Simpson Defense: Police Mishandled Evidence At Scene -- Victims' Photos Used To Make Point

LOS ANGELES - It was one of the goriest photos of the trial: one of Nicole Brown Simpson after she had been killed.

And it was shown to the jury yesterday not by the prosecution but by lawyers for the man accused of causing the hideous scene.

It was a risky move for O.J. Simpson's defense team, which is trying to create reasonable doubt by arguing that police - through incompetence, malice or a little of both - mishandled evidence and rendered it useless.

In one case, trying to show that a gate had not been dusted for fingerprints, defense attorneys projected a color photo of Nicole Simpson's bloody, crumpled body onto a 7-foot screen.

"That has to be a calculated risk that underscores their belief that they can create sufficient reasonable doubt that it wasn't O.J. Simpson, and so that they don't have fear of the jurors seeing what really happened there," said law professor Robert Pugsley of Southwestern University.

No court activities were scheduled today. The trial was to resume Tuesday.

Prosecutors also used gruesome photographs of Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman. Many were so graphic that the judge ordered TV and still photographers not to show them, and prosecutor Marcia Clark warned the victims' relatives, "You don't want to look."

Nicole Simpson's mother left as soon as the display began; her father stayed briefly, then left with tears in his eyes. Goldman's stepmother and sister stayed, sobbing quietly.

Simpson took notes, conferred with lawyer Robert Shapiro and occasionally clutched the edge of the table, looked up and sighed.

Under the defense theory, the most incriminating evidence against Simpson - genetic tests that show traces of his blood at the murder scene and his ex-wife's blood in his house - cannot be trusted because it was contaminated or poorly stored by incompetent police officers and badly trained technicians.

Defense attorney Johnnie Cochran Jr. had mixed results when he attempted to use yesterday's only witness, Officer Robert Riske, to lay the groundwork for this argument.

Riske, the first officer to reach the murder scene, described finding bloody footprints, a knit cap and a single bloody glove near a bush.

But in a lengthy cross-examination, Riske acknowledged that:

-- About a dozen officers had access to the crime scene in the early hours of June 13, before the bodies were removed, and that none wore protective boots or gloves to guard against contaminating crucial blood evidence.

-- He himself made a phone call from Nicole Simpson's kitchen phone before dusting it for fingerprints or trying to determine who had last called her home.

-- Police made no effort to photograph or preserve a partially melted cup of ice cream that he saw inside the house - and that defense lawyers contend could have helped establish the time of the murders.

-- No one photographed or investigated Nicole Simpson's bathroom, where he said he found candles burning and water drawn in a sunken tub, suggesting she had been preparing a bath when she was killed.

Riske gave the defense another opening when prosecutor Marcia Clark asked him if the Police Academy trained him to preserve a crime scene.

"They kind of gloss over it. They don't really train you," said Riske, a patrolman with four years of experience at the time of the crime. He said he learned on the job, handling some 15 homicide cases.

Riske, viewing photos of the crime scene, also said it appeared that an envelope and bloody glove were in different positions at different times.

The defense has suggested that a detective moved one of two bloody gloves from the murder scene and planted it at Simpson's estate. Information from Knight-Ridder Newspapers is included in this report.