Mark Fuhrman, a Los Angeles police detective who in the 1995 murder trial of O.J. Simpson went from being the prosecution\u2019s star witness to its disastrous liability when defense lawyers used his past racist language to discredit him, died on May 12 in Kootenai County, Idaho. He was 74.<\/p>\n
The Kootenai County coroner\u2019s office confirmed the death, but did not say where in the county he died. Lynda Bensky, Mr. Fuhrman\u2019s manager, said the cause was throat cancer.<\/p>\n
Soon after a California jury found Mr. Simpson not guilty, Mr. Fuhrman pleaded no contest to perjury charges brought against him and was placed on probation. He went on to become a television commentator and the author of books about the Simpson case and other famous murders.<\/p>\n
Mr. Fuhrman was among the Los Angeles police officers who across the years had responded more than once to calls for help from Nicole Brown Simpson, who said that she had been beaten by her husband, the former football star, and that she feared for her life. The Simpsons divorced in 1992.<\/p>\n
Then, on June 12, 1994, she and a friend, Ronald L. Goldman, were stabbed to death on a walkway leading to her condominium in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles. She was nearly decapitated.<\/p>\n
From the start, police investigators believed that her former husband was the killer. Among the evidence they collected was a bloody glove found at the murder scene. But Mr. Simpson\u2019s lawyers asserted during his 1995 trial that the police had planted the glove, though they offered nothing to support that allegation. The knife used in the attacks was never found.<\/p>\n
Devastating to the prosecution\u2019s case was Mr. Fuhrman\u2019s turn as a witness \u2014 specifically his repeated past use of a racial epithet that he initially denied having uttered. That denial was shown to be untrue when the Simpson defense team introduced audiotapes of him using the word dozens of times. Mr. Fuhrman then acknowledged having used such language, but said it was in the context of creating a screenplay that he hoped would become a movie.<\/p>\n
Other trial witnesses testified that Mr. Fuhrman had indeed used the word in earnest; one of them recalled his having said that if it were up to him, Black people \u201cwould be gathered together and burned.\u201d On the tapes, he was heard saying that there were police officers who \u201cwould just love to take certain people and just take them to the alley and just blow their brains out.\u201d<\/p>\n
Some of Mr. Fuhrman\u2019s Black and Latino police colleagues defended him, telling newspaper reporters that while they found him to be arrogant, they did not believe he was racist. Indeed, few complaints were brought against him during his years on the police force, from 1975 to 1995.<\/p>\n
All the same, the damage to the Simpson prosecution was severe. In a second turn on the witness stand, Mr. Fuhrman invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. To discredit the detective further in his summation to a jury that had nine Black people among its 12 members, Mr. Simpson\u2019s lead lawyer, Johnnie Cochran, likened him to Hitler and called him \u201ca lying, perjuring, genocidal racist.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was a winning tactic. \u201cThis is now the Fuhrman trial,\u201d Fred Goldman, the father of Ronald Goldman, observed sarcastically to Vanity Fair\u2019s Dominick Dunne.<\/p>\n
In a verdict anxiously awaited by a riveted country, the jury in October 1995 found Mr. Simpson not guilty.<\/p>\n