Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,945

This is the grave of Johnnie Cochran.

“If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit!”

There is no other way to start any piece on Johnnie Cochran, who became the most notorious lawyer in the 1990s when he got OJ Simpson off from a murder he obviously committed.

Born in 1937 in Shreveport, Louisiana, Cochran grew up in a middle class Black family. His father was an insurance salesman and his mother sold cosmetics. They moved to Los Angeles during World War II, as did so many Black families. Cochran was a very good student, finishing as the valedictorian in high school. He went to UCLA and got a degree in business economics in 1959 and then went on to Loyola Law, finishing there in 1962. He passed the bar shortly after. He always claimed his model and hero was Thurgood Marshall. Could be true, could be the self-mythologizing that Cochran was far from immune to. He got a job as a deputy city attorney and started making a name for himself prosecuting high profile cases. That started with Lenny Bruce, as the authorities hounded him into the grave for obscenity as they tried to stop the 1960s from happening. OK sure, Bruce didn’t help himself here, but still, it’s a remarkable moment in that the authorities so clearly saw Bruce as an attack on basic decency and themselves holding back the tide. Cochran helped lead the prosecution on Bruce in 1964. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of evidence that Cochran was exactly reflective of his role there. After all, it was good for Johnnie Cochran.

In 1966, Cochran started his own practice and he found himself quite a niche–taking on high profile cases that would motivate the Black community of Los Angeles to see him as their champion in the legal system. This was cynical stuff, but of course there was a market for this. Given that the LAPD saw the Black community as nothing but people to beat on, there was a lot of police brutality out there and who better to represent victims of this than Johnnie Cochran? He rose in the Black community this way through the 70s. In 1978, he returned to the District Attorney’s office in order to build up his political connections. He didn’t just want to be a defense attorney. He wanted to be a powerful man. He had gone as far as he could in his practice and so doing some prosecutions would be good for him moving forward. Cochran never forgot that what really mattered was himself.

In 1983, Cochran started a new private practice. He now knew everyone and could call in favors. So he promoted himself by taking on a combination of police brutality cases, high profile tort cases, and personal work for his rich friends. He was absolutely loaded and let everyone know how rich he was–if you were to hire a lawyer, wouldn’t a super pricey suit and a Rolls Royce let you know that his price was worth the money? Well, for a lot of people it did.

This gambit wouldn’t have worked if Cochran was not a highly skilled trial lawyer. He continued to make his name as the go-to big shot lawyer in the Black community when he got Geronimo Platt out of prison, the wrongly convicted Panther thrown into the clink for being a Black radical during Hoover’s COINTELPRO program. I assume COINTELPRO is already being revived in the Trump administration to include anyone left of Susan Collins. Luminaries no less than Jesse Jackson called Cochran “the people’s lawyer.” Whether representing Michael Jackson on his child molestation charges was an act of the people is a question you all can answer, but Michael paid, that’s for sure. Them suits weren’t cheap.

We don’t really need to go too into the OJ trial here, but let’s just say that the glove gambit was absolutely brilliant. When the defense was able to get this whole farce on TV, they had more or less already won. The glove thing was ridiculous–OJ was wearing a glove over a glove! And unquestionably he was told by Cochran to make it look hard. Moreover this was 1995. The Black community in LA was furious at the LAPD for the Rodney King beating. It was going to get no favors from a mostly Black jury. Even Robert Shapiro was made uncomfortable by Cochran repeatedly saying this was racism against the Juice. The fact that OJ had spent his entire life running away from being Black made this all even more rich. But then the LAPD was of course racist as living fuck and Mark Fuhrman just reinforced it all.

A few years after the acquittal, I was working for a summer at the Martin Luther King National Historic Site in Atlanta. Most of the other staffers were Black, as you’d expect. I was chatting with one woman about my age and this came up and she noted that the real impact of the OJ trial was that it showed white people that the legal system didn’t work. After all, she pointed out, Black people always knew that verdicts hardly ever had anything to do with whether someone was actually guilty or innocent. This has stuck with me for the last 25 years because it was inarguably true.

Getting OJ off was a massive miscarriage of justice, but hey, that was Cochran’s job. It certainly made him even more famous. Let’s not forget the character of Jackie Chiles in Seinfeld, just the most prominent example of how Cochran informed popular culture. After the NYPD engaged in their grotesque fascist assault of Abner Louima, Cochran got called into the defense team. It didn’t go that well in that Louima’s original lawyers accused Cochran of bigfooting them, but of course he did, why else are you going to call in the most famous lawyer in America? And he got Louima a very large settlement.

By 2000, Cochran was aging and thought about retirement. He took on Sean Combs’ bribery and stolen weapons case and got him off. And then P-Diddy never did anything wrong again….But he decided to retire after that. He had plenty of offers of course. Both Allen Iverson and R. Kelly asked him to represent them but he demurred.

Good thing too because Cochran didn’t have long to live. He developed a brain tumor in 2003. It was knocked out but as happens, it came back and the second time he couldn’t beat it. He died in 2005. Hew was 67 years old.

Johnnie Cochran is buried in Inglewood Park Cemetery, Inglewood, California.

If you would like this series to visit other figures from OJ trial, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. I’ve already covered Robert Kardashian, so this is becoming a thing. OJ does not have a grave, which is a bummer. F. Lee Bailey is in Canton, Georgia and Linda Deutsch is in Hollywood. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.