Christopher Darden

The O.J. Simpson murder trial was abruptly halted yesterday, with one lawyer hospitalized for chest pains and several others at one another's throats in an extraordinary eruption of accusations and personal animosity that could haunt the case for months to come. As prosecutor William Hodgman underwent testing after a stressful battle with defense lawyers the day before, fellow prosecutor Christopher Darden took up the fight yesterday, accusing the defense of "sandbagging us" with last- minute witnesses he labeled a collection of "heroin addicts, thieves, felons" and "a court-certified pathological liar.

The O.J. Simpson murder trial got off to a tumultuous start yesterday with prosecutors vowing to expose "the real O.J. Simpson" as a "a wife beater, an abuser, a controller" who killed his ex-wife, Nicole, rather than set her free. Aided by gruesome crime-scene photographs displayed publicly for the first time, prosecutors chronicled the Simpsons' stormy 17-year relationship and declared that a trail of bloodstains, shoe prints and fibers tied O.J. Simpson to the June 12 stabbing deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman.

The issue of race, long an undercurrent in the O.J. Simpson murder case, burst dramatically to the surface yesterday as opposing black lawyers clashed in an emotional debate over what role race should play in the football superstar's trial. In an extraordinary attack, black prosecutor Christopher Darden accused Simpson defense lawyer Johnnie Cochran Jr., who also is black, of trying to "play the race card" to distract black jurors from the larger question of whether Simpson is guilty.