Former detective Mark Fuhrman was charged Wednesday with felony perjury for allegedly lying when he said during the O.J. Simpson trial that he hadn't used a racial slur against blacks in the past decade.
The charge was filed amid reports the retired detective would enter into a plea agreement. An arraignment was set for Wednesday in Municipal Court."(He) did willfully and contrary to such oath, state as true a material matter which he knew to be false," the court complaint said.
The complaint said the perjury came March 15, 1995, during Fuhrman's testimony "that he had not addressed any black person as a `nigger' or spoken about black people as `niggers' in the last 10 years."
A perjury conviction carries a maximum penalty of four years in prison.
A message left with the answering service of Darryl Mounger, Fuhrman's lawyer, was not returned Wednesday.
Fuhrman, who said he found a glove on Simpson's estate covered with the blood of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, was perhaps the prosecution's biggest embarrassment in Simpson's murder trial.
Four defense witnesses contradicted that testimony, including an aspiring screenwriter who testified that Fuhrman said the word at least 41 times on tapes they made while working on a screenplay over the previous decade. Jurors were played one example of the word on the tapes.
Superior Court Judge Lance Ito barred the defense from introducing other evidence of alleged racism, including records of Fuhrman's 1981 disability hearing.
During the trial, District Attorney Gil Garcetti's office argued that Fuhrman's comments were immaterial to the question of whether Simpson was guilty or not guilty.
State Attorney General Dan Lungren began an investigation in November after the district attorney's office bowed out.