Cochran's position at the district attorney's office did not spare him a brush with racist police. One afternoon as he drove his two young daughters across town in his Rolls Royce, he was pulled over. The police yelled at him to get out of the car with his hands up, and when he did he could see that they had drawn their guns.
Suddenly this cop goes gray. He sees my number three badge from the D. He's like, 'Ahh! I never got stopped again, but I'm careful not to make any weird moves. I might get shot! Cochran never publicized the incident, but he was deeply disturbed about its effect on his two daughters. So I tried to smooth things over. And you don't want them to feel hatred.
Returning to private practice in , Cochran established himself as "the best in the West," to quote Ebony magazine. One of his first major victories occurred in the case of Ron Settles, a college football player who police said had hanged himself in a jail cell after having been picked up for speeding. On behalf of Settles' family, Cochran demanded that the athlete's body be exhumed and examined.
A coroner determined that Settles had been strangled by a police choke hold. Essence reporter Diane Weathers wrote: "Cochran is not just another rich celebrity lawyer. His specialty is suing City Hall on behalf of many fameless people who don't sing, dance or score touchdowns and who have been framed, beaten up, shot at, humiliated and sometimes killed at the hands of the notorious LAPD.
Success bred success for Cochran. The Settles case was followed by another emotional case in which an off-duty police officer molested a teenager and threatened her with bodily harm if she told anyone. As Cochran's fame grew, his client list began to include more celebrities, which included pop singer Michael Jackson.
On Jackson's behalf, Cochran arranged an out-of-court settlement with a boy who had accused the singer of molestation. Cochran had the case retired in such a way that the charges against Jackson were withdrawn, and Jackson could publicly proclaim his complete innocence. Cochran also engineered an acquittal for Diff'rent Strokes star Todd Bridges, who stood accused of attempted murder.
No celebrity trial was more closely followed than O. Simpson's trial, however. In the summer of , Simpson was arrested and charged with the murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ron Goldman. Simpson declared that he was innocent, and he engaged Cochran as part of an expensive "dream team" of lawyers dedicated to his defense.
Before long, Cochran had replaced Robert Shapiro as leader of the "dream team" as the matter was brought to trial. Calling the O. Simpson trial a "classic rush-to-judgment case," Cochran vowed to win an acquittal for the football star-turned-television celebrity. Responding to questions about the nickname for his legal team, Cochran told Time : "We certainly don't refer to ourselves as the Dream Team. We're just a collection of lawyers …trying to do the best we can.
One week into the Simpson trial in February of , Time reported that Cochran had "unveiled an unexpectedly strong defense. Piece by piece he challenged the evidence, paying special attention to the racist attitudes of one of the investigating officers, Mark Fuhrman.
Cochran was effective—and controversial—in his closing arguments on Simpson's behalf. He claimed his client had been framed by a racist police officer, and that if such injustice were allowed to persist, it could lead to genocide as practiced by Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. Speaking to the jury, Cochran concluded: "If you don't speak out, if you don't stand up, if you don't do what's right, this kind of conduct will continue on forever.
Observers called Cochran's remarks the "race card," and some castigated the attorney for proceeding in this manner. Cochran offered no apologies for his strategy, claiming that his scenario represented the truth as he saw it.
People don't want to face up to the fact that we do have some racial divisions. After handling the post-trial publicity, Cochran returned to other cases, including pending civil litigation against Simpson. The trial had a huge impact on Cochran's life. Once a celebrity lawyer only in Los Angeles, he became a celebrity lawyer across America. Cochran had his share of negative publicity as well. His first wife, Barbara Berry Cochran, wrote a memoir during the Simpson trial in which she accused Cochran of abuse and infidelity.
I would like young lawyers not to make the mistakes I made. He also began appearing regularly on the Courtroom Television Network first as a co-contributor on the show Court TV: Inside America's Courts and then on his own show a few years later. Many people speculated that Cochran might retire after settling the Pratt case, as he had off-handedly commented on many occasions, but Cochran forged ahead in his fight against police and governmental abuse against African Americans.
In early he took on the case of four men who were shot by New Jersey police during what Cochran called a "racial profiling" traffic stop. Johnnie Cochran, Jr. While the Assistant D. Cochran left the D. The day of the low-speed Bronco chase to the Rockingham mansion, Cochran was scheduled by the television show Nightline as a legal expert to comment on the developments of the day.
While on camera, Cochran declared Simpson to be "presumed innocent. He sought not only justice for victims, but to set precedent and evoke real change in the legal system. His legacy is today carried on by the hundreds of experienced attorneys working in the many offices of The Cochran Firm throughout the United States.
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