Johnnie L. Cochran, Jr., the masterful attorney who gained prominence as an early advocate for victims of police abuse, then achieved worldwide fame for successfully defending football star O.J. Simpson on murder charges, died this afternoon. He was 67.
Cochran died at his home in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles of an inoperable brain tumor, according to his brother-in-law Bill Baker. His wife and his two sisters were with him at the time of his death.
Cochran, his family and colleagues were secretive about his illness to protect the attorney's privacy as well as the network of Cochran law offices that largely draw their cache from his presence. But Cochran confirmed in a Sept. 2004 interview with The Times that he was being treated by the eminent neurosurgeon Keith Black at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
Long before his defense of Simpson, Cochran was challenging the Los Angeles Police Department's misconduct.
From the 1960s on, when he represented the widow of Leonard Deadwyler, a black motorist killed during a police stop in Los Angeles, Cochran took police abuse to court. He won historic financial settlements and helped bring about lasting changes in police procedure.
He could figure out how to connect with any jury, and in his most famous case, the Simpson trial, he delivered to the jurors an eloquent, even lilting closing argument. He famously cast doubt on the prosecution's theory of the case saying, "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit." The line referred to Cochran's overall assessment of the prosecution's evidence, but it most evoked the moment during the trial when Simpson appeared to struggle to put on what were presumed to be the murderer's bloody gloves — one of which was found at the murder scene, the other outside Simpson's house.
As a result, the line is often quoted as "If the glove doesn't fit, you must acquit"-an adaptation that even Cochran made in his 2002 book, "A Lawyer's Life."
ur right, it was unexpected. A controversial lawyer but he did his job.
RIP