The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour (2024)

MR. LEHRER: Good evening. I'm Jim Lehrer in Washington.

MR. MAC NEIL: And I'm Robert MacNeil in New York. After tonight's News Summary, we get the latest on Hurricane Opal's threat to the Gulf Coast, then our panel of legal scholars discusses revelations from the O.J. Simpson jury, Time Magazine's Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports on efforts to protect Internet users from cyber crimes, and essayist Richard Rodriguez discusses the paintings of Edward Hopper. NEWS SUMMARY

MR. LEHRER: Hurricane Opal is battering the panhandle of Florida this evening with winds gusting up to 144 miles an hour. The storm struck East of Pensacola just after 6 PM Eastern Time. A state of emergency has been declared by the governors of Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. Earlier in the day, tens of thousands of people in Gulf Coastal areas jammed highways to flee the storm. Officials of the Federal Emergency Management Agency are standing by with supplies, equipment, and personnel. The hurricane has spawned at least one tornado. A woman who lived in a mobile home was killed when the tornado touched down in the Northwest Florida town of Crestview. We'll have more on the story right after this News Summary. Robin.

MR. MAC NEIL: NATO warplanes fired at three Bosnian Serb radar sites today. A State Department spokesman said the missiles were launched after the radar locked on to NATO planes in two separate incidents. It was the first NATO attack on the Serbs since September 20th. NATO had stopped air strikes against them in exchange for a commitment to withdraw heavy weapons from around Sarajevo. NATO Secretary-General Willy Claes discussed today's attack at a National Press Club luncheon in Washington.

WILLY CLAES, NATO Secretary-General: I do not think that this incident is enough to declare here that we are taking the decision to start once again bombardments. Of course, as I've said before, what, what we need is from all the parties involved some clear signals that they are ready to accept a peace agreement.

MR. MAC NEIL: In his speech, Claes said that if allied troops were asked to enforce a peace settlement in Bosnia, they must remain strictly neutral.

MR. LEHRER: Pope John Paul II arrived in Newark, New Jersey, today. The 75-year-old Pontiff was greeted at the airport by President and Mrs. Clinton. The Pope is on a five-day visit to New York, New Jersey, and Baltimore. A Vatican official said he expects the Pope to discuss Bosnia and possibly Cuba at a private meeting with Mr. Clinton. Both men spoke to an airport crowd.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: All Americans are very, very happy to see you. This is our third opportunity to visit. I look forward to our discussion, and I am grateful that your voice for peace and hope and for the values that support every family and the family of humanity.

POPE JOHN PAUL II: It is a great joy for me to return to the United States. Thank you all for receiving me so warmly. This is a land of much generosity, and its people have always been quick to extend their hearts in friendship and to offer hospitality.

MR. MAC NEIL: The Pope will address the United Nations tomorrow and celebrate four outdoor Masses during his stay here.

MR. MAC NEIL: The government's Index of Leading Economic Indicators moved up slightly in August. The Index rose .2 of 1 percent. The increase was supported by a 2.6 percent jump in factory orders, the largest increase in nine months. Improvements in both numbers usually forecast moderate growth for the U.S. economy.

MR. LEHRER: A fast-moving wildfire burned more than 2,000 acres of brush and timber on the Point Reyes Peninsula in California, North of San Francisco. Firefighters in helicopters and on the ground are battling the blaze. Vegetation is bone dry in the area, making the flames difficult to control. Forty homes have burned and hundreds of people have been evacuated. The blaze was ignited yesterday afternoon by a small, illegal campfire in a national park 35 miles North of San Francisco.

MR. MAC NEIL: One of the jurors who acquitted O.J. Simpson of double murder charges discussed the decision today. Brenda Moran said two jurors initially voted for a guilty verdict but then changed their minds after further deliberations. She said the mishandling of blood evidence by the Los Angeles Police Department influenced her decision most. At an LA news conference, Moran responded to criticism of the verdict.

REPORTER: There's a feeling among white Americans that a predominantly black jury had sympathy for O.J., and, therefore, gave him an acquittal. Did that--was that the way it worked?

BRENDA MORAN, Simpson Trial Juror: [CNN] No. I feel bad about that, because I--I didn't come here to serve on a sequestered jury for nine months to be really humiliated like that. I feel myself and all the other jurors, we did this on the advice the court gave us. Weigh the evidence. We were fair. It wasn't a matter of sympathy. It wasn't a matter of favoritism. It was a matter of evidence. And this was the case.

MR. MAC NEIL: That's our summary of the news. Now it's on to Hurricane Opal, more on the O.J. Simpson jurors, crime in cyberspace, and the paintings of Edward Hopper. FOCUS - HURRICANE WATCH

MR. LEHRER: Hurricane Opal is first tonight for us, as it is for thousands of residents living along the Gulf Coast. We get the latest now from Louis Uccellini, director of the Office of Meteorology for the National Weather Service. Welcome, sir. All right. It's now 6:07 Eastern Time, so make sure people know when we're talking about this. Where is the storm now?

LOUIS UCCELLINI, National Weather Service: Okay. As of an hour ago, the storm was reported to be 25 miles due South of Pensacola, Florida, moving North-Northeast at about 21 miles an hour. So right at this time, the storm is making landfall probably just South of Pensacola, Florida.

MR. LEHRER: Landfall meaning what?

MR. UCCELLINI: That the eye of the storm is now approaching the coast of Northwest Florida at about this time.

MR. LEHRER: Okay. Now, according to the latest, we've got a map up there that shows that, according to the latest measurements, how strong is it now?

MR. UCCELLINI: Okay. Earlier this morning, this storm deepened very rapidly to the point where it had a central pressure of about 916 millibars, which is about 27.05 inches of mercury on the barometer.

MR. LEHRER: How many miles per hour?

MR. UCCELLINI: And the wind speeds increased--around this storm system--the wind speeds increased to about 155 miles an hour-- excuse me, about 150 miles an hour. This put the storm in a category four. And at that point, the storm was actually deeper-- the storm had a lower pressure than either Andrew or Hugo, which were the two most intense storms to hit the coastal United States in the last 10 years. This was an extremely dangerous. It remains an extremely dangerous storm. The central pressure has risen a bit during the day. Itis now categorized as a level three on the scale, and this is a dangerous storm. Wind speeds are now estimated to be 125 miles an hour near the eye, approaching the extreme Northwest coast of Florida and the Southeast coast of Alabama.

MR. LEHRER: Now, based on, on your expertise and based on prior experiences, is that, that 125 miles an hour, which is the figure that most of laypeople zap in on--

MR. UCCELLINI: Right.

MR. LEHRER: --is that likely to get worse, or likely to get better?

MR. UCCELLINI: Well, as the storm crosses the coastline, the wind speeds will decrease. Another aspect of the storm crossing the coastline, however, is a storm surge. The water building up to the East of the storm as it approaches the coast could build up to a 15-foot storm surge. So the winds can cause damage and the storm surge can cause tremendous damage immediately along the coast.

MR. LEHRER: What kind of damage should we expect?

MR. UCCELLINI: When you get a storm of this category, you can expect structural damage, roofs, walls, buildings that take direct hits. With the storm surge, of course, they could be totally destroyed. We also have the concern of tornadoes.

MR. LEHRER: Now, explain how a hurricane spawns a tornado.

MR. UCCELLINI: Uh, there is a great deal of instability, dynamic instability, near a hurricane. The, the--given the amount of moisture in the atmosphere, the warmth of the atmosphere and these instabilities, you can easily spin vortices. Very difficult to predict where they'll occur. We have our watches out for a broad area.

MR. LEHRER: And that's what causes a tornado, is heavy wind hitting a sudden change in temperature, is that right?

MR. UCCELLINI: Well, there are many--

MR. LEHRER: No?

MR. UCCELLINI: --things that can cause tornadoes.

MR. LEHRER: Okay.

MR. UCCELLINI: Within hurricanes, we have mechanisms which are quite different than we get in the Midwest near a front, for example. But tornadoes can be part of these systems. And, again, we have to be concerned about them. And this carries the damage potential further inland. Not only as the storm moves inland do you get the coast, but these strong winds will exist as the storm moves inland, you have tornadoes that can develop inland, as the storm moves away from the coastline, and these can combine to produce quite a bit of damage even away from the coastline.

MR. LEHRER: I understand that you had to close one of your Weather Service offices down there.

MR. UCCELLINI: Yes. The Apalachicola office was evacuated earlier

BRENDA MORAN: No. I feel bad about that, because I--I didn't come here to serve on a sequestered jury for nine months to be really humiliated like that. I feel myself and all the other jurors, we did this on the advice the court gave us. Weigh the evidence. We were fair. It wasn't a matter of sympathy. It wasn't a matter of favoritism. It was a matter of evidence. And this was the case.

ROBERT BALL, Moran's Lawyer: Wait a minute. And I think it's important to point out that this was not a--there were not twelve black jurors.

BRENDA MORAN: Correct.

ROBERT BALL: It took two white jurors and an Hispanic juror--

BRENDA MORAN: Exactly.

ROBERT BALL: --to come back with this verdict as well.

REPORTER: Why did you spend only less than four hours if you had all of that evidence to look at?

BRENDA MORAN: Well, sir, I'll tell you why. Okay. He wants to know that answer. I'll give it to him. The reason why--we've been sitting on this case for nine months. We've taken this case serious for nine months. We didn't take it serious for four hours. We've taken it serious for nine months. So we had nine months to weigh the evidence, so we knew when we looked at the evidence in the jury room in deliberations, we went over that again, it didn't take us nine more months to figure it out. We're not that ignorant.

REPORTER: What effect did the scientific experts--

SECOND REPORTER: Ms. Moran, at what point do you think you made up your mind?

BRENDA MORAN: Well, to be honest, after I listened to all the evidence, all the people that came to testify, after all that was over with, that's when I came up with my decision and looked at-- after I got--deliberated in the back room, in jury deliberations.

THIRD REPORTER: Ms. Moran, stepping back a bit, what was your vote, to convict or not?

REPORTER: There--going on outside--obviously, all of the hoopla and everything--were you at all aware of what was going on outside from either someone who came in to visit? What did you know about what was going on outside the courtroom?

BRENDA MORAN: Nothing. You know, I can comment on that. We worked closely with the deputies, and they did a very tremendous good job. Our families supported us morally. We had better things to talk about than this case. We had to deal with this case, what, five days a week, and sometimes go back to the court at the very beginning for an activity. So talking about this case, hey, wouldn't be on anyone's mind, I don't think.

REPORTER: Do you think that further deliberations would have changed your mind?

REPORTER: Do you think the domestic abuse factor was not important? Domestic abuse, why was that not important?

BRENDA MORAN: The domestic abuse--to me, that was a waste of time. This was a murder trial, not domestic abuse. If you want to get tried for domestic abuse, go in another courtroom and get tried for that.

ROBERT BALL: Wait a minute.

REPORTER: Do you think that further deliberations would have made a difference in the outcome, if you deliberated longer?

BRENDA MORAN: No, sir. I think nine months is very long.

[ALL THE REPORTERS TALKING AT ONCE]

ROBERT BALL: Hold it. Hold it. Please, just a moment. We're going to address--and this is going to wrap it up--we're going to address the socks. We're going to address the glove.

REPORTER: What about the blood?

ROBERT BALL: And the blood. Okay. We will address those. First, with respect to the blood--

MAN: Let her say something.

ROBERT BALL: All right.

BRENDA MORAN: Okay. The glove--in back of the--when we went out there to view the scene, you had to go down this narrow pathway, it was a long pathway, and where the glove was found, it was covered with blood, but the pathway had no blood, no blood on the leaves, on the ground, nowhere down that pathway. So why was there so much blood on that glove and not a drip of blood on the ground anywhere around in that back way?

REPORTER: Do you believe it was planted?

BRENDA MORAN: Somebody planted it.

ROBERT BALL: All right. With respect to the socks.

BRENDA MORAN: The socks, that was another problem with me. That was--the blood on the socks, it went through. If I put my leg in a sock, how does it end up on one, two, three sides?

ROBERT BALL: And another--I think we didn't touch on one other issue, and that was the effect of the glove not fitting during the trial.

REPORTER: Oh, yes. Thank you.

REPORTER: Good one.

BRENDA MORAN: Now, that played a large factor with me there.

REPORTER: Why?

BRENDA MORAN: Actually--the simple thing--I'm going to leave this with you, and then I'm out of here. In plain English, the glove didn't fit.

MR. MAC NEIL: Now, for some analysis of Brenda Moran's comments, we hear from law professors Patricia Williams of Columbia University, John Langbein of Yale, Kathleen Sullivan of Stanford, and Peter Arenella of the University of California at Los Angeles. Mr. Langbein, does hearing Brenda Moran change your view of what moved this jury, the view you expressed to us last night?

JOHN LANGBEIN, Yale Law School: Not really. I think this jury was bamboozled by sensationally good defense counsel advocacy. And I think what you heard the very last bit--she was actually mouthing the line Johnnie Cochran had used about the glove, if it doesn't fit, and so forth--

MR. MAC NEIL: "You must acquit."

MR. LANGBEIN:That's right. And in truth, she didn't bother to tell us what her answer was to the very powerful expert evidence about why that glove, in fact, didn't fit. So you didn't have a reasoned explanation here.

MR. MAC NEIL: Mr. Arenella, do you think her press conference shows the jury was bamboozled?

PETER ARENELLA, UCLA Law School: [Los Angeles] Well, it depends on what you mean by bamboozled. I mean, the problem here is that the prosecution suffered from a series of very serious self- inflicted wounds. And one of the obvious examples is one of the things that Ms. Moran mentioned, which was the domestic violence. They highlighted that at the beginning of their case as if this was a domestic violence case, not a murder case, before they presented any of the physical evidence implicating Mr. Simpson. And, frankly, the domestic violence wasn't that powerful; they had one violent act in '89, very remote from the murders. It gave the jury at the start the impression that they were trying to assassinate Mr. Simpson's character and not do a murder case. And one other point. Race enters into this very powerfully but as a way of evaluating the credibility of what you're listening to. And so I think that you had a jury that was more susceptible to claims of police misconduct. And, after all, remember, two police officers lied to this jury, so one can understand why these jurors might have had some reasonable doubts, even if you disagree with their verdict.

MR. MAC NEIL: Patricia Williams, how do you see it now? You said to us last night, "I don't know what this verdict says," because we hadn't heard from the jurors yet. Do you know what it says now?

PATRICIA WILLIAMS, Columbia Law School: It says that they found problems with the sufficiency of evidence, and I think that's not a surprise, given, as it's been pointed out repeatedly, you had two of the prosecution's main witnesses who were caught in rather stunning acts of perjury. You had problems with chain of custody. You had a lot of evidence, as many people have pointed out, but that evidence was handled. There was access to it by witnesses who had control over it who were then caught in acts of perjury. And that's significant, I think, and it's unfair to say that the belief that that constitutes a reasonable doubt is bamboozling, I think. They believed something different from--

MR. MAC NEIL: Mr. Langbein.

MR. LANGBEIN: Well--

MR. MAC NEIL: It's unfair to say they were bamboozled, Ms. Williams says.

MR. LANGBEIN: One has to look at the enormity of the evidence. One of the curious things that's gone on in this trial is the tendency to hold the prosecution to some kind of fantastic standard of near-perfection. These people work under police departments, prosecutors, work under very large caseload pressures. They're not perfect. They have new people coming on. They make some mistakes. But that doesn't justify holding them to a standard of perfection that nobody can satisfy, yet, that is the defense mind set; defense counsel worked very hard to sell you on that. Once you do that, and you start suspecting as perfidy everything, every little lapse that occurs, then you have a mind frame into which you wind up fitting things as "reasonable doubt."

MR. MAC NEIL: Kathleen Sullivan, what does the Brenda Moran press conference or revelation say to you about this jury?

KATHLEEN SULLIVAN, Stanford Law School: [Stanford] Well, we've heard two versions of what may have gone on in the verdict. She says we were just deciding on the evidence, we were just deciding about reasonable doubt. And then others say, no, maybe you were swayed by emotional sympathy, a predominantly black jury had emotional sympathy with a black defendant. I think there may be a third explanation, one that's rational, not emotional, but one that is very troubling, and that is that this was jury nullification designed to, as Mr. Cochran urged it to, send a message to the police. If--this jury may have decided, look at this police misconduct, we have police lying about why they were there, of course they were there because O.J. was a suspect; we have police possibly doctoring evidence, putting themselves above the law; we have police who are racists, and they may have been saying, if the courts are not going to guard us from the guardians in blue, then we're going to have to do it. But that, if it happened, is a very troubling message, and I think that may have been what happened, even though, of course, the jurors are now going to follow the script of saying they had a reasonable doubt. That's the script that is to be expected. Of course, saying--

MR. MAC NEIL: That's what their lawyers will be advising them to say, you say?

MS. SULLIVAN: Sure. And also the two issues of police misconduct and sufficiency of the evidence merge. If they say I didn't believe Vannatter, they're putting him on trial but saying he didn't give them good evidence. And here's why it's troubling. If they were saying this police misconduct in a verdict of "not guilty," they were taking on a role that properly belongs in our systems to the courts. It's police and prosecutors and, above all, the courts, who are supposed to keep the state honest under four Fourth Amendment and Fifth Amendment rights. If they're falling down on the job after twenty years of rolling back criminal defendants' rights in a nation where the political mood has shifted right on crime, tough on crime, then juries shouldn't be having to move in to fill the gap. If they start trying to speak the language of constitutional justice in the form of jury verdicts, saying, "not guilty," we're not going to be able to talk to each other in this country. It'll be as if we're seeing--

MR. ARENELLA: Robin, could I interject something here?

MR. MAC NEIL: Yeah. I was going to ask you, Mr. Arenella, do you share the suspicion that this was nullification?

MR. ARENELLA: No, I don't. And I have the greatest respect for Kathleen Sullivan, but I think she's just off the wall here. Johnnie Cochran did make an argument about jury nullification. He suggested that a conviction--the conviction of O.J. Simpson would endorse Mark Fuhrman's racism, but I think it's absolutely wrong to suggest that in a murder case these jurors would be willing to send such a message, to use this trial as a forum to decry racism. I don't think jurors who act in good faith more often than not in serious criminal cases are going to be thinking that way. And I think it also ignores the amount of problems that occurred during this trial. I watched this trial every day, and there were detectives that lied to this jury. And the jury had to interpret those lies. And unfortunately for the jury, they didn't know how to interpret some of those lies. Let me give you one example raised by Brenda Moran. She talked about the significance to her of how Detective Vannatter had done something extraordinarily unusual. He had brought O.J. Simpson's blood reference sample to Rockingham, instead of bringing to the lab. That, for her, created an opportunity for blood being planted. There was no explanation for why Vannatter did that. A second lie: Vannatter told the jury, "I never considered O.J. Simpson a suspect." Well, of course, the jury understood that Vannatter considered Simpson a suspect. But what the jury didn't know was Vannatter had to do a lie like that at a suppression hearing to get over a Fourth Amendment problem about a warrantless entry. Since they didn't understand the reason for the lie, they read into it greater significance than was really there. There are a series of things like that that occurred that led to tainting of some of the evidence. And once, once the police lost their credibility in the eyes of the jury and the prosecution lost its credibility in the eyes of the jury, then it's very difficult, frankly, to get a proof beyond a reasonable doubt conviction even when the evidence is there.

MR. MAC NEIL: Ms. Sullivan.

MS. SULLIVAN: With the greatest respect for Mr. Mr. Arenella, I did not say this was a possible jury nullification sending a message about racism. I suggested this was possibly a jury nullification sending a message about police lying and police misconduct, which fits--

MR. ARENELLA: Not in a murder case.

MS. SULLIVAN: --Mr. Arenella's theory. And as to the lie, why didn't Vannatter and Fuhrman get a warrant, wake up a judge at 2 AM? If we followed the rules, if we played by the Fourth Amendment, then perhaps the series of problems the police had in this case never would have arisen. So I'm agreeing with him about the violation of the Fourth Amendment here. I'm just--

MR. ARENELLA: But Kathleen, the jury didn't know about that.

MS. SULLIVAN: --saying that courts, rather than juries, should be sending that message.

MR. MAC NEIL: Well, how do you feel about all this now, Mr. Langbein, having heard this exchange about the--about how the police botched it, in effect, and really led the jury- -that evidence led the jury to acquit?

MR. LANGBEIN: It is certainly the case that Fuhrman is a despicable character and when the prosecution had gone as far as to introduce evidence which required Fuhrman to make it credible and we then find that credible was--that Fuhrman was who he was and had lied about these matters, it was devastating. Now, the question is whether you have evidence independent of the Fuhrman-tainted evidence that was powerful enough to satisfy beyond reasonable doubt. My view is that's an easy call, that there was--the blood evidence, the DNA evidence, the evidence of O.J.'s blood at the scene, of the evidence of the blood in the Bronco, the evidence of the blood all over his bedroom and so on, this was just overpowering.

MR. MAC NEIL: Ms. Williams, let's turn this now to the--the race question. Ms. Moran says--you heard her--was humiliated by the widespread perception that black jurors voted their race. What is your observation on that?

MS. WILLIAMS: I'm tremendously concerned by this widespread tendency simply not to hear what Ms. Moran said and what the other jurors have said, which is that they did listen to the evidence, and that in addition to the questions of whether or not Mark Fuhrman lied, which apparently they played much less importance than the media has--that there is a question of where all of this blood which they found ended up. Who handled it? When was it analyzed? It's a chain of custody problem. It's who had access to it. And the witnesses who had access to that, their credibility was implicated in this.

MR. MAC NEIL: You're saying it's credible, you think, that Ms. Moran is credible on that, on that testimony that it was not her identity as a black woman which influenced her decision on this but the evidence?

MS. WILLIAMS: I think she is credible, and I also--what I find sort of interesting is that not only do people sort of dismiss what she says, but she must have been tutored to say that. I mean, the agency of these jurors has been completely removed. A largely black jury is in the rhetoric of this discussion made to be an exclusively black jury. This was an integrated jury that in very quick order came back with an agreement. It's as--the underlying assumption is almost as though these jurors must have been--the white jurors must have been mugged by the black jurors and this is- -this is clearly only racial passion. This is--either disbelieves everything the black jurors are saying as having any basis in weighing evidence and as well makes the white jurors completely invisible in this.

MR. ARENELLA: But Professor Williams, certainly you would concede, wouldn't you, that the social experience of these jurors matter tremendously in how they interpret their world and what they find believable and what they don't find believable, and if you're an African-American from South Central Los Angeles, who's been the victim either directly or indirectly of police abuse, when you hear allegations of police abuse, you're more likely to take them seriously and perhaps upon a little bit less evidence than a white juror, who finds it hard to believe that the police could ever act like that. And surely, I think you would concede the possibility that that aspect of one's social experience is going to lead you to interpret evidence perhaps differently than a white juror would.

MS. WILLIAMS: But that's precisely why I would refrain from words like bamboozle, for example. It seems to me--

MR. ARENELLA: Oh, I agree. I didn't use that word. That was Professor Langbein.

MS. WILLIAMS: --that the concept of reasonable doubt--but the concept of reasonable doubt and the concept of a jury of one's peers really is based upon a notion of, of a community norm, is a somewhat normative standard, and I think, as I have said before, one of the legacies of an extraordinarily divided society such as ours is that in black communities, largely under served or mis- served by certain police departments under certain circ*mstances, not all but under certain circ*mstances, that this gets built into the relative weighing of probabilities in terms of what is perceived as reasonable within normative groups.

MR. LEHRER: Mr. Langbein.

MS. WILLIAMS: That's part of the system.

MR. LANGBEIN: Robin, I need to come right back in and rehabilitate "bamboozled," and I want to emphasize that I went said bamboozle, I didn't talk about race. I don't think race is particularly salient here. Indeed, I think it's very important to understand that blacks in this country are the victims of a tremendous amount of crime, and there's no evidence at all that blacks have any different attitude than whites about how horrible serious crimes are. I just don't--I don't believe racism is involved at all in the particular issue here. The particular issue is one which occurs whenever you have a rich guy like O.J. who can buy Johnnie Cochran and Alan Dershowitz and Henry Lee and all the tricksters and all the slippery experts and bring 'em in there and Barry Scheck beating up on Dennis Fung for nine days, nobody. Mother Teresa would come away from a cross-examination like that looking like a thug. Now, that's the problem. And that's why I say any jury has a very serious risk of being deceived by this kind of tricksterism.

MR. MAC NEIL: If this jury really was indifferent, though, tricksterism--leaving that aside for a moment--if it really was as indifferent to the racial issue swirling around this all through the country for nearly a year and a half, wouldn't that be a great vindication of the system?

MR. LANGBEIN: I think that one of the bright spots in this sad affair is the race-neutral side of it, the fact that you had such distinguished African-American personnel on both sides of this case, that you had these wonderful role models out there of distinguished competence on both sides, and in my own view the fact that this jury was not particularly race-affected according to all the evidence that's come in.

MR. MAC NEIL: Kathleen Sullivan, your observation on that?

MS. SULLIVAN: Well, I think it's too simple by far to say this was a case in which race was determinative or money was determinative. Several very rich, prominent celebrity defendants have been convicted after very well-financed defenses: Michael Milken, Michael Tyson, for example. So it can't be just that money bought this outcome, and it isn't just that the race card was played. What concerns me about this verdict and what I think we have to think about seriously in our system is that the jury cannot simultaneously be the place where we try the defendant and we try the state. We have to take more seriously the obligation of using law to keep the state honest, so that juries can stick to the task of deciding whether guilt was proved beyond a reasonable doubt. And I do believe that jurors are absolutely sincere when they express that this was a reasonable doubt case. I just think part of where the reasonable doubt came from was their skepticism about the state, and fixing the state should happen elsewhere than the jury box.

MR. ARENELLA: Well, but what type of skepticism about the state, Kathleen, are you talking about. If you're talking about skepticism concerning how the state processed evidence or collected evidence, that goes to the evidence. That's different than sending a message to the police that if you've engaged in some sort of other misconduct that doesn't relate to the evidence, we're going to acquit. And I just don't see any evidence that that's what occurred here. Their skepticism went to how the police collected evidence in this case. And though I don't share that skepticism, and, in fact, I think there's a third option that no one's ever discussed in the public--in public discourse, which is that O.J. Simpson might very well be guilty of this crime--but very serious police misconduct occurred, that wasn't an option presented to the jury for reasons that are obvious. It doesn't suit the prosecution's self-interest in an adversarial system to sell such a story.

MR. MAC NEIL: Finally, can we just discuss for a moment, starting with you, Ms. Williams, what do you make of her statement--we heard it referred to earlier by Mr. Arenella--that the whole domestic violence issue was irrelevant to them, that she thought it was a waste of time that it was given so much prominence?

MS. WILLIAMS: I do think that what she was probably referring to had to do with the--precisely with the larger policy issues of resolving the issue of domestic--of domestic violence in some general sense, that that was not came into their--

MR. MAC NEIL: Because surely a lot of laymen--to speak for myself--watching that thought, gee, that is really bad for O.J., the sort of way it was being, the way it was being presented. It casts him--cast him as a wife abuser and helped to--one would have thought--establish an alibi--establish a motive leading up to this,and--but for a jury to disregard it and say it was a waste of time astonished me. What would you say?

MS. WILLIAMS: I--again, I'd like to have heard her say a little bit more about that. It's a little hard to speculate, because she was so abbreviated about it, but I do think that actually it goes to the fact that they considered the evidence rather narrowly, that they really were concerned about this particular act, rather than the prior relations between these parties, they were really concerned about the evidence of what happened on this night.

MR. MAC NEIL: Ms. Sullivan, finally and briefly, what did you think about that aspect?

MS. SULLIVAN: I think it was very troubling, because that evidence was highly relevant to the question of motive and identity in this case. Of course, the fact that you've battered someone doesn't mean that you will murder them, but when somebody's been murdered, it is probative to show that you previously battered her. So I think that was very troubling, and I hope it doesn't send a message out to any other victims of domestic violence that they ought not come forward.

MR. MAC NEIL: Well, Ms. Sullivan and Ms. Williams, gentlemen, thank you. FOCUS - CYBER CRIME

MR. LEHRER: Now, computer security. As the use of computers has mushroomed, so has the problem of keeping communication and business transactions secure. Time Magazine's Senior Editor Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports.

PHILIP ELMER-DeWITT, Senior Editor, Time Magazine: When Tom Feegel signed up with Netcom, a company that sells computer users access to the Internet, he did what thousands of others have done; he paid for the new service with his charge card. He thought his credit card information would be protected. He was wrong. To his surprise, his credit card number, along with 20,000 others, turned up in the computer files of Kevin Mitnick, the world's most notorious hacker.

TOM FEEGEL, First Virtual Holdings: My trust in Netcom and the security of machines like theirs has been devastated, and I'll never put my credit card on-line. If you put sensitive financial information on a machine that's connected to the Internet, it is vulnerable, and it is very likely that those people to whom it becomes an attractive target--criminals--will, in fact, steal that information.

MR. ELMER-DeWITT: Mitnick was caught and agreed in July to plead guilty to one count of possessing stolen cellular telephone numbers. The remaining 22 charges against him were dismissed in a plea bargain. Many hackers like Mitnick often break into computers not to steal anything of value but just to prove that they can. But the case underscores a growing problem on the global computer network called the Internet. The network was designed to be open and easily accessible. That's one of the keys to its success. That's also one of its greatest vulnerabilities, because sensitive information stored on Internet computers--proprietary research, corporate secrets, medical records, even love letters--may also be easily accessible. Right now, the Internet leaks like a sieve. As the number of computers on the Internet grows, so do the incidents of break-ins. The computer emergency response team at Carnegie Mellon University reported over 2200 Internet security breaches last year. And that number is considered conservative because most companies don't like to talk publicly about their computer security problems. Still, businesses are rushing to set up shop on the Internet. Virtual malls filled with electronic storefronts are cropping up all over the Worldwide Web, the multimedia portion of the network. Companies want to use the Internet to advertise and eventually sell goods and services to millions of customers around the world. Millions of Internet subscribers, in turn, are using the network as a new form of communication, trusting that conversations carried out over e-mail can be as secure as private letters or phone calls. That's why computer companies are working so hard to make the systems connected to the Internet and the information that travels over them more secure. Sun Microsystems, for instance, has recruited three of the world's leading computer security experts to help shore up the Internet. We spoke to them recently about the Internet's security problems.

DAN FARMER, Computer Security Expert: I think the Internet against individuals is fairly ineffective in defenses. I think that anyone who knows what they're doing pretty much anywhere in the world can break into almost literally any other computer.

WHITFIELD DIFFIE, Computer Security Expert: I think business should be worried about transmitting any information it considers confidential, whether it's personnel information or trade secret information or product plans or marketing plans.

TSUTOMU SHIMOMURA, Computer Security Expert: We want to be able to trust the Net. We want to be able to engage in commerce. I want to be able to place an order, and if I receive an order for something, I want to know that it's for real; I want to be able to fill it.

MR. ELMER-DeWITT: Each of these men has helped make the Internet safe, each in his own way, either by protecting the data that travels over the Internet, or protecting the systems where that information is stored, or pursuing the intruders who steal that information. Whitfield Diffie's concern is protecting sensitive information from prying eyes. He helped design the Public Key Encryption Scheme, a system for scrambling data.

WHITFIELD DIFFIE: Cryptography is the process of sending messages by transforming them from their normal what we call their plain text form into a cybertext that is only understandable and usable by people who have particular secret keys that are used to unscramble it.

MR. ELMER-DeWITT: Not only does it scramble messages, but it stamps them with the electronic equivalent of an unforgeable digital signature.

WHITFIELD DIFFIE: For example, if you're a stockbroker, you'd like to receive an order to sell 10,000 shares of stock and charge your customer a brokerage fee for it, and you want to know that it's actually the customer who owns the stock who is ordering you to sell the stock and that nobody along the way has changed the order from a sale to a buy, something of that sort.

MR. ELMER-DeWITT: Diffie's system has now been adopted by companies like IBM, Lotus, and Netscape looking to do business on the Internet. Dan Farmer's concern is the security of large multiuser computer systems connected to the Internet. He wrote a controversial program called "Satan" that seeks out and locates security holes in those computer systems.

DAN FARMER: That's right. The program can tell you, okay, point it to the Pentagon or point it to Cairo or Japan, here are the weak spots of these systems and here's how you can break into them.

MR. ELMER-DeWITT: To ensure its widespread use, Farmer released "Satan" to the Internet, where it could be retrieved for free by system administrators and hackers alike. On the day of its release, tens of thousands of copies were downloaded. Many system administrators later wrote Farmer to thank him for pointing out weaknesses in their systems so thatthey could fix them.

DAN FARMER: The most frequent comment was that, "Well, thanks for the tool because now I found some problems that were there. I just never would have found them without, without this."

MR. ELMER-DeWITT: Rather than bringing the Internet to a halt, as some had feared, Farmer's program seems to have made it more secure. Finally, there is Tsutomu Shimomura, who became something of a hero on the Internet when he tracked down Kevin Mitnick following an electronic trail from California to North Carolina. The story began last December.

TSUTOMU SHIMOMURA: I had a break-in on my machines over Christmas of last year, and it wasn't clear who they were or who was involved, but there were some fairly clear pointers. And there was a reasonably clear trail to follow, and so in February, we proceeded to, you know, pull the thread, see what was at the other end, where the other end was.

MR. ELMER-DeWITT: And the thread--

TSUTOMU SHIMOMURA: Went through the Net. We spent a couple of weeks tracking backwards, got onto the phone network after transing the Internet, you know, found that the phone network had been modified in order to make tracing more difficult, but we were able to bypass that and eventually found Kevin at the other end of a cellular telephone.

MR. ELMER-DeWITT: The highly-publicized case put the Internet community on notice that intruders like Mitnick should be pursued and stopped.

TSUTOMU SHIMOMURA: As we have more commerce on the Net, as there's more stuff of commercial value, there will be more incentive for people to break in for personal gain. There may be more things that they can acquire or more services or perhaps real wealth or real world goods that they can acquire by defrauding services on the Net, and so I would expect there will be more break-ins and more intrusion attempts certainly.

MR. ELMER-DeWITT: No one really knows how many people on the Internet have an incentive to break into powerful computer systems.

DAN FARMER: There's a lot of people out there that are interested in accessing things that other people don't want them to have.

WHITFIELD DIFFIE: We are talking about something that ranges from, from young people just getting into their experience with computers to organized crime or large corporations or intelligence agencies. I think this sort of thing is so hard to, to measure that it's very hard to make an estimate of who the players are.

MR. ELMER-DeWITT: At this flower shop in New York City, most business is done person-to-person. Buyers and sellers know who they're dealing with. They recognize their face, their voice, their signature. But when that same flower shop does business in cyberspace, taking an order and a credit card number on-line, there is no absolute guarantee that the order is real or that the transaction is secure. Business will not flourish on the Internet until it provides those assurances. That's a problem for the thousands of companies and millions of customers getting ready to do business on the Worldwide Web. Until basic protections are in place, most people are likely to buy their flowers the old- fashioned way, at the shop down the street. ESSAY - A SENSE OF TIME

MR. MAC NEIL: Finally tonight, essayist Richard Rodriguez has some thoughts on the paintings of Edward Hopper.

RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: For the last few months, the Whitney Museum in New York has presented a show grandly titled "Edward Hopper and the American Imagination." In the museum catalogue, novelists and poets attribute pieces that rhyme with Hopper's work. Movies, the film noire sort, like "Rear Window" and "Laura" were shown. Art historians noted the way Hopper's use of commercial symbols anticipated Andy Warhol's "Soup Cans." At the center of all the words remain the enigmatic paintings of Edward Hopper, American. Edward Hopper is not an American in the way we speak of Mark Twain or George Gerswhin, as being characteristically American. There is something so odd, so incessantly internalized about Hopper's vision that it defies place. Behind me here on the sidewalk in San Francisco is the Green Street Market and Deli. In the America of Edward Hopper, all specificity is wiped away. This facade, this grocery store, would become only generic--"Store," "Street." What matters to Hopper more powerfully than place is time. So many of the titles of his paintings refer to time, not place--"Morning Sun," "Early Sunday Morning, 7:00 A.M.". It is as though he senses an America that is not a physical place. His America is a state of mind. He senses the ruthlessness of Americans. A generation after his death, he happily abandoned any semblance of region or place for McDonald's and Wal-mart. Hopper, himself, was born in Nyack, New York, in 1882. His family was solidly middle class. As a boy, he attended a Baptist church that his mother's grandfather had built. From that early childhood, he intended to become a painter. Three times he traveled to Paris as a young man. He sought the influence of the European masters, would remain influenced by the Impressionists, but his great life journey would be across America. When I look at Hopper's paintings, I think of Vladimir Nabakov's own vision of America in is great novel Lolita, America as a series of train compartments and hotel lobbies, America, the motel. For nearly all of his adult life--50 years--Hopper lived at the same address, a walk-up on Washington Square in New York City. He was married to one woman. Despite the conventionality of his domestic life, he is famous for his paintings of hotel lobbies and diners. In Hopper, people sit alone in places where one would expect crowds. Were we ever in love with this land? Were we ever at ease with the night or the harsh glow of day? The American sky is fast. Huck Finn lies contentedly on his back and considers the stars from his raft. But nature in Edward Hopper is ominous. Who would dare drive the dark road beyond the Mobil Gas Station? And nature seems unrelated to the narrative of our lives. The sun pours into the bedroom but reveals nothing about the lives within. What did Edward Hopper know of the condition of our lives? He died in 1964, just about the time when Americans were beginning to abandon the neighborhood diner for McDonald's, just when we were beginning to abandon Main Street for the suburban mall. Had he lived a few years longer, how would he have painted the new generic spaces where we now spend our lives wandering and waiting? We have ended up with everyplace to go. We end up alone. We end up people without a clear narrative. Why is that lady waiting at the window? Her nudity reveals no answers. A year before he died, Edward Hopper was pestered by an interviewer, asked what he was after with his painting called "Sun in an Empty Room." Hopper replied, "I am after me." I'm Richard Rodriguez. RECAP

MR. MAC NEIL: Again, the major stories of this Wednesday: the eye of Hurricane Opal came ashore tonight, striking the Florida panhandle near Pensacola with sustained winds of 125 miles an hour. It is the third hurricane to hit the area this season. President and Mrs. Clinton welcomed Pope John Paul II in Newark, New Jersey, at the beginning of the Pontiff's five-day visit to the United States. And NATO warplanes fired missiles at Bosnian Serb radar installations. The planes had been targeted by the Serbs during a routine patrol of Bosnia's no-fly zone. Good night, Jim.

MR. LEHRER: Good night, Robin. We'll see you tomorrow night. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you and good night.