On July 28, 1995, Forsyth County Superior Court Judge William Z. Wood, Jr., ruled against O. J. Simpson’s attorneys, holding that aspiring screenwriter Laura Hart McKinney did not have to turn over her taped interviews with Los Angeles police officer Mark Fuhrman and others.
Professor McKinney of the North Carolina School of the Arts, who was working on a screenplay and novel about women police officers, conducted the interviews about the work of LAPD officers between 1985 and 1994. She had amassed about 13 hours of tapes in which Fuhrman repeatedly used racial slurs and made remarks about police brutality, planting of evidence and harassment of female officers.
Fuhrman later became a central figure in the O. J. Simpson trial after he found a bloody glove at the murder site on Simpson’s estate. Simpson’s defense team argued that the glove was planted and sought to use the tapes to bolster their argument as well as to prove that Furman perjured himself by denying his use of racial slurs.
The following month, Simpson’s North Carolina lawyers, Kenneth B. Spaulding and Joseph B. Cheshire V, successfully appealed the decision to the North Carolina Court of Appeals on the grounds that it interfered with the defendant’s right to a fair trial.
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