The Times Union (Albany, NY)

March 10, 1995, Friday, THREE STAR EDITION

Ito thwarts courtroom use of ‘TU’ story

BYLINE: VINCENT JACKSON; Staff writer

SECTION: MAIN, Pg. A9

LENGTH: 395 words

DATELINE: COLONIE

Judge Lance Ito, who is presiding over the double-murder trial of O.J. Simp-son, has refused to allow the contents of a Times Union article on the case to be submitted into evidence.

But the views of Juan Jimenez, a top Los Angeles County Coroner’s official quoted by the paper, may still become a part of the trial’s official record if he is called to testify, the judge ruled.

The Times Union quoted Jimenez in Sunday’s editions as saying that the Los Angeles Police Department compromised the Nicole Brown Simpson-Ronald Goldman murder case by failing to promptly notify coroners as they are supposed to do by law.

”They dropped the ball. They’ve done this on numerous occasions,” Jimenez is quoted as saying, referring to the police department. On Saturday, Jimenez had been in Colonie to address the state Association of County Coroner and Medi-cal Examiners at The Desmond hotel.

In a one-on-one interview, Jimenez criticized L.A. police for failing to no-tify his office for 10 hours after the bodies of Brown Simpson and Goldman were found.

Defense lawyers in the case, led by Johnnie Cochran Jr., had been hoping to use the article to help bolster their case and to show that police had damaged their investigation by waiting so long to call the coroner’s office.

But on Tuesday, Judge Ito ruled the article inadmissible, Bill Pavelic, an investigator with O.J. Simpson’s defense team, confirmed Thursday.

The newspaper article came into play when Cochran was questioning a prosecu-tion witness, Detective Tom Lange, and started asking Lange about coroners’ com-plaints that police delayed calling them into murder scenes.

After Lange said he wasn’t aware of such complaints, Cochran produced the a copy of the Times Union that had Jimenez’s complaints about the Los Angeles po-lice and asked Lange if he was aware of the contents of the story.

Deputy District Attorney Marcia Clark objected to Cochran’s introducing the newspaper article, and Judge Lance Ito called the attorneys to a sidebar confer-ence.

Ito read the story then ruled its contents as hearsay and thus inadmissible, according to transcripts of the Tuesday sidebar conversations, which were ob-tained by the Houston Chronicle on Thursday.

Although the newspaper article could not be admitted as evidence, Cochran has said Jimenez will be called as a defense witness.

LOAD-DATE: March 13, 1995

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH