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I heard the news tonight and
the first thing that came into my head was Joan Baez' voice singing
Babe, I'm going to miss you. No, those aren't the right lyrics
. . .The jukebox in my mind switched over to Tina Turner: You're
simply the best. Better than all the rest. I don't know if Johnny
Cochrane sang or played an instrument. Yet always when I have
seen him on TV or read about him, it has lifted my spirits and
got my feet tapping. Bye Bye Mr. American guy.
Johnny Cochrane
Most of all I'll miss sharing
the planet with you, knowing you're out there with your intelligence
and grace. Next I'm going to miss your purple suits.
Famed Attorney Johnnie
L. Cochran Jr. Dies at 67
By Carla Hall, LA Times
Times Staff Writer, March 29, 2005, 5:37 PM CST
Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., the
masterful attorney who gained prominence as an early advocate
for victims of police abuse, then achieved worldwide fame for
successfully defending football star OJ. Simpson on murder charges,
died this afternoon. He was 67.
Cochran died at his home in
the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles of an inoperable brain tumor,
according to his brother-in-law Bill Baker. His wife and his
two sisters were with him at the time of his death.
Cochran, his family and colleagues
were secretive about his illness to protect the attorney's privacy
as well as the network of Cochran law offices that largely draw
their cachet from his presence. But Cochran confirmed in a Sept.
2004 interview with The Times that he was being treated by the
eminent neurosurgeon Keith Black at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center
in Los Angeles.
Long before his defense of
Simpson, Cochran was challenging the Los Angeles Police Department's
misconduct.
From the 1960s on, when he
represented the widow of Leonard Deadwyler, a black motorist
killed during a police stop in Los Angeles, Cochran took police
abuse to court. He won historic financial settlements and helped
bring about lasting changes in police procedure.
His clients weren't always
black - he unsuccessfully represented Reginald Denny, the white
trucker beaten by a mob during the 1991 riots that followed the
verdicts of not guilty in the trial of police officers charged
with assaulting Rodney King. Instead of arguing, as he often
did, that police had been brutal on the job, Cochran contended
that the trucker's civil rights had been violated because police
didn't do their jobs when they withdrew from a South Los Angeles
intersection of Florence and Normandie, where rioting was fierce
and Denny was beaten.
By the time Simpson was accused
of murder in 1994, Cochran was "larger than life" in
the city's black community, said Kerman Maddox, a political consultant
and longtime Los Angeles resident. After Simpson, that profile
would expand, earning him new admirers as well as new detractors
who considered him a racially polarizing force.
His successful defense of Simpson
against charges of murdering his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson,
and Ronald Lyle Goldman, a waiter and friend of Nicole's, vaulted
him to the rank of celebrity, beseeched by autograph-seekers
and parodied on "Saturday Night Live" and "Seinfeld."
His name was invoked by movie
characters, one of whom boasted in the 1997 film "Jackie
Brown" that his lawyer was so good, "he's my own personal
Johnnie Cochran." Ever aware of his public image, he delighted
in the attention and even played along, showing up in the occasional
movie or TV show in a cameo role as himself.
Resplendently tailored and
silky-voiced, clever and genteel, Cochran came to epitomize the
formidable litigator, sought after by the famous and wealthy,
the obscure and struggling, all believing they were victims of
the system in one way or another.
He could figure out how to
connect with any jury, and in his most famous case, the Simpson
trial, he delivered to the jurors an eloquent, even lilting closing
argument. He famously cast doubt on the prosecution's theory
of the case saying, "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit."
The line referred to Cochran's overall assessment of the prosecution's
evidence, but it most evoked the moment during the trial when
Simpson appeared to struggle to put on what were presumed to
be the murderer's bloody gloves - one of which was found at the
murder scene, the other outside Simpson's house.
As a result, the line is often
quoted as "If the glove doesn't fit, you must acquit"-an
adaptation that even Cochran made in his 2002 book, "A Lawyer's
Life."
"He has a real gift for
communicating with people," Erwin Chemerinsky, a Duke University
law professor who offered analysis of the Simpson trial, said
in late 2004. "Obviously you saw that in the OJ. case. I
think you could have given that case to a lot of talented lawyers
and OJ. would have been convicted."
Cochran inspired law students
and attained a level of stardom rare for a lawyer and even rarer
for a black lawyer. One of his most important legacies was the
transforming effect of a black man attaining that level of success.
"Clients of all races
are now no longer hesitant to retain black lawyers to represent
them in significant cases," said Winston Kevin McKesson,
a black criminal defense attorney in Los Angeles. "That
was not the case 25 or 30 years ago. We couldn't even get African
Americans in our community to trust us. He's a historic figure."
However, the Simpson criminal
trial defined Cochran's career for better and for worse. While
it made him a household name and offered him access to virtually
every high-profile criminal case, it also changed his life "drastically
and forever," he wrote in "A Lawyer's Life." "It
obscured everything I had done previously."
More galling and perplexing
to him was the criticism that rained down after the Simpson verdicts.
Though many legal experts marveled at Cochran's skill, a parade
of critics - TV pundits and newspaper columnists, California's
then governor, the Republican Pete Wilson, and even his own co-counsel,
Robert Shapiro - decried a legal strategy that put the competence
and character of the Los Angeles Police Department on trial.
"Not only did we play
the race card, we dealt it from the bottom of the deck,"
Shapiro said in a national TV interview after Simpson was acquitted
by a jury of nine African Americans, two whites and one Latino.
(All but two were women.)
During the trial, Cochran and
the rest of the defense team excoriated criminalists for sloppy
work that compromised blood evidence and claimed that police
officers prejudged Simpson. Cochran and his "Dream Team",
as the defense attorneys were known, revealed that police Detective
Mark Fuhrman, who collected key evidence in the case, had a history
of making racist remarks.
Everything about the Simpson
case came to personify the excess of Los Angeles. A combustible
combination of murder, sex and race, the extravagantly lengthy
trial was carried live on television, making it arguably the
first high-profile reality TV show.
When it was finally over, the
jury acquitted Simpson, but many in the public did not. A Times
poll indicated that half the American public disagreed with the
verdict. And the majority believed the defense used the issue
of race inappropriately to help free a defendant whose controversial
saga began unfolding when he fled police in a nationally televised
slow-speed freeway chase.
Chemerinsky said Cochran did
nothing more than discharge his duty as a zealous advocate in
defending Simpson. "I think Johnnie Cochran did a superb
job," Chemerinsky said. "He ultimately put the LAPD
and the racism of the LAPD on trial, and that worked with that
jury."
Cochran spent two post-trial
memoirs trying to dispel the criticism.
"The charge that I could
convince black jurors to vote to acquit a man they believed to
be guilty of two murders because he is black is an insult to
all African Americans," he wrote in "A Lawyer's Life."
It wasn't, Cochran contended,
that he believed the police had conspired to frame Simpson. It
was more that their racism led them to a "rush to judgment"
and a willingness to "adjust the physical evidence slightly,"
he wrote.
"He got an awful rap in
the white community after the Simpson trial," said Stuart
Hanlon, a white attorney who was a longtime criminal defense
collaborator with Cochran. "All he did was do a great job
as a lawyer - which is what we're supposed to do - and beat some
inept prosecutor. For him to get vilified for it just shows the
racism in our community. I really think if OJ's lawyer had been
white, that wouldn't have happened. If I had done that trial
and won, no one would hate me."
Ironically, up to that time,
Cochran had spent most of his life not as a racial polarizing
force but as the integrator, the black man gliding easily through
white conference rooms, dinner parties, and neighborhoods.
In a September 2004 phone interview
with the Times, Cochran said, he still would have taken the case
knowing it would change his life. "I thought it was the
right thing to do," he said.
Cochran continued to support
Simpson's version of his activities the night his former wife
and Goldman were found knifed to death outside her Brentwood
townhouse.
"I still believe he's
innocent of those charges," Cochran said in the September
2004 interview. "Even after all this time."
While the Simpson case may
have been Cochran's bravura moment on the public stage, he believed
that it was not his most important case. It was the long and
twisted legal saga of Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt that marked
for Cochran, at different points, both the nadir and the pinnacle
of his career.
Authorities contended that
Pratt, a former Black Panther party leader and Vietnam War veteran,
robbed and shot a young white couple on a public tennis court
in Santa Monica in December 1968. The woman died, but her husband
survived and identified Pratt in a line-up two years after the
shootings.
Cochran said his biggest disappointment
was watching his client, Pratt - who now goes by the name Geronimo
ji Jaga - be convicted of murder in 1972. And Cochran's greatest
triumph came when a judge in Orange County reversed that conviction
25 years later.
The course of Cochran's four
decade career zigzagged across the legal landscape, starting
in the Los Angeles city attorney's office, where he eagerly prosecuted
drunk driving cases, and ending in a private practice that earned
him wealth and fame.
His law firm sprouted 14 offices
outside California, devoted to personal injury law and other
civil litigation. But Cochran remained rooted not just to Los
Angeles but to Mid-Wilshire Boulevard, maintaining his legal
headquarters there even as the street's glamour faded. For rising
black professionals of his generation, a Wilshire Boulevard address
was the ultimate aspiration.
The eldest child of four, Cochran
was born in a charity hospital in Shreveport, La. He was, he
wrote, the great-grandson of slaves and the grandson of a sharecropper.
His ambitious father, Johnnie L. Cochran Sr., moved the family
across the country to California and began an upward climb from
working as a pipe fitter in the San Francisco Bay Area shipyards
to selling insurance for Golden State Mutual, the state's leading
black-owned insurance company.
The family settled in Los Angeles
in 1949. There, Cochran's father ran an insurance district office,
bought a house in a well-tended neighborhood on West 28th Street,
and took his family to the Second Baptist Church.
Like other members of the mid-century's
burgeoning black middle class in America, the senior Cochran
and his wife, Hattie, expected much of themselves and more of
their children. His father stressed education and working hard
"to reach our fullest potential," Cochran wrote in
"A Lawyer's Life." "And he seemed to think our
fullest potential was always a little fuller than we did."
Cochran grew up wanting to
be a lawyer, he surmises, because he loved to debate, a skill
he honed at the dinner table and at Los Angeles High School.
Dazzled by the natty attire of many classmates and their late-model
convertibles, Cochran began developing a taste for stylish clothing
and a love of fine cars.
After graduating from UCLA,
Cochran earned a law degree from Loyola Marymount University
in 1962. The summer after his first year in law school, he married
Barbara Berry.
The couple eventually had two
girls - Melodie and Tiffany - before the marriage ended in divorce.
He later had a relationship with Patricia Sikora, who bore him
his only son, Jonathan, now a California Highway Patrol officer
- something Cochran loves reminding critics who say he hates
all police.
As a college-age man, Cochran
wrestled with his feelings about a white world that saw him as
black before they saw him as anything else, a concept of duality
that he said the writer and black liberationist W.E.B. DuBois
best described as "two-ness."
"The concept of 'two-ness'
is one that has eternally intrigued me," he wrote in "Journey
to Justice," his first memoir. "We were never viewed
as just teachers, doctors, lawyers, scientists, and writers.
We were perceived as black teachers, black doctors, black lawyers,
black scientists and black writers."
But that distinction was inescapable
as he made his way in Los Angeles. In the fall of 1961, during
his last year in law school, he became the first black law clerk
in the office of the city attorney. In early 1963, he became
a deputy city attorney.
He enjoyed trial work but he
grew uncomfortable prosecuting people - usually black men - who
had allegedly resisted arrest. And he grew wary of the police,
because many of those people showed signs of severe beating.
"By the mid-1960s, the
problem of unchecked police misconduct was the defining issue
among black Angelenos of every social class," he wrote in
"Journey to Justice."
He left the city attorney's
office in 1965 for private practice and kept busy defending the
kind of people he once prosecuted.
It was a case of alleged police
misconduct in May 1966 that first thrust Cochran into the spotlight.
Deadwyler, speeding his pregnant wife to the hospital, was pulled
over by police, then shot dead. The officer who stopped him said
later he had reached into the car to grab the ignition key and
the car lurched forward causing the gun to discharge accidentally.
The shooting outraged a city
still emotionally smoldering from the Watts riots less than a
year earlier. Cochran represented Deadwyler's widow, Barbara,
at a coroner's inquest. As TV cameras rolled, viewers saw the
deputy DA consulting with Cochran and often prefacing questions
to witnesses with "Mr. Cochran wants to know" A majority
of jurors found the shooting of Deadwyler accidental, but Cochran's
presence offered an indelible image of a black attorney as an
important player.
"If you talk to African
American professionals between 40 and 50, it was a powerful moment
when they were young," said Maddox, who was one of those
youngsters.
In the two decades after the
Deadwyler inquest, Cochran took on other cases that challenged
L.A. juries and police policies.
But he was devastated when
Pratt was convicted in July 1972 of murder. Although the husband
of Caroline Olsen, the murdered woman, had identified Pratt as
the assailant and a former Black Panther rival, Julius Butler,
had testified against Pratt, Cochran was confident the system
would exonerate his client.
Only years later would Cochran
learn that Butler - the witness against Pratt - had been an informant
for the government, including the district attorney's office.
Butler had denied that on the stand. If Cochran had known at
the time, it would have been a different case.
"I had learned that prosecutors
and law enforcement officials, convinced of their own righteousness,
would do anything to make the system yield the 'right result,'
" he wrote.
Years later, Cochran would
suggest that the LAPD did just that to make their case against
Simpson - and others would accuse Cochran of using similar methods
to defend Simpson.
Cochran continued to represent
the families of people he believed to be victims of police abuse
and was able to extract from the city of Los Angeles the first
cash settlement - $25,000 - in a wrongful death suit stemming
from a police shooting.
In 1978, L.A. County Dist.
Atty. John Van de Kamp tapped him to be assistant district attorney,
the No. 3 position in the office, and suggested he change the
system from the inside. Cochran left his $300,000 a year practice
for the $49,000 salaried job, becoming the first African American
to hold it.
But change came slowly. He
lost a debate with his bosses over filing manslaughter charges
against police officers who killed Eula Love, a black woman,
after police said she threatened them with a knife. The police
had been called to her home after Love, overdue on her gas bill,
allegedly used a shovel to shoo away gas company employees.
Later, Cochran and Gil Garcetti,
then a deputy district attorney, changed the way prosecutors
investigated police shootings. They initiated the policy of rolling
out a prosecutor and a district attorney's investigator to the
scene of every police shooting, a move designed to make the investigation
impartial. No longer would the government rely entirely on police
investigations of their own shootings.
Cochran left the DA's office
in 1981 and soon took on another case that would be a benchmark
for the Los Angeles area. After a traffic stop, Ron Settles,
a Cal State Long Beach football player, was booked by police
in Signal Hill for resisting arrest, possession of cocaine, and
assault on a police officer. However, the validity of the charges
would never be tested in court - a few hours later, just before
his bail was posted, Settles was found dead in his cell. Police
said he apparently hung himself.
Cochran and attorney Mike Mitchell,
representing Settles' parents at the coroner's inquest, contended
that the athlete died as a result of a police chokehold. Although
the jury never specified how he was killed, they did issue a
majority verdict that Settles had not killed himself but "died
at the hands of another."
Later, in the city of Los Angeles,
Cochran was part of a group that successfully argued before the
Police Commission that the bar-arm chokehold be banned.
In the 1980s, Cochran worked
on burnishing his reputation as a premier attorney and player
in Los Angeles. Mayor Tom Bradley, his mentor, and fellow Kappa
Alpha Psi fraternity brother, appointed him to the powerful Los
Angeles Airport Commission, which oversaw expansion and the awarding
of contracts to run the airport.
And in court, he was winning
millions of dollars in awards for victims injured or killed by
the police. Most notably, he and law partner Eric Ferrer won
a $9.4-million judgment for Patty Diaz, a 13-year-old Latina
who was sexually assaulted in her home by an LAPD officer. At
the time it was the largest award resulting from LAPD misconduct
granted by a trial jury, although the plaintiff later agreed
to a reduced award of $4.6 million.
In the middle of his rise as
an attorney, his personal life took a new turn. As an airport
commissioner, he was attending a 1981 conference when he met
Dale Mason, an executive for an Atlanta-based concessionaire.
Cochran and Mason, 13 years his junior, were married at the Bel-Air
Hotel in 1985.
Mason survives him, as does
his son, Jonathan Cochran; daughters, Tiffany Cochran Edwards
and Melodie; and sisters Pearl Baker and Martha Jean Sherrard.
Cochran also cultivated a clientele
of celebrities in trouble. In 1993, he represented pop superstar
Michael Jackson during his first battle against accusations of
sexual molestation. A year later, Simpson called Cochran from
jail, begging him to join his defense team.
After his Simpson trial victory,
there was hardly a prominent civil rights or police abuse case
that he was not connected to in some way. But his impact was
diluted by the sheer volume of what he undertook. He jetted between
coasts, tried his hand at co-hosting a syndicated television
legal show, and dipped in and out of numerous cases.
"At any given time, I
am actively involved in about 50 different cases," he wrote
in "A Lawyer's Life." That didn't always sit well with
clients. The mother of Amidou Diallo, the unarmed African immigrant
who was gunned down by police in 1999 in the Bronx, stirring
a national outrage, had retained Cochran to represent her, but
fired him when she felt he didn't have enough time for her.
"Maybe I did a few too
many cases," he mused in a September 2004 phone interview.
"I handled a lot, and they were real tough cases."
Cochran gave up the stressful
and time-consuming practice of criminal law after successfully
defending rap music mogul Sean Combs on weapons charges in New
York in 2000.
He wanted to concentrate instead
on other issues. Had he not become ill at the beginning of 2004,
he would have helped prepare a lawsuit testing whether reparations
will be paid for slavery in this country.
But one case he stayed involved
with for more than two decades was that of Pratt. "Some
people would say that Cochran abandoned the case. I know better,"
said Hanlon, who spent 23 years continuously working the case.
"He was always there when I needed to talk to him."
Not only did Cochran lend his
expertise when they finally got a hearing on whether Pratt's
conviction should be overturned, he also lent his credit card
to the effort. "We were broke," said Hanlon.
Because the court hearing was
transferred from Los Angeles to the Orange County courtroom of
a conservative judge, Cochran's presence was key. "I was
a known radical," said Hanlon. "He brought a credibility
to the courtroom that I couldn't bring.
Pratt's murder conviction was
overturned in May 1997, and he was freed after 27 years behind
bars. The Los Angeles district attorney declined to retry him.
Cochran helped Pratt secure a $4.5-million settlement of a false
imprisonment lawsuit.
"There are so many cases
I believe in," said Cochran in a 2004 phone interview. "Probably
the biggest was Pratt.Just getting him free - I remember that
day down in Orange County, that was probably the happiest day
for me in my whole career."
Funeral services are pending.
Copyright © 2005, The
Los Angeles Times
|
Truth can never be
told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd. William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell
