Tuesday, March 29, 2005
Johnnie L. Cochran Jr
Johnnie Cochran, Famed Defense Lawyer, Is Dead at 67
By ADAM LIPTAK
LOS ANGELES -- Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., who became a legal superstar after helping clear O.J. Simpson during a sensational murder trial in which he uttered the famous quote "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit," died Tuesday. He was 67.
Cochran died of a brain tumor at his home in Los Angeles, his family said.
"Certainly, Johnnie's career will be noted as one marked by 'celebrity' cases and clientele," his family said in a statement. "But he and his family were most proud of the work he did on behalf of those in the community."
With his colorful suits and ties, his gift for courtroom oratory and a knack for coining memorable phrases, Cochran was a vivid addition to the pantheon of America's best-known barristers.
The "if it doesn't fit" phrase would be quoted and parodied for years afterward. It derived from a dramatic moment during which Simpson tried on a pair of bloodstained "murder gloves" to show jurors they did not fit. Some legal experts called it the turning point in the trial.
Soon after, jurors found the Hall of Fame football star not guilty of the 1994 slayings of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman.
Simpson, reached at his home in Florida, praised Cochran on Tuesday, saying "I don't think I'd be home today without Johnnie."
He said other members of his defense team also deserved credit for his acquittal, but added: "Without Johnnie running the ball, I don't think there's a lawyer in the world that could have run that ball. I was innocent, but he believed it."
For Cochran, Simpson's acquittal was the crowning achievement in a career notable for victories, often in cases with racial themes. He was a black man known for championing the causes of black defendants. Some of them, like Simpson, were famous, but more often than not they were unknowns.
"The clients I've cared about the most are the No Js, the ones who nobody knows," said Cochran, who proudly displayed copies in his office of the multimillion-dollar checks he won for ordinary citizens who said they were abused by police.
"People in New York and Los Angeles, especially mothers in the African-American community, are more afraid of the police injuring or killing their children than they are of muggers on the corner," he once said.
By the time Simpson called, the byword in the black community for defendants facing serious charges was: "Get Johnnie."
Over the years, Cochran represented football great Jim Brown on rape and assault charges, actor Todd Bridges on attempted murder charges, rapper Tupac Shakur on a weapons charge and rapper Snoop Dogg on a murder charge.
He also represented former Black Panther Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt, who spent 27 years in prison for a murder he didn't commit. When Cochran helped Pratt win his freedom in 1997 he called the moment "the happiest day of my life practicing law."
But the attention he received from all of those cases didn't come remotely close to the fame the Simpson trial brought him.
After Simpson's acquittal, Cochran appeared on countless TV talk shows, was awarded his own Court TV show, traveled the world over giving speeches, and was endlessly parodied in films and on such TV shows as "Seinfeld" and "South Park."
In "Lethal Weapon 4," comedian Chris Rock plays a policeman who advises a criminal suspect he has a right to an attorney, then warns him: "If you get Johnnie Cochran, I'll kill you."
The flamboyant Cochran enjoyed that parody so much he even quoted it in his autobiography, "A Lawyer's Life."
"It was fun. At times it was a lot of fun," he said of the lampooning he received. "And I knew that accepting it good-naturedly, even participating in it, helped soothe some of the angry feelings from the Simpson case."
Indeed, the verdict had done more than just divide the country along racial lines, with most blacks believing Simpson was innocent and most whites certain he was guilty. It also left many of those certain of Simpson's guilt furious at Cochran, the leader of a so-called "Dream Team" of expensive celebrity lawyers that included F. Lee Bailey, Robert Shapiro, Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld.
But in legal circles, the verdict represented the pinnacle of success for a respected attorney who had toiled in the Los Angeles legal profession for three decades.
Cochran was born Oct. 2, 1937 in Shreveport, La., the great-grandson of slaves, grandson of a sharecropper and son of an insurance salesman. He came to Los Angeles with his family in 1949, and became one of two dozen black students integrated into Los Angeles High School in the 1950s.
Even as a child, he had loved to argue, and in high school he excelled in debate.
He came to idolize Thurgood Marshall, the attorney who persuaded the U.S. Supreme Court to outlaw school segregation in the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision and who would eventually become the Supreme Court's first black justice.
"I didn't know too much about what a lawyer did, or how he worked, but I knew that if one man could cause this great stir, then the law must be a wondrous thing," Cochran said in his book. "I read everything I could find about Thurgood Marshall and confirmed that a single dedicated man could use the law to change society."
After graduating from UCLA, Cochran earned a law degree from Loyola University. He spent two years in the Los Angeles city attorney's office before establishing his own practice, later building his firm into a personal injury giant.
His first marriage, to his college sweetheart, Barbara Berry, produced two daughters, Melodie and Tiffany. During their divorce, it came to light that for 10 years Cochran had secretly maintained a "second family," which included a son.
When that relationship soured, his mistress, Patricia Sikora, sued him for palimony and the case was settled privately in 2004.
Although he frequently took police departments on in court, Cochran denied being anti-police and supported the decision of his only son, Jonathan, to join the California Highway Patrol.
He counted among his closest friends Los Angeles City Councilman Bernard Parks, the city's former police chief, and the late Mayor Tom Bradley, who had been a Los Angeles police lieutenant before going into politics.
But in the Simpson case, Cochran turned the murder trial into an indictment of the Police Department, suggesting officers planted evidence in an effort to frame the former football star because he was a black celebrity.
By the time Simpson was acquitted, Cochran and co-counsel Shapiro were on the outs. Shapiro, who is white, had accused Cochran of playing the race card and of dealing it "from the bottom of the deck."
Simpson, meanwhile, was held liable for the killings following a 1997 civil trial and ordered to pay the Brown and Goldman families $33.5 million in restitution. Cochran didn't represent him in that case.
He remained a beloved figure in the black community, admired as a lawyer who was relentless in his pursuit of justice and as a philanthropist who helped fund a UCLA scholarship, a low-income housing complex and a New Jersey legal academy, among other charitable endeavors.
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A Buddha statue in central Afghanistan, pictured in 1997, was ordered destroyed by the Taliban government in 2001.
When Sentiment and Fear Trump Reason and Reality
By LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS
I have recently begun to wonder whether I am completely out of touch with the mainstream, and if so, what that implies.
When I was a young student it became clear to me that the remarkable success of the scientific method, which changed the world beyond belief in the four centuries since Galileo, made the power and efficacy of that method evident. Moreover, scientific ideas are not only powerful but so beautiful that they are on par with the most spectacular legacies of civilization in art, architecture, literature, music and philosophy.
This is what makes the current times so disconcerting. We like to think that spectacular intellectual developments bring progress, so that future generations may benefit from what has come before. But this is often an illusion.
I remember the shock wave generated four years ago when the Taliban government in Afghanistan destroyed thousands of statues, including two priceless and awe-inspiring archaeological artifacts, the world's largest standing statues of Buddha, created almost 2,000 years ago. The Taliban claimed that Islamic law prohibited the creation of idolatrous images of human faces that might be used for worship.
I remember sharing the feeling of incredible sadness to know that the world had forever lost a precious part of its intellectual heritage. It was difficult to believe that in the 21st century such a return to the dark ages could happen anywhere.
Those images came to mind again as I followed recent news of incidents in the United States in which fundamentalist dogma and its fear of the intellectual progress that comes from understanding nature has trumped the scientific method. These actions attack intellectual pillars of our civilization that are every bit as real as monumental statues of Buddha.
The "reality-based community," as one White House insider so poetically referred to it recently, is losing the fight for hearts and minds throughout the country to a well-orchestrated marketing program that plays on sentiment and fear.
The open intrusion of religious dogma into the highest levels of government is stunning. Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court speaks of "the fact that government derives its authority from God" (during oral arguments before the court about displays of the Ten Commandments) while the president of the United States has argued that evolution is a theory not a fact.
The effort to blur the huge distinction between faith and science, between empirically falsifiable facts and beliefs, was on display again this month in two very different contexts.
Congressional leaders ignored the conclusions of the doctors who have actually examined Terri Schiavo and judges who have listened to the evidence. Senator Bill Frist, previously a heart surgeon who must have once known better, shunned the conclusions of these doctors and, without ever having examined Ms. Schiavo himself, stated his "belief" that she was not in a vegetative state.
Meanwhile, on a much less emotionally tragic but no less intellectually puzzling front, the Templeton Foundation continued with its program to sponsor the notion that science can somehow ultimately reveal the existence of God by once again awarding its annual Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion not to a theologian, but to a physicist.
Dr. Charles Townes, the winner, is a Nobel laureate whose scientific work has been of impeccable distinction; his prime contribution to religion appears to be his proudly proclaiming his belief in God as revealed through the beauty of nature.
I confess that my immediate reaction was the same as it has been to all of Templeton's recent awards to scientists. If this is the most significant progress in religious thought, beating out the work of distinguished theologians throughout the world, then it is a sad reflection on such progress. Of course, I rather believe that it reflects on the foundation's misguided goals and methods.
Nature's beauty inspires religious fervor in some scientists. For others, like the Nobel laureate Dr. Steven Weinberg, it merely reinforces their belief that God is irrelevant.
The point here, which should be obvious, is that science and religion are separate entities: science is a predictive discipline based on empirically falsifiable facts; religion is a hopeful discipline based on inner faith.
Theologians as ancient as St. Augustine and Moses Maimonides recognized that science, not religion, was the appropriate and reliable method to try to understand the physical world. Yet it is precisely this ancient wisdom that is now under attack.
Foes of evolution and the Big Bang in this country do not operate with the direct and brutal actions of the Taliban. They have marketing skills. Openly condemning evolution as blasphemous might play well to the fundamentalist true believers, but it wouldn't play well in the heartland, which is the real target. Thus the spurious argument is created that evolution isn't good science.
This "fact" is established by fiat. The Discovery Institute in Seattle supports the work of several Ph.D.'s who then write books (and op-ed articles) decrying the fallacy of evolution. They don't write scientific articles, however, because the claims they make - either that cellular structures are too complex to have evolved or that evolution itself is improbable - have either failed to stand up to detailed scrutiny or involve no falsifiable predictions.
What is being obscured in this manufactured debate is that the underlying intent has little to do with evolution, or the age of the earth. The fundamentalist attack is on the basic premise that physical phenomena have physical causes that can be revealed by use of the scientific method.
Because science does not explicitly incorporate a deity in its considerations, some fundamentalists believe that it undermines our moral order, just as the Buddha statues presented a threat to the fundamentalist Islamic moral order.
The pillar of our humanity that is most under attack is our remarkable ability to understand nature. We claim that in places like Afghanistan the enemies of truth are the enemies of freedom and democracy. If the scientific method is out of the mainstream in our country it is time to take a stronger stand against the effort to undermine empirical reality in favor of dogma.
Dr. Lawrence M. Krauss is chairman of the physics department at Case Western Reserve University. His new book, "Hiding in the Mirror," will appear this fall.
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Panel's Report Assails C.I.A. for Failure on Iraq Weapons
By DAVID E. SANGER and SCOTT SHANE
WASHINGTON, March 28 - The final report of a presidential commission studying American intelligence failures regarding illicit weapons includes a searing critique of how the C.I.A. and other agencies never properly assessed Saddam Hussein's political maneuverings or the possibility that he no longer had weapon stockpiles, according to officials who have seen the report's executive summary.
The report also proposes broad changes in the sharing of information among intelligence agencies that go well beyond the legislation passed by Congress late last year that set up a director of national intelligence to coordinate action among all 15 agencies.
Those recommendations are likely to figure prominently in April in the confirmation hearings of John D. Negroponte, whom President Bush has nominated to be national intelligence director and who is about to move to the center of the campaign against terror.
The report particularly singles out the Central Intelligence Agency under its former director, George J. Tenet, but also includes what one senior official called "a hearty condemnation" of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency.
The unclassified version of the report, which is more than 400 pages long, devotes relatively little space to North Korea and Iran, the two nations now posing the largest potential nuclear challenge to the United States and its allies. Most of that discussion appears only in a much longer classified version.
In the words of one administration official who has reviewed the classified version, "we don't give Kim Jong Il or the mullahs a window into what we know and what we don't," referring to the North Korean leader and Iran's clerical leaders.
Mr. Bush is expected to receive the report officially on Thursday.
As early copies of the report circulated inside the government on Monday, officials said much of the discussion of Iraq went over ground already covered by the Senate Intelligence Committee and by the two reports of the Iraq Survey Group, which was set up by the government to search for prohibited weapons after the Iraq invasion, and came up basically empty-handed.
After Iraq's defeat in the Persian Gulf war in 1991, international inspectors dismantled an active nuclear program - which had not produced a weapon - along with biological agents and chemical weapons. Much of the flawed intelligence was based on a series of assumptions that Mr. Hussein reconstituted those programs after inspectors left the country under duress in 1998.
But in retrospect, those assumptions by American and other intelligence analysts turned out to be deeply flawed, even though some of Mr. Hussein's own commanders said after they were captured in 2003 that they also believed the government held some unconventional weapons. It was a myth Mr. Hussein apparently fostered to retain an air of power.
The discovery of the false assumptions forced Mr. Bush to appoint, somewhat reluctantly, the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, which has operated largely in secret under the direction of Laurence H. Silberman, a senior judge on the United States Court of Appeals, and former Governor Charles S. Robb of Virginia.
According to officials who have scanned the document, the unclassified version of the report makes a "case study" of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, the major assessment that the intelligence agencies produced at the White House's behest - in a hurried few weeks - in 2002.
After the Iraq invasion in March 2003, the White House was forced to declassify part of the intelligence estimate, including the footnotes in which some agencies dissented from the view that Mr. Hussein had imported aluminum tubes in order to make centrifuges for the production of uranium, or possessed mobile biological weapons laboratories.
The report particularly ridicules the conclusion that Mr. Hussein's fleet of "unmanned aerial vehicles," which had very limited flying range, posed a major threat. All of those assertions were repeated by Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other senior officials in the prelude to the war. To this day, Mr. Cheney has never backed away from his claim, repeated last year, that the "mobile laboratories" were probably part of a secret biological weapons program, and his office has repeatedly declined to respond to inquiries about whether the evidence has changed his view.
One issue the commission grappled with is whether the intelligence agencies failed to understand what was happening inside Iraq after the inspectors left in 1998, a period that David Kay, the first head of the Iraq Survey Group, referred to last year as a time when the country headed into a "vortex of corruption." Mr. Kay, who also testified before the commission, said Mr. Hussein's scientists had faked some of their research and development programs, and Mr. Hussein was reported by his aides to be increasingly divorced from reality.
One defense official who had been briefed on an early draft of the report said Monday that one of its conclusions was that "human intelligence left a lot to be desired" in the global war against terror.
The official also indicated that there was already considerable anxiety about the final report and its recommendations. "We're all wondering what it will say," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the report had not been publicly released yet. "We all know there were shortcomings before 9/11," the official said. "Will this report take into account what we've done since then?"
The commission's mandate was to examine the intelligence agencies' ability to "collect, process, analyze and disseminate information concerning the capabilities, intentions and activities of foreign powers." Besides Iraq, Iran and North Korea, that mandate covered terrorist groups and private nuclear black market networks created by Dr. A. Q. Khan, the Pakistani scientist.
The classified version of the report is particularly critical of American failures to penetrate Iran's program, and notes how much of the assessment of the size of North Korea's suspected nuclear arsenal is based on what one official called "educated extrapolation." Officials and outside experts who were interviewed by the commission or its staff said they had been asked at length about the absence of reliable human intelligence sources inside both countries.
The commission's conclusions, if made public, may only fuel the arguments now heard in Beijing, Seoul and the capitals of Europe that an intelligence system that so misjudged Iraq cannot be fully trusted when it comes to the assessments of how much progress has been made by North Korea and Iran. North Korea has boasted of producing weapons - but has never tested them - and Iran has now admitted to covering up major elements of its nuclear program, even though it denies that it is building weapons.
The nine-member commission has met formally a dozen times at its offices in Arlington, Va., and in November visited Mr. Bush at the White House to speak with him and his staff. It had formal meetings with most top administration intelligence and foreign policy officials and interviewed former C.I.A. directors and academic experts on weapons proliferation. The commission, which has a professional staff of more than 60 people, mostly longtime mid-level intelligence professionals, has had access to even the most secret government documents.
All the sessions have been closed to the news media and the public, and the commission members and staff have been tight-lipped about the contents of their report.
"We and the staff have made a commitment in blood not to discuss the report in advance," said Walter B. Slocombe, a former defense official and member of the commission.
David Johnston and Anne E. Kornblut contributed reporting for this article.
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By DAVID E. SANGER and SCOTT SHANE
WASHINGTON, March 28 - The final report of a presidential commission studying American intelligence failures regarding illicit weapons includes a searing critique of how the C.I.A. and other agencies never properly assessed Saddam Hussein's political maneuverings or the possibility that he no longer had weapon stockpiles, according to officials who have seen the report's executive summary.
The report also proposes broad changes in the sharing of information among intelligence agencies that go well beyond the legislation passed by Congress late last year that set up a director of national intelligence to coordinate action among all 15 agencies.
Those recommendations are likely to figure prominently in April in the confirmation hearings of John D. Negroponte, whom President Bush has nominated to be national intelligence director and who is about to move to the center of the campaign against terror.
The report particularly singles out the Central Intelligence Agency under its former director, George J. Tenet, but also includes what one senior official called "a hearty condemnation" of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency.
The unclassified version of the report, which is more than 400 pages long, devotes relatively little space to North Korea and Iran, the two nations now posing the largest potential nuclear challenge to the United States and its allies. Most of that discussion appears only in a much longer classified version.
In the words of one administration official who has reviewed the classified version, "we don't give Kim Jong Il or the mullahs a window into what we know and what we don't," referring to the North Korean leader and Iran's clerical leaders.
Mr. Bush is expected to receive the report officially on Thursday.
As early copies of the report circulated inside the government on Monday, officials said much of the discussion of Iraq went over ground already covered by the Senate Intelligence Committee and by the two reports of the Iraq Survey Group, which was set up by the government to search for prohibited weapons after the Iraq invasion, and came up basically empty-handed.
After Iraq's defeat in the Persian Gulf war in 1991, international inspectors dismantled an active nuclear program - which had not produced a weapon - along with biological agents and chemical weapons. Much of the flawed intelligence was based on a series of assumptions that Mr. Hussein reconstituted those programs after inspectors left the country under duress in 1998.
But in retrospect, those assumptions by American and other intelligence analysts turned out to be deeply flawed, even though some of Mr. Hussein's own commanders said after they were captured in 2003 that they also believed the government held some unconventional weapons. It was a myth Mr. Hussein apparently fostered to retain an air of power.
The discovery of the false assumptions forced Mr. Bush to appoint, somewhat reluctantly, the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, which has operated largely in secret under the direction of Laurence H. Silberman, a senior judge on the United States Court of Appeals, and former Governor Charles S. Robb of Virginia.
According to officials who have scanned the document, the unclassified version of the report makes a "case study" of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, the major assessment that the intelligence agencies produced at the White House's behest - in a hurried few weeks - in 2002.
After the Iraq invasion in March 2003, the White House was forced to declassify part of the intelligence estimate, including the footnotes in which some agencies dissented from the view that Mr. Hussein had imported aluminum tubes in order to make centrifuges for the production of uranium, or possessed mobile biological weapons laboratories.
The report particularly ridicules the conclusion that Mr. Hussein's fleet of "unmanned aerial vehicles," which had very limited flying range, posed a major threat. All of those assertions were repeated by Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other senior officials in the prelude to the war. To this day, Mr. Cheney has never backed away from his claim, repeated last year, that the "mobile laboratories" were probably part of a secret biological weapons program, and his office has repeatedly declined to respond to inquiries about whether the evidence has changed his view.
One issue the commission grappled with is whether the intelligence agencies failed to understand what was happening inside Iraq after the inspectors left in 1998, a period that David Kay, the first head of the Iraq Survey Group, referred to last year as a time when the country headed into a "vortex of corruption." Mr. Kay, who also testified before the commission, said Mr. Hussein's scientists had faked some of their research and development programs, and Mr. Hussein was reported by his aides to be increasingly divorced from reality.
One defense official who had been briefed on an early draft of the report said Monday that one of its conclusions was that "human intelligence left a lot to be desired" in the global war against terror.
The official also indicated that there was already considerable anxiety about the final report and its recommendations. "We're all wondering what it will say," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the report had not been publicly released yet. "We all know there were shortcomings before 9/11," the official said. "Will this report take into account what we've done since then?"
The commission's mandate was to examine the intelligence agencies' ability to "collect, process, analyze and disseminate information concerning the capabilities, intentions and activities of foreign powers." Besides Iraq, Iran and North Korea, that mandate covered terrorist groups and private nuclear black market networks created by Dr. A. Q. Khan, the Pakistani scientist.
The classified version of the report is particularly critical of American failures to penetrate Iran's program, and notes how much of the assessment of the size of North Korea's suspected nuclear arsenal is based on what one official called "educated extrapolation." Officials and outside experts who were interviewed by the commission or its staff said they had been asked at length about the absence of reliable human intelligence sources inside both countries.
The commission's conclusions, if made public, may only fuel the arguments now heard in Beijing, Seoul and the capitals of Europe that an intelligence system that so misjudged Iraq cannot be fully trusted when it comes to the assessments of how much progress has been made by North Korea and Iran. North Korea has boasted of producing weapons - but has never tested them - and Iran has now admitted to covering up major elements of its nuclear program, even though it denies that it is building weapons.
The nine-member commission has met formally a dozen times at its offices in Arlington, Va., and in November visited Mr. Bush at the White House to speak with him and his staff. It had formal meetings with most top administration intelligence and foreign policy officials and interviewed former C.I.A. directors and academic experts on weapons proliferation. The commission, which has a professional staff of more than 60 people, mostly longtime mid-level intelligence professionals, has had access to even the most secret government documents.
All the sessions have been closed to the news media and the public, and the commission members and staff have been tight-lipped about the contents of their report.
"We and the staff have made a commitment in blood not to discuss the report in advance," said Walter B. Slocombe, a former defense official and member of the commission.
David Johnston and Anne E. Kornblut contributed reporting for this article.
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