Tumor kills the man who got O.J. acquitted

Formidable in court, he fought for the famous and the obscure.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
LOS ANGELES -- 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 Tuesday 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 two sisters were with him at the time of his death.
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.
His clients weren't always black -- he unsuccessfully represented Reginald Denny, the white trucker beaten by a mob during the 1991 riots that followed the verdict of not guilty in the trial of police officers charged with assaulting Rodney King. Instead of arguing, as he often did, that police had been brutal on the job, Cochran contended that the trucker's civil rights had been violated because police didn't do their jobs when they withdrew from a South Los Angeles intersection where rioting was fierce and Denny was beaten.
Revered in community
By the time Simpson was accused of murder in 1994, Cochran was "larger than life" in the city's black community, said Kerman Maddox, a political consultant and longtime Los Angeles resident. After Simpson, that profile would expand, earning him new admirers as well as new detractors who considered him a racially polarizing force.
His successful defense of Simpson against charges of murdering his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Ronald Lyle Goldman, a waiter and friend of Nicole's, vaulted him to the rank of celebrity, beseeched by autograph-seekers and parodied on "Saturday Night Live" and "Seinfeld."
Resplendently tailored and silky-voiced, clever and genteel, Cochran came to epitomize the formidable litigator, sought after by the famous and wealthy, the obscure and struggling, all believing they were victims of the system in one way or another.
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.
The eldest child of four, Cochran was born in a charity hospital in Shreveport, La.
Focused on law
Cochran grew up wanting to be a lawyer. After graduating from the University of California, Los Angeles, Cochran earned a law degree from Loyola Marymount University in 1962. The summer after his first year in law school, he married Barbara Berry.
The couple had two daughters -- Melodie and Tiffany -- when the marriage ended in divorce. He later had a relationship with Patricia Sikora, who bore him his son, Jonathan.
In the middle of his rise as an attorney, his personal life took a turn. As an airport commissioner, he was attending a 1981 conference when he met Dale Mason, an executive for an Atlanta-based concessionaire. Cochran and Mason, 13 years his junior, were married at the Bel Air Hotel in 1985.
Mason survives him, as does his son, Jonathan Cochran; daughters, Tiffany Cochran Edwards and Melodie; and sisters Pearl Baker and Martha Jean Sherrard.