Declaring FBI scientist Roger Martz a hostile witness didn't help. Neither did sharp questioning by defense attorney Robert Blasier.
Jurors in the O.J. Simpson trial had long since checked out.Over and over again, Martz testified that his tests showed no signs of a police crime lab preservative in blood on a crime-scene gate and a sock at Simpson's mansion.
Blasier hammered Martz from all directions Wednesday, questioning his measuring abilities, ridiculing his ignorance of the math number pi, branding him a prosecution hack and suggesting he was so dumb he couldn't use a calculator.
And still Martz remained firm.
"I was able to determine the bloodstains on the sock and the gate did not come from preserved blood," he said, debunking the defense claim that the presence of the preservative, EDTA, means the blood was taken from tubes at the crime lab and planted by police.
This was the umpteenth time he testified that he found no significant levels of EDTA in the evidence blood, and jurors had stopped paying close attention.
They took hardly any notes during Blasier's sharp redirect questioning, which took the form of a cross-examination since the judge granted a defense request to declare Martz a hostile witness. They took even fewer notes when prosecutor Marcia Clark tried to rehabilitate him.
Mostly, they appeared bored, staring into space, distracted at the smallest noise in the courtroom. Their attention waned even though it was a half day in court, the morning session canceled so the judge and attorneys could attend the funeral of a murdered bailiff.
With Martz's testimony complete, the trial's focus moves back to the bloody gloves in evidence.
Herbert MacDonell, a blood spatter expert, was the next witness on the defense list Wednesday. He was expected to shoot down the prosecution theory that the evidence gloves didn't fit Simpson in a courtroom demonstration because of shrinkage from being soaked in blood.
Also on Wednesday's agenda were legal arguments on whether the judge should bar testimony on whether detective Mark Fuhrman is a racist, whether the defense must hand over a tape of a message left by Simpson on a cheerleader's answering machine the night of the murders, and whether the head of the crime lab should have to testify about an alleged news leak.