Barry Scheck

Jurors Cooley, Bess, and Rubin-Jackson wrote in A Rush to Judgement? that Barry Scheck was the most persuasive attorney at the trial.[6] However, Vincent Bugliosi,[7] Darnel M. Hunt,[8] Daniel M. Petrocelli,[9] and defense witness Henry Lee all wrote that Scheck made many factually false claims about the physical evidence.[10] Lee wrote in Blood Evidence: How DNA is Revolutionizing the Way We Solve Crimes (2003) that both of the defense's forensic DNA experts, Lee and Edward Blake, had rejected Scheck’s argument that the mistakes made during evidence collection rendered the results unreliable and his contamination claim.[11][12] Hunt wrote in O. J. Simpson Facts and Fictions: News Rituals in the Construction of Reality that Scheck "floated ridiculous conspiracy theories to the jury".[13] Jeffrey Toobin wrote in The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson that "the most remarkable thing was that Scheck actually accomplished this goal...Schecks arguments presupposed a conspiracy so immense within the LAPD that, analyzed objectively, it seemed a practical impossibility but Scheck made his theories real for the jury and for that reason he was primarily responsible for that verdict."[14]

Scheck argued that 100% of the DNA from the evidence samples was lost due to bacterial degradation because the swatches were collected and packaged in plastic bags, not paper bags as recommended, and then stored in a police van without being refrigerated for up to seven hours. The evidence samples were then cross-contaminated with DNA from Simpson, Nicole Brown, and Ron Goldman's reference vial being transferred to all but three evidence items. The remaining three exhibits were planted by police and thus fraudulent.[15][11] Lee wrote in Blood Evidence that most of the blood evidence was sent directly to the consulting labs and not the LAPD crime lab, where Scheck alleged the evidence was contaminated. Since all of the samples the consulting labs received were testable despite none of those samples having been "contaminated" in the LAPD crime lab, that conclusively disproves Scheck's claim that 100% of the DNA had been lost due to degradation because those samples should have been inconclusive. Lee writes that this also effectively refutes the contamination claim as well because if the evidence samples were not 100% degraded and were contaminated with Simpson's DNA in the LAPD crime lab, the result would be a mixture of Simpson's DNA and the real killer's DNA but the results only showed Simpson's DNA was present.[16]

Lee explains in Blood Evidence why he rejected Scheck’s contamination claim. Scheck claimed that contamination could happen from repeated use of the reagents for Amplification but all the reagents tested negative for contamination.[17] Petrocelli wrote in Triumph of Justice that Scheck’s witness John Gerdes lied when he said that Collin Yamauchi spilled Simpson's blood in the lab.[18][19] Scheck then suggested that the victims blood in the Bronco could be the result of contamination in the LAPD crime lab but Lee wrote in Blood Evidence the second collection from the Bronco returned the same matches as the first collection, proving they weren't contaminates.[20] M. L. Rantala wrote in OJ Unmasked that Scheck implied that the evidence locker was in the PCR amplification room when he had Gerdes testify that Yamauchi took the PCR extraction product back to "the same location"[18] so his contamination claim would be plausible.[21] Lee wrote in Blood Evidence that "Gerdes conceded the PCR extraction product was not returned to the specific area near the extraction room or evidence-handling area but was taken to a completely separate area located a comfortable distance away making a contamination scenario highly improbable".[22][23] Scheck also contradicted himself when he claimed it was impossible to distinguish blood from the reference vials from blood from the body[24][25] despite demonstrating just that the week prior using EDTA.[26][27] Scheck argued that all of the contamination occurred through random carelessness in the lab and but the only three valid matches were the same three the defense claimed were planted[28][29] while the remaining 58 matches were all false positives[30] despite that never having happened before.[31] The substrate controls that are used to determine if contamination like he was suggesting occurred were also coincidentally all false negatives so Scheck was claiming that the contamination only got on the evidence items despite they and the substrate controls all being handled interchangeably at the same time.[32] Clinical molecular geneticist Dr. Brad Popovich called Schecks claims "ridiculous".[33] Lee published "A Systematic Analysis of PCR Contamination" which concluded that "no significant contamination occurs from random carelessness".[34]

In Triumph of Justice: Closing the Book on the O.J. Simpson Saga, Petrocelli explains how he disproved all of Scheck's blood planting claims.[35][36] Scheck implied that Vannatter could have planted Simpson's blood at the crime scene when he returned later that evening to Simpson's home to deliver his blood reference vial to Dennis Fung but the crime scene is actually at Nicole Brown's home.[37] Scheck then suggested that another police officer could have "sprinkled Simpson's blood at the crime scene" but the prosecution demonstrated that the blood was photographed being there prior to Simpsons blood being drawn by the nurse.[38] Scheck then implied that Vannatter could have planted the victims blood in the Bronco when he returned to Simpson's home but the Bronco had been impounded prior to his arrival and wasn't even there.[39] Scheck then claimed that the results from the second Bronco collection were unreliable because the car had been burglarized but the DNA matches are the same before and afterwards, disproving that claim.[40][41] Scheck then produced two witnesses who claimed there was no blood in the impounded Bronco implying it was planted afterwards but the prosecution produced photographs of the blood in the impounded Bronco, disproving that claim.[42][43] Christopher Darden wrote in In Contempt that nearly all of Scheck's blood planting claims were originally made by Stephen Singular in his book proposal for Legacy of Deception: An Investigation of Mark Fuhrman and Racism in the L.A.P.D. The key difference is that he claimed that Fuhrman, not Vannatter, planted all of the blood evidence.[44] Singular cited an unnamed source in the LAPD but both Johnnie Cochran and Carl Douglas dismissed Singulars claims because Fuhrman never had access to Simpson's reference vial.[45]

In 2014, Scheck acknowledged that public perception of defense attorneys changed as a result of the trial.[46] Scheck came under enormous pressure to justify his claims at trial after members of the defense and the media were giving him the credit for the acquittal[47] but he and Peter Neufeld are the only two attorneys from the trial to not publish any books about the case.[48]