Secrets of a Courthouse Reporter

In L.A., the courthouse is for judges, jurors, bailiffs, and lawyers. Reporters? Take a number, chump.

The designated "press room" for the O.J. Simpson preliminary hearing was on the eleventh floor of the Criminal Courts Building -- a plain white room with three long white tables crammed into a space about a third the size of the average M.E.'s office.

For those who arrived early enough to stake out a square on one of the tables, working conditions were elbow-to-elbow. Latecomers sat on the floor, leaned in the doorway, or jumped up on the sink in the corner. Those with East Coast deadlines or without courtroom passes would spend the day there, watching the hearing on a twelve-inch television set perched on a stack of telephone books while banging away into a remote.

Grief with editors became a great equalizing force. Since telephone conversations were public domain, it became a source of comfort for those of us from the journalistic small-time to hear the reporter from the august New York Times arguing with his editors.

"You want the dawg in the lead!" protested the reporter, who had a gravelly southern drawl. "That's such an AP mentality. A dawg. Why don't I just put in a burnin' barn -- that'll get 'em readin'!"

When he slammed down the phone, he shouted out, cheerleader-style: "How much do we hate editors?"

The reporter from The Washington Post struggled with an assignment she didn't like -- a "color story" on the families of the victims. She finally turned it in only to get another call from her editors. They wanted a legal analysis. It was past 5 p.m. on the Friday before the July 4th weekend.

A reporter from USA Today considered it a great moral victory when she convinced her editors, after much argument, that there were actually thirty-three disputed pieces of evidence that the defense was challenging in its motion to suppress -- not the widely reported thirty-four.

Next to editors, our worst tormentors were court bailiffs on the ninth floor, who were charged with enforcing the rules against media contact with the major players. Merely asking if Simpson's attorney, Robert Shapiro, would be holding a press conference could bring on threats of permanent banishment from the courtroom.

The rules seemed to change each day. The appointed times for picking up the courtroom pass kept changing. The places to line up for the pass kept changing. Even the passes themselves kept changing -- from orange to bright pink.

The morning after the July 4th weekend, a maintenance guy in a beige uniform appeared at the press room doorway. "The air conditioner is broken," he said.

Someone from the courthouse sent down a week's supply of coffee, filters, and cups. The next day a harried technician rushed in with the news that something had blown the fuse for three different television stations trying to do live shots. His eyes locked in on the coffee machine. "Shut it off!" he said, running off. It was hard not to think: conspiracy.

During court breaks, we'd watch the hallway television feed to see which of our colleagues was sneaking a ninth-floor interview with the attorneys behind a bailiff's back. By the end of the preliminary hearing, reporters had become brazen, following defense attorney Gerald Uelmen right up to the men's room, then picking up the conversation when he exited.

That was most of us. Then there was the New York Times writer. He had an assistant -- a hard-working cub reporter whose job description seemed to include getting coffee and sandwiches for the Writer, spelling names, protecting the Writer from air-conditioning drafts, finding quotes, generally explaining what was going on, and, occasionally, soothing the Writer's bruised ego when editors called with niggling questions.

"I do hair," the assistant wisecracked.

By the second week, the courtroom routine had so beaten us down that most reporters lost their competitive lust. We freely shared choice tidbits of color from the courtroom -- describing how Nicole Brown Simpson's father "bowed and wept" when the search warrant evidence was admitted by the judge, or how Marcia Clark warned the family that she was about to bring out the gory photographs from the death scene.

Toward the end, a New York Newsday reporter volunteered to do "pool color" for the gang.

We checked our quotes against each other.

 We spelled names for each other.

 We were a band of rough equals who were lucky to be thrown together in a tiny room for a brief, interesting time.

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