OJ Simpson and Robert Kardashian. (Getty)
F.Lee Bailey was part of O.J. Simpson’s defense team that made history.
Dubbed as the Trial of The Century, Simpson was charged with the murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.
Simpson was acquitted on the murder charges but lost a $33.5 million judgment in civil court for the deaths of Brown and Goldman.
Bailey joined Robert Shapiro, F.Lee Bailey, Robert Kardashian, Alan Dershowitz, Gerald Uelmen, Carl E. Douglas and Johnnie Cochran, the defense team dubbed: “The Dream Team.”
Bailey disagrees with that notion, however.
“It had some good lawyers, some not so good,” Bailey told me on Scoop B Radio.
Bailey who also secured a reversal of Dr. Sam Sheppard’s conviction in the murder of his pregnant wife in the 60’s and an acquittal at his second trial and represented Albert DeSalvo, who claimed to be the Boston Strangler weighed in more on his assessment of the Simpson Dream team lawyers.
“Johnnie Cochran tried his best to keep an even keel in the atmosphere of the courtroom we were working in,” Bailey told Scoop B Radio.
Cochran was the only attorney in Los Angeles ever to receive both the “Civil Trial Lawyer of the Year” Award and the “Criminal Trial Lawyer of the Year” Award. In 1995, he was named “America’s Trial Lawyer of the Year” by The National Law Journal, as well as being named one of the “Headliners of the Year” by Time magazine.In 1999, he was named one of the “Top 50 Trial Attorneys of 1999” by the Los Angeles Business Journal.
“That wasn’t very easy and he was not always successful,” Bailey said of Cochran.
“Although Johnnie was a very good lawyer, I enjoyed working with him and became his good friend, but apart from that the dream team was not as well coordinated as it should have been and the work was not apportioned out on a very thoughtful basis in my view.”
According to Bailey the Simpson case was rather long and he just wanted to do his work and go home.
”A lot of people were competing for the limelight,” said Bailey.
“I just wanted to get out of there because California trials are an imposition on anybody that gets wrapped up in them. The Patty Hearst case was worth three weeks of trial; indeed that was forecast. It was wrapped up in three months even in a Federal court. The O.J. case might have been three months total, it took over a year. That’s pretty unnerving for someone who has other clients to worry about, other places to be.”
“It was a very important case,” Alan Dershowitz, told Scoop B Radio.
“It was a case that told us a lot about the racial situation in AmericaWhen I got into the case he was facing the death penalty.”