can not make the nexus between lying and racism and an intent to frame O.J. Simpson.”

The appellate court said it would review Schwartz’s written response after it is filed and would rule without hearing oral argument.

In another matter regarding Fuhrman, the detective sued the Star tabloid magazine Tuesday, contending that he was libeled by articles published in August, 1994, and March of this year. In the suit filed in Santa Monica Superior Court, Fuhrman seeks unspecified damages because of the articles, which suggested there was a relationship between him and Nicole Simpson.

Times staff writers Stephanie Simon, Henry Weinstein and John M. Glionna contributed to this article.