WHO DROPPED THE BALL? : TOOBIN TELLS TALE BEHIND VERDICT IN SIMPSON TRIAL.

Byline: Michiko Kakutani The New York Times

Title: ``The Run of His Life: The People vs. O.J Simpson''

Author: Jeffrey Toobin 

Data: 466 pages, Random House; $25

Our rating: Four stars

If you're not already sick and tired of the O.J. Simpson trial and want an intelligent retrospective on the whole depressing case, then this is the book to read: ``The Run of His Life,'' by Jeffrey Toobin, the New Yorker writer who broke the story back in July 1994 that the Simpson defense team intended to play the race card.

Although Toobin once worked as an assistant U.S. attorney in Brooklyn, N.Y., he does not write like a typical lawyer: His prose is fluent, direct and supple, his assessments pithy and succinct.

In the course of this book, Toobin obviously retraces a lot of terribly familiar ground, but in doing so, he uses his legal expertise to assess defense and prosecution strategies, highlight crucial developments and sketch in the background of principal players in such a way that their stories create a mosaic of life in the city of Los Angeles.

``The Run of His Life'' also contains some startling assertions, including Toobin's claim that Simpson was told of the not-guilty verdict the night before it was announced in the courtroom: the sheriff's deputies guarding the jury, he says, leaked the news to their colleagues guarding the defendant.

Toobin pulls no punches in this book. He is convinced that O.J. Simpson is guilty of murdering his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Lyle Goldman, and he argues that ``any rational analysis of the events and evidence in question leads to that conclusion.''

In addition to reviewing the enormous amount of physical and blood evidence presented at the trial, Toobin points out that Simpson had a violent relationship with his ex-wife for years, that he had no persuasive alibi for the time of the murders and that the police conspiracy alleged by the defense would have had to be spectacularly wide-ranging and adept in the face of ``the most relentless media scrutiny in American legal history.''

So why was Simpson acquitted? In Toobin's view, two reasons stand out: ``The prosecution's arrogance led it to disaster. The defense's obsession with race led it to victory.''

It is Toobin's contention that Simpson's lawyers, Robert Shapiro and Johnnie Cochran Jr., knew their client was guilty from the start. Toobin writes that Shapiro said to friends, ``Of course he did it,'' and that before signing on to the defense team, Cochran told a friend: ``He obviously did it. He should do a diminished-capacity plea and he might have a chance to get out in a reasonable amount of time.''

Although Shapiro would later try to distance himself from the defense team's use of the race card, Toobin writes that Shapiro advocated a race-based strategy ``from practically the day Simpson was arrested,'' a strategy that Cochran later ``embellished even beyond the original conception.'' Simpson, who once said ``I'm not black, I'm O.J.,'' was one of the few people, says Toobin, who failed to understand ``the nature of the defense strategy''; he initially wanted Gerry Spence, and what Toobin calls his ``corn-pone charm,'' to defend him instead of Cochran. According to Toobin, Simpson ``was an uneducated, semi-literate ex-athlete who could barely understand much about the legal proceedings against him.''

The heart of the defense strategy, Toobin argues, ``featured an effort at public storytelling, the creation of a counternarrative based on the idea of a police conspiracy to frame Simpson.''

``For this effort,'' he goes on, ``the defense needed a receptive audience, which it most definitely had in the African-Americans who dominated the jury pool in downtown Los Angeles. The defense strategy played to experiences that were anything but fictional - above all, the decades of racism in and by the Los Angeles Police Department. The defense sought to identify the Simpson case as the latest in a series of racial abuses by the LAPD, which featured such celebrated outrages as the Rodney King case and thousands of other insults and affronts great and small.''

If the Simpson defense team was shameless in its manipulation of racial tensions, Toobin suggests, the prosecution was thoroughly inept, doomed by arrogance, bumbling and plain bad luck. Toobin notes that in the first (and only) Los Angeles police interview with Simpson, the detectives Philip Vannatter and Tom Lange treated the suspect with ``astonishing deference,'' allowing him to give ``vague and even nonsensical answers'' that would be of little use to the prosecution.

Toobin also writes that the lead prosecutor, Marcia Clark, willfully ignored the advice of a jury consultant, Donald Vinson, who warned that African-Americans (and African-American women in particular) tended to be supportive of Simpson. During jury selection, Toobin observes, the prosecution did not even exercise all 20 of its peremptory challenges. The final jury included five people who said that they or a family member had had a negative experience with law enforcement, five who thought it acceptable to use force on a family member, and nine who thought O.J. Simpson was less likely to have murdered his wife because he had excelled at football.

Toobin further argues that the prosecution's decision to forgo the death penalty ``yielded an important strategic advantage'' because jurors who say they are willing to consider the death penalty are ``well known for being more likely to convict.''

Almost no one comes off well in ``The Run of His Life'': not the defense, not the prosecution, not the police and certainly not the Given the abusive history of the Los Angeles police, given Fuhrman's role in the case and most of all given the Simpson defense team's relentless pursuit of a race-based strategy, Toobin concludes, ``it is not surprising that black jurors decided to punish the police for its sorry past and that, alas, O.J. Simpson turned out to be the undeserving beneficiary of this ignoble tale.''

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Photo: O.J. Simpson ``was an uneducated, semi-literate ex-a thlete who could barely understand much about the legal proceedings against him,'' Jeffrey Toobin writes in his new book, ``The Run of His Life: The People vs. O.J Simpson.''