RIGHT OF CENTER: O.J.'S TRIAL: A SPECTACLE? OR JUSTICE?

The O.J. Simpson trial continues to inch along, day after tedious day, as prosecutors and defense lawyers bicker over insignificant rot that has little to do with the trial and has nothing to do with justice.

Now the defense wants to put Los Angeles Police Detective Mark Fuhrman on trial. It shouldn't come as a surprise that the father of murder victim Ronald Goldman this week denounced the proceedings. "Do they take us all for morons?" Fred Goldman asked of the Simpson lawyers.

If not you and your family, Mr. Goldman, the jury certainly.

Why else would Johnnie Cochran and company assert that a tape recording of Fuhrman's bigoted ranting must be admitted into evidence to bolster the defense contention that O.J. Simpson was set up by racist white police officers. If Fuhrman lied about whether he had used any racist epithets in the past 10 years -- and apparently the tapes reveal the lie -- then, the defense contends, he likely lied when he denied the defense's cockeyed conspiracy theories of planted blood.

The tapes issue raises emotions in the courtroom and keeps court-TV ratings competitive. But the Fuhrman tapes are just another of many distractions from the true reason for the trial: justice.

The defense is banking on moronic jurors so muddled by conflicting testimony and evidence amassed throughout the interminable trial that they will be unable to ferret out truth from the bosh heaped into the courtroom.

Like the Israelites wandering in the desert able to eat only what the Lord provided daily, the jurors must be getting sick of this manna.

The Fuhrman tapes are interesting. He allegedly was tape-recorded making disparaging remarks about minorities and Judge Lance Ito's police captain wife. The defense considers the tapes explosive and the type of thing that can unravel the prosecution case, if it isn't already in tatters.

But if Mark Fuhrman were the grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan it wouldn't change the facts of this case. It wouldn't make O.J. Simpson's DNA-laden blood disappear from the crime scene. It wouldn't remove the murder victims' DNA from Simpson's Ford Bronco and his home.

To assume detective Fuhrman is capable of plotting and executing an elaborate scheme to frame O.J. is to assume he's too intelligent to commit perjury by testifying he hadn't used the N-word in the past 10 years when he knew of taped evidence to the contrary. If the defense had to prove O.J. was framed, they wouldn't have a chance. So why should such absurdities be allowed into the court record, when it only clouds justice?

The irrefutable facts of the Simpson murder case are that Ronald Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson were brutally murdered in June 1994. As its moniker illustrates, the "O.J. Simpson Trial" has more to do with the public prurience than with justice.

This case has drifted so far off track that most observers will be surprised if it doesn't end in a mistrial. There is nothing wrong with a mistrial if a lack of evidence warrants it or if the defendant has no motive to link him with circumstantial evidence.

But despite the testimony of a couple of so-called experts paid for by the defense, motives and evidence aren't at issue in this case. The evidence points to Simpson's guilt. He has a history of spousal abuse, and his propensity for jealous rage provides the motive.

And yet few people are confident the weary jurors will ignore the defense's fog of obfuscation and focus on the evidence to convict O.J. Simpson.

Whether there is a mistrial or O.J. walks away a free man, when this trial is over, there will be a third victim: the American legal system, battered and corrupted by a televised debacle at a Los Angeles courtroom.

~Jay Eastlick is the news editor of the Southeast Missourian.