Marcia Rachel Clark

CLARK, MARCIA RACHEL

Marcia Rachel Clark gained national prominence as the prosecutor of legendary football player O.J. SIMPSON. Yet, long before the Simpson trial made her famous, Clark had built an enviable legal reputation. The one-time professional dancer left private practice to become a Los Angeles assistant district attorney in 1981, a fortuitous career choice that allowed the 28-year-old lawyer to combine her interest in victim advocacy with powerful preparatory skills and a strong courtroom style. Clark prevailed in 19 successful HOMICIDE prosecutions in just over a decade against such high-profile defendants as the murderer of TV actress Rebecca Schaeffer and Los Angeles vigilante James Hawkins. Colleagues and adversaries alike praise her abilities. She is noted for her ability to critically examine complex SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE.

Clark was born in Oakland, California, on
August 31, 1953, to Abraham Kleks and Rozlyn
Mazur Kleks. In their strict orthodox Jewish
household academic achievement took priority.
Clark and her brother studied heavily and took
classes in Hebrew twice a week. Clark’s passion
was drama: she studied ballet; took lead roles in
high school plays; and later, as a student at the University of California, Los Angeles, briefly
toured with a professional dance company. But
Clark had nonartistic interests as well, as
reflected in her undergraduate degree in political
science, awarded in 1976. Upon graduation,
she married and enrolled in Southwestern University
School of Law. The marriage, to Gabriel
Horowitz, a flamboyant backgammon gambler
known for his high-stakes hustling of celebrities,
did not last. It did, however, once bring Clark
across the path of Simpson, one of her husband’s—
and later her own—famous opponents.
Following her graduation from law school in
1979 Clark decided to specialize in CRIMINAL
LAW. Her life changed rapidly. In 1980, she married
Gordon Clark, a computer engineer and an
executive in the Church of Scientology, and took
his name. She had recently joined the Los Angeles
firm of Brodey and Price as a junior attorney
but the job did not suit her: she strongly disliked
defending violent suspects and soon came to a
personal crossroads. The turning point was her
involvement in the defense of James Holiday, a
man accused of fatally stabbing a woman he had
lured into his car. So disturbing was the case to
Clark that she believed herself incapable of completing
a legal brief for him. But she did the
work and won; the case was thrown out of court
for lack of evidence and Holiday walked. Afterward,
confronting her boss with her deep misgivings,
Clark was advised to consider a career
change. She took this recommendation, and in
1981 the Los Angeles district attorney’s office
hired her.
The new assistant district attorney assumed
her duties in the Culver City, California, courthouse
with enthusiasm. She knew that her sympathies
lay with VICTIMS OF CRIME and it only
remained for her to prove herself as a prosecutor.
Working with another assistant district
attorney, Clark successfully tried several murder
suspects over the next four years. These cases
established her reputation for thorough preparation
and toughness in court. In 1985, she won
convictions in a lurid case involving the double
murders of a college couple,Michelle Ann Boyd
and Brian Harris, by four inner-city youths, convincing
one of the murderers to testify against
his friends. If tough guys did not intimidate her,
neither did high-powered defense attorneys. In a
case that anticipated their matchup in the Simpson
trial, she faced off successfully against noted
California defense attorney ROBERT L. SHAPIRO
who ultimately entered a plea bargain for his
client, Theodore Pacheco, an estranged husband
accused of storming into his wife’s home with a
shotgun and killing her friend.
Clark’s success quickly came to the attention
of the district attorney’s office. In 1985, she got a
considerable career boost when she was assigned
to work with veteran Los Angeles prosecutor
Harvey Giss on the James Hawkins murder case.
Hawkins, an African American who worked at
his father’s grocery store in Watts, had shot a
street gang member.Hawkins said he intervened
to stop the gangster from harassing a woman
and her five children; the shooting, he claimed,
was accidental. Turning him into an overnight
folk hero, the media and community leaders
praised him for fighting back against criminals.
But investigators believed that he had simply
shot a rival gang member. In 1987, in part
because of Clark’s skillful presentation of gun
ballistics evidence, she and Giss won a conviction
on not one but two charges of murder. Her
success against Hawkins’s top-notch defense
team, headed by Los Angeles attorney Barry
Levin, did not go unnoticed. “She was born to be
a trial prosecutor,” Levin later told the San Jose
Mercury News. “She’s tenacious, she’s ethical,
she’s highly competent, she’s prepared.”
Clark’s reputation continued to grow, not
simply because she won cases but because of
how she won them. She was innovative and daring,
as the Rebecca Schaeffer murder case
revealed. After slaying the young TV actress in California in 1989, John Bardo, an emotionally
disturbed Arizona man who stalked celebrities,
fled back to Arizona where he was arrested. His
public defender fought Clark’s request for
Bardo’s extradition—but filed pleadings in the
wrong Arizona court. Clark capitalized on his
legal error by dispatching detectives at the
eleventh hour to return Bardo to Los Angeles to
stand trial. The action provoked controversy, but
Clark withstood it, supported by Los Angeles
district attorney Ira Reiner who praised her tactics
and understanding of the law. The successful
prosecution of Bardo in 1991 involved keen
preparation that undermined the testimony of
the defense’s star witness, a psychiatrist who
argued that Bardo had shot the actress in a fit of
anger. Chipping away at the expert’s testimony,
Clark proved that the murder had been premeditated.
Later, superior court judge Dino Fulgoni
publicly complimented her on her trial preparation
skills. Bardo’s public defender was ambivalent;
having refused to enter any plea for his
client in protest of the surprise EXTRADITION,
he later told the Los Angeles Daily News that
Clark was “very aggressive, but she’s always very
well-prepared, very professional in her presentation.”
By the time of O. J. Simpson’s arrest on suspicion
of murder in mid-1994, Clark was highly
qualified to bring the state’s case against him.
She had a record of 19 successful homicide prosecutions.
She had matched abilities with star
defense attorneys.Moreover, her ability to win a
case in court using highly detailed, complex scientific
evidence was proved; she had, after all,
won the conviction of murderer Christopher
Johnson in 1991 on the strength of a single drop
of blood found in his car, establishing a link to
Johnson through DNA comparisons with blood
of the victim and of the victim’s living relatives.
In addition, Clark was already recognized as a
victim advocate who went out of her way to
forge close ties to victims’ families. Early in the
case against Simpson, she endeavored to build
public sympathy for the slain Nicole Brown
Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman. “We have
two young people whose lives stretched out
before them,with all the possibilities,” she said at
a press conference in June 1994. “These two
young victims have been murdered in a brutal
and horrible way.”
The Simpson trial earned Clark mixed
reviews. At first, legal analysts generally
approved of the prosecution’s strategy although
sometimes not of Clark’s tactics. In the long,
frustrating case, Clark readily held her own
against Simpson’s celebrated defense team in
their many biting exchanges. Even from the
beginning, Clark sparred with Shapiro as each
warned the other not to try to direct her or his
case. Yet, as the weeks wore on, she did not
always come out favorably in the eyes of Judge
Lance Ito, who sometimes admonished her for
inappropriate remarks in court. Clark and lead
defense attorney JOHNNIE L. COCHRAN JR., battled
passionately over the admissibility of certain
evidence, but it was with attorneys F. LEE
BAILEY and Barry Scheck that she fought most
bitterly. In court, she likened Bailey to a bizarre
character out of the novel Alice in Wonderland,
and after a query from Scheck, she exploded,
“There is no lawyer with half a brain, with an IQ
above five, who would not have known that such
a question was improper.”
Given the extraordinary attention paid to
the trial, it was inevitable that Clark herself came
under exacting scrutiny. Her new status as the
best-known woman attorney in the nation carried certain liabilities. Her gender opened her to
peculiar criticism: initially, critics jumped on
her decision to wear what the media called short
skirts. When she changed clothes and hairstyle,
the criticism sharpened. Clark took the advice of
jury specialists (consultants who advise attorneys
on the subtleties of body language, clothing,
and speech) who had recommended that
she soften her image to be more appealing to
jurors. Feminist critics generally sympathized
with her but called the need to change her
appearance offensive. Susan Estrich, a University
of Southern California law professor, told the
Boston Globe, “This woman is in the business of
prosecuting murderers, and the notion that she
has to do it wearing pink is a stunning indictment
of how far we’ve come in terms of equal
rights.” “She’s not going to a tea party, after all,”
observed GLORIA ALLRED, president of the
Women’s Equal Rights Legal Defense and Education
Fund. Clark also became the focus of discussion
about working mothers, after Gordon
Clark, from whom she was divorced in 1994,
sued for custody of their two children, alleging
that she had no time left over from the Simpson
trial to care for them.
On July 6, 1995, after five and a half months,
the prosecution rested its case. The numbers
were staggering: Clark and fellow prosecutors
had presented 58 witnesses over 92 days of testimony
with 488 exhibits—at a minimum
expense to Los Angeles County of $5.69 million.
As expected, defense attorney Cochran immediately
filed a motion to have the case dismissed,
arguing that the prosecution had failed to prove
its case; the motion failed. If any consensus
emerged among legal analysts, it was that the
prosecution had presented too much CIRCUMSTANTIAL
EVIDENCE, much of which defense
attorneys had apparently been able to discredit.
Standing by his prosecutors, Los Angeles district
attorney Gil Garcetti told reporters, “The mountain,
truly the giant mountain of evidence that
we have produced in court over these many
weeks, points to only one person, and we know
who that person is.” Esquire magazine named
Clark its Woman of the Year for 1995, and speculation
immediately began about whether she
would continue her career as a prosecutor or
pursue movie offers.
In October 1995, O.J. Simpson was acquitted.
The jury verdict stunned the prosecution
and strained race relations throughout the
country. Immediately afterwards, Clark took a
leave of absence and ultimately resigned from
the district attorney’s office in 1997. She began a
series of speaking engagements that continues to
this day.
In 1997, Clark published her book about the
trial. Cowritten with Teresa Carpenter, Without
a Doubt describes the Simpson trial as well as
the experiences that brought Clark to her role as
prosecuting attorney. The book immediately hit
the best-seller lists where it remained for a number
of weeks. Since then Clark has appeared as
legal commentator on a number of TV and
radio shows.

FURTHER READINGS
Clark,Marcia, and Teresa Carpenter. 1997.Without a Doubt.
New York: Viking.
Linedecker, Clifford L. 1995.Marcia Clark: Her Private Trials
and Public Triumphs. New York: Pinnacle Books.

CROSS-REFERENCES
Simpson, O. J.