Chris Darden

Ethics Dunce: Marcia Clark

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments
Bill Buckner's error: he didn't kill anyone, but to many Red Sox fan, this was worse.

Bill Buckner’s error: he didn’t kill anyone, but to many Red Sox fan, this was worse.

“I did not want [Simpson] to try on the evidence gloves. I never did,” failed O.J. prosecutor Marcia Clark tells”Dateline NBC” in a TV special airing this week. “That was [Darden’s] call. … I was miserable from the moment that Chris said, ‘No, I’m doing this.’ And I never expected anything good to come of it.”

Unbelievable. How petty, unfair and low of Clark at this late date to start trying to blame others on the prosecuting team for losing a murder case that should have been won! It is decades later, the story is part of U.S. legal, racial and cultural lore, and everyone has known that Darden was tricked into the bloody gloves trap by Johnnie Cochran for almost all of that time. There is no justification for Clark to turn on her colleague now. Continue reading →

Chris Darden: Failing The Accountability Test and Making the Unethical Quote of the Week, Too

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I feel sorry for Chris Darden.

It’s all Johnny Cochran’s fault.

Like Monica Lewinsky and others, he was living a normal personal and professional life  until events beyond his control  thrust him to the center ring of a media circus, and the bright lights of celebrity and hyper-scrutiny derailed his life forever. As a young prosecutor, he could have made many worse errors than his infamous gamble of allowing O.J. Simpson to try on the murder gloves found at the scene of Nicole Simpson’s and Ron Goldman’s death, and been able to learn and move on. But his  blunder was on live TV, during the most watched trial in history. Master defense attorney Johnny Cochran turned it into a ditty (“If the gloves don’t fit, you must acquit”) that found immortality in law school classes, history books and “Seinfeld,” and Chris Darden, working lawyer, became celebrity road-kill. (So did his colleague Marcia Clarke. Seeing today, bleached, botoxed and barely recognizable, desperately trying to eke out a living as a D-list celebrity pundit, it becomes vividly clear that Simpson ruined more lives than the two he snuffed out that bloody night.)

So I understand why Darden, taking part in a panel discussion about the trial at Pace Law School in New York City, shocked his fellow panel members  and the audience by saying, “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.” Darden then asserted that the defense team had unsupervised custody of the glove before the infamous test, which is when he surmised that the tampering took place. I understand it, just as I understand a lot of terrible conduct that is still inexcusable. Continue reading →

“Twelve Angry Men,” A Million Angry Fools, and the Jury System

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

Their defendant was probably guilty too.

Ethics Alarms All-Star Lianne Best sent me this link about a member of the Casey Anthony jury who is going into hiding because of all the hate and criticism being directed at jury members and their controversial verdict. Her plight, which must be shared by other members of the much-maligned jury, highlights the unethical, not to mention ignorant, reaction of the public to the Florida ex-mother’s narrow escape from a murder conviction she almost certainly deserved.

The problem begins with publicity. We may need to re-examine the logic behind broadcasting high-profile cases. The combination of live courtroom feeds and quasi-semi-competent commentary gives viewers the mistaken belief that they are qualified to second guess the jury, and they are not. They are not because the jury is in the courtroom, and the viewers aren’t. The jury and TV watchers see different things; individuals communicate different emotions and reactions in person than they do on camera. There is only one fair and sensible way to answer those on-line instant polls that ask, “Do you think Casey Anthony should be found guilty?”, and that is “I don’t know.”

Most of all, the viewers and pundits are not present in the jury room. Continue reading →

Marcia Clark, Exploiting the Anthony Verdict for Her Own Sake

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Marcia Clark. OK, this really isn't Marcia, but the real picture of her doesn't look like her either.

Marcia Clark’s article on the Casey Anthony verdict is so tainted with obvious conflicts of interest that it should have been rejected by The Daily Beast…or rather would be rejected by any website more selective and less shameless than the Daily Beast. This would be any fair site that does not deal in over-the-top opinion as a matter of course.

Marcia, like her colleague Chris Darden, is a rather tragic figure these days. The former lead prosecutor in the O.J. case is struggling to make it as a pundit, freshly botoxed and rendered almost unrecognizable so as to be fetching in those close-ups. After she sold the inevitable cash-in book about the Trial of the Century, she has wandered in the C-List celebrity wilderness, and will soon join Newt Gingrich and William Shatner as a celebrity novelist. She will be remembered, quite correctly, as the prosecutor who botched the O.J. murder trial, even if we give Darden an assist for the gloves debacle. (Why cable news shows insist on recycling failures as experts is an enduring mystery, the mystery being “how can the producers look themselves in the mirror after choosing recognizable flops over less well-known but more accomplished authorities?”)

But Clark apparently saw an opportunity in the Casey Anthony verdict to rehabilitate her tarnished reputation, and grabbed it. The result is “Worse Than O.J.!”, a new low in self-serving analysis. Continue reading →