Ruling Keeps Ito on Simpson Case; Tape Furor Grows : Trial: Judge’s wife, Capt. York, cannot be called as witness. Chief Williams steps up inquiry, says Fuhrman was among subjects of brutality investigation in ’78.

In a ruling that clears the way for Superior Court Judge Lance A. Ito to remain in charge of the murder trial of O.J. Simpson, another jurist ruled Friday that Ito’s wife, a Los Angeles police captain, cannot be called as a witness in the case.

Superior Court Judge John Reid issued his written ruling after listening to audiotaped interviews of former Detective Mark Fuhrman--tapes that have rocked the trial and created a troubling quandary for the Los Angeles Police Department, where officials on Friday stepped up efforts to secure a copy of the tapes so that they can fully investigate the recently retired detective’s remarks during interviews with North Carolina screenwriter and professor Laura Hart McKinny.

His comments--particularly his graphic, brutal and vigorously contested descriptions of a beating he said he and other police administered in the wake of a 1978 police shooting--have prompted calls for a federal investigation, raised new questions for the Simpson case and heightened fears about long-term fallout for the Police Department.

In another development, a source close to the case said prosecutors have withdrawn a request for a Sunday night jury visit to the Bundy Drive crime scene because they are dissatisfied with lighting installed there in an attempt to create conditions similar to those on the night of the killings. Prosecutors had long pushed for the visit, but after a trip to the crime scene Friday, they decided that the lighting was inadequate.

Complaining of the toll the Fuhrman issue has taken on the LAPD, Police Chief Willie L. Williams, said he is personally investigating a 1978 incident in which two police officers were shot in Boyle Heights. Speaking to reporters at police headquarters, the chief revealed that Fuhrman was one of more than a dozen officers charged with personnel complaints in the wake of that incident.

“People complained about excessive use of force,” he said. “People complained about improper language.”

The result was an extensive investigation by the department’s Internal Affairs Division, at the end of which all 16 accused officers were cleared of wrongdoing, said Williams. In transcripts of a taped interview between Fuhrman and an aspiring screenwriter, however, the detective boasts of beating suspects and then conspiring with other accused officers to mislead department investigators.

“They knew damn well I did it,” Fuhrman said during that interview, according to the transcript made available to The Times. “But there was nothing they could do about it.”

Fuhrman testified that he found a bloody glove on the grounds of Simpson’s Brentwood estate, and long has been the centerpiece of the Simpson defense team’s controversial police conspiracy theory. Simpson has pleaded not guilty to the June 12, 1994, murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman.

In the transcript, Fuhrman described a blood-splattered apartment and badly battered suspects, telling his interviewer that one suspect required 70 stitches and another suffered a cracked knee. The apartment where the beating took place, according to the Fuhrman transcript, had “blood everywhere--all the walls, all the furniture, all the floor. It was just everywhere.”

Another officer who was at the scene vehemently disputed that account.

Mike Middleton, a former LAPD sergeant who was at the scene of the officers’ shooting just minutes after it occurred and later was commended for his performance there, said the incident was a frightening, violent one but that no officers used the type of force that Fuhrman claimed to have used in his interviews.

“This was a wildly volatile situation,” said Middleton, who retired from the department in 1988 after 21 years. “These were dangerous people . . . but I never saw anyone with their face mangled.”

As for Fuhrman’s contention that officers had to wash the blood off their uniforms after beating four suspects, Middleton said there were no hoses or faucets that would have permitted that. Moreover, he said, there were so many people on the street that night that police officers washing blood off themselves certainly would have been noticed.

And in response to Fuhrman’s description of the apartment as covered with the blood of the beaten suspects, Middleton said: “I was in that room for probably 10 minutes. There was no blood in that room.”

Reid Ends York Issue

The Fuhrman tapes have leaped to the forefront of the Simpson trial as defense lawyers have used them in their effort to paint the former detective as a liar who might have planted evidence implicating their client. Prosecutors have made little attempt to defend Fuhrman’s truthfulness, but have steadfastly insisted there is no basis for arguing that the detective did plant evidence--or even that he could have done so.

The issue of the tapes was complicated further by passages in which Fuhrman disparages Ito’s wife, Capt. Margaret York. Prosecutors said they were considering calling York to the witness stand, and Ito, confronted with a potential conflict of interest, asked another judge to consider whether York would have material testimony.

If Reid had decided that York could take the stand, Ito would have had to withdraw from the trial, a move that would have forced a long delay and possibly even a mistrial. But Reid instead released a written ruling Friday in which he held that York did not need to testify.

Reid said his decision was based on a review of 12 audiotapes and an offer of proof submitted by the district attorney’s office about why the testimony of York would be relevant. Reid also noted that he had met with Deputy Dist. Atty. Alan Yochelson and Simpson lawyer F. Lee Bailey in chambers on the issue.

“There is no reasonable expectation that Capt. Margaret York, a member of the Los Angeles Police Department, could give relevant evidence in regard to any issue before the court” in the Simpson case, Reid wrote. “If upon the request of either party any additional issue is raised regarding potential need of witness York’s testimony, the court will reconsider this ruling.”

The district attorney’s office had no immediate reaction to the decision.

Carl Douglas, one of Simpson’s lawyers, praised the ruling, saying it was “a complete vindication of our position” that York had nothing relevant to offer to the case.

“I’m real elated,” Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., Simpson’s lead trial lawyer, said as he arrived in Philadelphia for a conference. “Reid . . . went through those tapes and he found that there’s no way that Capt. York could be relevant. I think it was a ploy by the prosecution to threaten and intimidate Judge Ito. Now we can all move along.”

Barry Levin, a former police officer who now is a lawyer representing York, said Reid’s decision was appropriate because his client had nothing to add to the trial.

“She was the lieutenant-watch commander at West L.A. for 15 months, back in February, 1984, to May, 1985,” Levin said. “During that time, Fuhrman was one of 175 officers assigned to the division, and she recalls him only as having been at the division and recalls nothing that would be relevant to this case concerning Fuhrman.”

The decision also was lauded by one of McKinny’s attorneys, Ron Regwan of Century City.

“Objectively speaking, as a lawyer, having read the transcript, I think it was preposterous to say she was a ‘material witness.’ I don’t know what the prosecution was thinking,” Regwan said.

LAPD Seeks Tapes

Since details of the Fuhrman tapes first began leaking out last week, they have put the trial into an emotional uproar, drawing angry denunciations from the Goldman family, stirring deep concern at the LAPD and prompting the local branch of the NAACP to call for a federal investigation.

“We are requesting that the U.S. Justice Department launch a full-scale intensive investigation of the incidents described by former LAPD officer Mark Fuhrman,” said Valerie Monroe, chair of the legal redress committee of the NAACP’s Los Angeles branch. “We’re asking that President Clinton support this investigation. We’re asking that Atty. Gen. Janet Reno support this investigation, and we’re asking that the Los Angeles Superior Court assist this investigation by releasing all the Fuhrman tapes to the Justice Department.”

The LAPD quickly began investigating details of the tapes as they leaked out, and this week uncovered records of the 1978 shooting in Hollenbeck Division, where Fuhrman was working at the time.

Based on those files, department investigators concluded that much of what Fuhrman said in the interview was true: There was a shooting in Hollenbeck Division on Nov. 18, 1978, that left two police officers wounded, Fuhrman was among the officers who responded, there was a violent confrontation between police and suspects and there was an extensive Internal Affairs investigation that focused in part on Fuhrman’s involvement.

But department sources remain skeptical of the other details in Fuhrman’s account, such as his boasts of brutalizing and torturing suspects and holding one woman hostage. Fuhrman’s lawyer and private investigator say their client concocted the details.

The department’s investigation has been thwarted, however, by the fact that its access to the Fuhrman accounts largely has been confined to the reports in the press. During his news conference, Williams complained that he and the department have been forced to respond to rumors and leaks, an untenable situation that has made it difficult for him to address the internal questions raised by the tapes.

Police Commission President Deirdre Hill raised the same concern at her own news conference, where she released a letter to the city attorney’s office requesting that it pursue a copy of the tapes as quickly as possible.

“We need to know, and we need to know sooner rather than later,” she said, adding that she and Williams would be the only two officials to review the tapes and pledging to abide by the confidentiality agreement that binds most of the people who have access to them.

Although there was no immediate response from the court, one of McKinny’s lawyers said he would make the tapes available to the police chief and commission president under certain conditions.

“Our initial position is they would be welcome to come to our offices to review the transcripts and tapes at their leisure, but we’re not inclined to make copies and have copies circulating,” Regwan said. “That’s the same offer we made to Fuhrman’s attorney last Friday [Aug. 11] and they haven’t taken us up on our offer yet.”

Regwan added, however, that his client was shocked by the excerpts of the tapes disclosed in The Times on Friday.

“What’s the point of having a protective order when people leak things?” he asked. “We faxed a letter to Judge Ito expressing our client’s concern with regard to the leak to the L.A. Times. We asked for a complete investigation and that the parties responsible be held in contempt of court.”

Who Found the Tapes?

Virtually every aspect of the tapes, whose admissibility Ito will consider next week, is the subject of controversy--even the question of which side was the first to hear of their existence and pursue them.

Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti has told reporters that it was prosecutors who first learned of the tapes and brought them to the attention of Ito and the defense team.

Defense investigator Pat McKenna, whose salty language rivals his investigative reputation, brusquely rejected that claim.

“That’s b.s.,” McKenna said of the district attorney’s claim. “He couldn’t find a Mick in Dublin.”

McKenna added that finding the tapes was “a product of legwork and luck like every case.”

Both sides have a full set of 12 audiotaped interviews covering a period from 1985 to 1994 and conducted as research for McKinny’s screenplay on police work. On Thursday, Simpson’s lawyers submitted a motion, which Ito placed under seal, seeking to have the jury hear scores of excerpts from the tapes--including sections in which Fuhrman allegedly uses a racial epithet that he denied uttering and other segments that reportedly feature him bragging about singling out blacks for arrest, manufacturing probable cause and planting evidence.

In some of the early interviews, Fuhrman repeatedly used the word nigger to disparage African Americans, according to prosecutors and defense attorneys. According to a transcript shared with The Times on Friday, Fuhrman discussed the issue of the controversial police chokehold and said it had been responsible for the deaths of “niggers.”

Faced with such a volume of material, prosecutors wrote to Ito asking until Monday to submit their response.

“These interviews comprise 12 separate cassette audiotapes,” Yochelson said in the letter, which was unsealed Friday. “The volume of Ms. Hart McKinny’s material and number of excerpts offered into evidence by the defense makes it impossible to prepare an adequate written response” by Friday afternoon.

Lawyers for Simpson balked, complaining that “our locked-up jury has already suffered one day of down time and will inevitably suffer another if the People are allowed to drag out their response until Monday.”

Compromising, Ito agreed to a short extension. A spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office said prosecutors expect to complete their response and file it under seal tonight.

Times staff writer Andrea Ford contributed to this article from Philadelphia.