Cochran Johnnie - A Lawyers Life

A Lawyers Life

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A Lawyers Life

JOHNNIE COCHRAN

with David Fisher

THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS/ST. MARTIN'S GRIFFIN NEW YORK

THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.

An imprint of St. Martins Press.

A LAWYER'S LIFE . Copyright 2002 by Johnnie Cochran. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.stmartins.com

Book design by Susan Yang

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cochran, Johnnie, L., 1937

A lawyers life / Johnnie Cochran, with David Fisher.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-312-27826-8 (hc)

ISBN 0-312-31967-3 (pbk)

1. Cochran, Johnnie L., 1937 2. LawyersUnited StatesBiography. 3. African American lawyersBiography. I. Fisher, David, 1946 II. Title.

KF373.C59A35 2002

340'.092dc21

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

This book is dedicated to all of those lawyers, past, present, and future, who spend their lives seeking justice for others, especially those who have used the law to change society for the better. Among these people are Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall, Leon Higginbotham, Damon Keith, Constance Baker Motley, and Revius Ortique, as well as Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck of the Innocence Project.

A Lawyer's Life

ONE

If it may please the reader...

There is a young California Highway Patrol officer who begins work each night at almost exactly ten oclock and finishes at 6:15 A.M . Thats known as the graveyard shift; he chooses to work through the night because by that time the worst of Southern Californias daily traffic jams have faded into the sunset and the job becomes the most interesting.

During his eight and a half hours in the black-and-white patrol car hell cover several hundred miles of Los Angeles freeway, mostly the 10 and the 110, upholding the law of the land. His patrol car is equipped to respond to a range of emergencies; there are ample medical supplies in the trunk and a shotgun in the back.

There is no such thing as a typical shift on this job. A single serious accident might fill up most of his time, or he can drive smoothly through the night making as many as twenty different and very routine stops. But on this job the next minute is always one brimming with possibilities; the unexpected is what makes it intriguing. Usually, though, the first couple of hours are pretty routine. Traffic is light. The officer and his partner will assist drivers with disabled vehicles. Theyll write some tickets, mostly for speeding. But in the early morning the bars around town close and the drunk drivers hit the road. Its during those three or four hours in the middle of the night that damage will be done.

This particular young man became a law enforcement officer in 1998. He was studying microbiology at UCLA, thinking about becoming a doctor, when his best friend joined the Highway Patrol. The job is exciting, his best friend reported, its different. Try it. And so he did. He had been on the job only a few months the first time he saw a traffic fatality. A man driving home one night had a flat tire and parked on the side of the freeway to change it. It was nothing, a simple flat tire. But another driver wasnt paying attention, his car drifted onto the apron, just close enough to hit the man changing his tire. He had been killed instantly. The result of a ton of metal traveling at high speed hitting a human being was brutal, the young officer remembered, the victims body was ripped up pretty badly. It was a serious welcome to the work.

The uniform the officer wears is tan, with a blue stripe running down the seam of his trousers. His badge is a gold star. He has a campaign hat, the familiar Smokey the Bear model, but never wears it on the road. Its mostly for show, for dress occasions.

It is still early in his career and hes been fortunate thus far. Hes never had to draw his weapon; hes never been threatened. Hes only been in three or four hot pursuits and each of them ended quickly and safely.

He has been pleasantly surprised to discover that most of the people he has stopped for traffic infractions have treated him politely. Several speeders have told him they were racing home to go to the bathroom. Only occasionally have drivers reacted to the stop with anger. Three or four people have accused him of stopping them only because they are African-American, and to each of them he politely pointed out that it was night and the windows of their car were tinted, making it impossible for him to see who was inside. Several times the drivers of cars he had stopped warned him that they knew influential people, that they could cause problems in his career. Two people told him they were personal friends of Johnnie Cochran.

Obviously they failed to read this young officers name tag. It reads J. E. Cochran. Jonathan Eric Cochran. My son.

Most people are quite surprised to learn that my only son is a police officer. Truthfully, when he called me from college and told me about this decision I was surprised, too. Surprised, but supportive. Ive spent much of my life around law enforcement officers. Among my best friends is the former chief of police of Los Angeles, Bernard Parks. My brother-in-law and my friend for more than forty years, Bill Baker served in the L.A. Sheriffs Department for more than thirty years, rising to the rank of chief. At two different times in my life I served as a prosecutor in Los Angeles, for three years being the third-highest-ranking attorney in the L.A. County District Attorneys office. So there are few people in this nation with more respect for law enforcement officersand the lawthan me.

That statement may surprise many people, too, particularly those people who most associate me with the criminal trial for murder and the acquittal on all charges of O. J. Simpson. The Simpson trial changed the lives of every person who participated in that trial. As advertised, it was indeed the Trial of the Century. It had all the elements of great drama: a beloved black athlete was accused of murdering his estranged white wife; it had money and sex, race and gore; it had intrigue and mystery and showcased a cast of diverse and fascinating characters. The trial dominated the popular culture in almost all of its forms for more than a year. It was probably the subject of more conversations and arguments than any subject since the Vietnam War. And, most importantly, it was televised around the world.

At the end of that trial not one of the participants walked out of that courthouse the same person he had been only months earlier. Our lives, too, had been changed forever.

Prior to the Simpson trial I was among the best-known and respected attorneys in Southern California. During my legal career I had been involved in literally thousands of cases, ranging from prosecuting dangerous drivers to defending accused killers. I am the only attorney to have been honored in Los Angeles as both Civil Trial Lawyer of the Year and Criminal Trial Lawyer of the Year. I had represented victims and their families in some of the most notorious cases in Los Angeles history. Id won several of the largest judgments in police negligence cases ever paid by the city. Id prosecuted or represented people of all races and religions and from every social stratum. Among the many celebrities Id represented this was long before the O. J. Simpson casewere Michael Jackson and football Hall of Famer Jim Brown. I represented former child TV star Todd Bridges in an attempted murder case in which he was positively identified by the victim. And in the case that spanned several decades of my professional career, I represented Geronimo Pratt, a member of the Black Panther Party who had been wrongly convicted of murder. In the community of Los Angeles I served on the boards of several charities, I was active in civic organizations, and was a member of the Los Angeles Airport Commissionduring the massive rebuilding of LAXfor almost thirteen years.