O.J. Simpson's Defense attorney Johnnie L. Cochran whose "if it doesn't fit, you must acquit" defense is largely responsible for the jury's decision to acquit Simpson for the murder of his wife and her friend, is being accused of tampering with the notorious "bloody glove" evidence.
The accusation comes from one of the prosecutors, Christopher Darden, who said, "I think Johnnie tore the lining. There were some additional tears in the lining so that O.J.'s fingers couldn't go all the way up into the glove," a discussion in at Pace Law School in New York as reported by Reuters.
Now friends and family of Cochran, who died in 2005, are calling the accusations "slanderous."
"As members of the defense team, Carl Douglas and I were present in court on the day that Chris Darden asked O.J. Simpson to try on the glove," Shawn Holley, another defense attorney in the case, told the Los Angeles Times. "Mr. Darden's self-serving assertion that Johnnie Cochran tampered with the glove -- or any piece of evidence -- is false, malicious and slanderous...Almost 20 years later, it seems Mr. Darden is still trying to exculpate himself from one of the biggest blunders in the history of jurisprudence."
The O.J. Simpson murder trial swept the nation in a frenzy in 1989, becoming more than a high-profile celebrity murder trial, touching on sensitive societal issues such as racism.
In 1989, Simpson, popular football player was accused of brutally murdering his wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Lyle Goldman. In the end he was acquitted of the murder but was found in a civil trial of wrongful death and battery and fined with $33,500,000.
