Howard had an advantage going into the trial. First off, the amiable, courtly judge was highly regarded by the South Carolina bar. Elected to the bench in 1988, Howard, 47, was rated as the state’s top judge in a lawyers’ poll last year. A devoted fisherman, he was born in Ann Arbor, Mich., and raised in Connecticut. Howard moved his family to South Carolina, went to the state law school in Columbia. then settled near Charleston.
But lawyers also knew that as soft-spoken and unassuming as he acted–Howard smiles even as he rebukes attorneys-they couldn’t mess with him. Early in the Smith case he imposed a gag order on attorneys, who then became wary of even talking privately with reporters they knew well. Leaks were so rare that prosecutor Tommy Pope complained that defense lawyer David Bruck was filing stacks of pretrial motions to try to sway the media and the jury pool. When something did leak, Howard came down hard. He ordered one reporter jailed when her paper published a confidential mental evaluation of Smith.
In Los Angeles, Ito also considered a gag order but never imposed it; the pundits assumed Ito, who likes the limelight, wouldn’t have the backbone to enforce it. So leaks in the O.J. trial are as common as ponytails in L.A. A no-nonsense judge, Howard also quashed diversions quickly. He ordered David Smith to remove a photo of his two children from his lapel. When Marcia Clark wore an angel pin in court, “it took Judge Ito about seven hours to decide whether she should have it on or not,” said Harpootlian.
Howard’s most important decision banned cameras from the trial. Broadcasting the OJ. case will give law professors grist for decades of debate. It opened the judicial system to millions, but also encouraged long-winded lawyers and money-crazed jurors and witnesses. Wanting none of the latter, Howard barred in-court TV coverage.
If Howard seemed a textbook player, so did the lawyers on both sides. Bruck is among the nation’s foremost anti-death-penalty advocates. Pope, who at 82 is the state’s youngest prosecutor, surprised skeptics who wondered whether he had the experience to try the high-profile case. If anything useful came out of this unimaginably grim exercise, it at least gave a much-needed reminder to the nation that the Simpson trial is anything but the norm.
