The O. J. Simpson Police Investigation
This paper will analyze the police investigation in the O. J. Simpson case. The discussion will center on whether the investigation was properly conducted and whether the evidence against this defendant was properly obtained by the police and other law enforcement agencies. The paper will also detail the types of evidence which were recovered at the crime scene, as well as how this evidence was documented and preserved. The analysis will show what was done with the evidence in the O. J. Simpson case and show how the evidence was properly obtained and therefore, how the investigation was, for the most part, properly conducted.
Officially, the case was known as People of the State of California v. Orenthal James Simpson, a.k.a. O. J. Simpson, Los Angeles County Superior Court Case BA#097211 (Bugliosi, 1996, p. 110). Some of the most important evidence which the police investigators collected from the crime scene was the blood evidence. O J. Simpson's defense lawyers started to attack the methods which the police use to recover the blood evidence from the scene during the early phases of their client's trial. On August 22, 1997, Simpson's defense team had a chance to cross-examine the prosecution's witnesses about how they inventoried the blood evidence. The defense attorneys learned that the Los Angeles Police Department had no standard method of record keeping for their evidence collection. Apparently police criminalists Fung and Mazzola had collected blood stains "without recording the number of Gauze swatches they used for each" (Schiller, 1996, p. 186).
Moreover, the defense's cross-examination revealed that there was no standard size for the swatches, nor any uniform shape. The swatches weren't tagged. And some bloodstains arbitrarily merited three swatches while others were given seven swatch collections. Once the police had collected the bloodstains, they were delivered...