OJ Simpson

[cruororism]

The Murder of Nicole Brown
Just like the footage from a real-life cop show, the police and camera crews flew overhead in helicopters, filming the car chase below and beaming pictures back into the television sets of millions of American homes.

As a whole nation stood watching, a white Ford Bronco driven by OJ Simpson drove 60 miles along a highway in Southern California pursued by a slow moving procession of police squad cars and reporters.

Viewers across the country stopped what they were doing and watched spellbound as the chase continued.

Excitable crowds of spectators alerted by the crackling wires of television and radio lined the sides of the road and overhead bridges, shouting and cheering as the bizarre convoy of hunted ex-pro footballer and movie star, pursuant LAPD vehicles, and jubilant media circus passed by at a sedate 40 miles per hour. It was as if an impromptu carnival was taking place.

At the head of the convoy, a suicidal OJ Simpson - football star turned broadcaster turned murder suspect - sat in the passenger seat holding a gun to his head as his friend Al Cowling drove.

The Ford Bronco continued, hazard lights flashing, into the city of Los Angeles, headed west towards the Pacific Ocean, and finally came to a halt in the driveway of Simpson's home. A small army of police officers awaited the 46-year-old Simpson, arresting him as helicopters fluttered noisily overhead.

Then the circus really began.

The murder
A dog, its belly and paws matted in blood, first alerted neighbours to the two badly mutilated bodies in the garden of the salubrious west Los Angeles home.

It was a discovery that would spark a murder trial that would obsess the world's media, grip the American public, destroy more than one professional career, and alter forever the way people looked at race in America.


In the early hours of June 13th 1994, Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers arrived at the murder scene. A woman lay, sprawled face down in a lake of blood that had poured from wounds in her upper body and throat. To her right lay the blood-soaked body of a man, crumpled against a garden fence.

They were later identified as the corpses of Nicole Brown Simpson, the owner of the building and ex-wife of Orenthal James Simpson, retired football player and sports newscaster, and Ron Goldman, her friend.

As LAPD officers began gathering evidence and cordoning off the crime scene, Nicole Simpson's two young children, nine-year-old Sidney and six-year-old Justin, lay fast asleep in an upstairs bedroom. The officers woke them, got them dressed and arranged for them to be taken to the West Los Angeles Division to await formal identification by a family member.

A tragic pairing
Nicole Simpson was18 years old and working as a waitress in a Beverly Hills nightclub when she met OJ, then 30 years old and married with a family.

OJ divorced, and married Nicole Simpson in 1985. Fuelled by jealousy and prone to violent rages, Simpson perpetrated a catalogue of domestic violence against his wife, leading to their divorce in 1992.

Simpson had achieved fame and fortune as a professional footballer with the Buffalo Bills, and was considered by some to have been the greatest running back in American football history.

He had later turned to sports broadcasting as well as acting in movies, including The Towering Inferno and The Naked Gun. As far as the US public was concerned, however, he was most famous as the face of the Hertz Rental Cars commercials.

Goldman, a former model who had designs on acting, was over six feet in height, strong, and practised martial arts. He had met Nicole Simpson a few months before he died, and the two had become close friends.

The criminal trial
The trial began on January 23rd 1995, and was televised throughout. More than 90 per cent of the American television viewing audience claimed to have watched it, and 142 million people listened on radio or watched television as the verdict was delivered. More than 2,000 reporters covered the trial, and more than 80 books have been written about it.

In media terms, it was the trial of the century.

The prosecution case at first seemed watertight - Simpson had a motive, an opportunity, and no alibi. He had a history of physically abusing his ex-wife, had made violent threats against her, and had purchased a knife similar in size and shape to what was believed to be the murder weapon.

The prosecution claimed Simpson dropped the bloody gloves, one at the crime scene and one at his home, and that he wore shoes the same size as a set of bloody footprints that had been found leading away from the crime scene.

The defence case did not at first appear to be quite so strong. There were no witnesses to the crime and no actual murder weapon was found. However, the defence argued that Simpson had been framed by unscrupulous LAPD officers, and cleverly uncovered flaws in the police evidence.

They portrayed their client as a black victim of a white judicial system, on trial simply because he was a black man.

[cruororism]

Innocent until proven guilty
As the case unfolded before the fascinated eyes of the American public, Simpson's innocence or guilt began to embody the wider political issue of the racial divide between black and white America.

A national debate on race took place as the public speculated whether a black man could be acquitted by a white-orientated justice system, or whether a predominantly black jury could bring themselves to reach a verdict of guilt for a black celebrity.

Interest in the case made celebrities out of the judge, lawyers and criminal justice officials involved.

Crucial evidence
Evidence presented at the trial by prosecutors Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden revealed a genetic match between Simpson's blood and blood found at the crime scene.

In addition, blood matching both Goldman's and Nicole Simpson's was found in Simpson's Ford Bronco, and blood matching Goldman's was found on a glove discovered by police on Simpson's property (the matching glove was found at the murder scene). Blood matching Nicole Simpson's was also found on a sock in Simpson's house.

Prosecutors made their first gaffe by asking Simpson to try on the bloody gloves during the trial. Simpson wore latex gloves underneath, to prevent contaminating the evidence, and appeared to experience great difficulty in pulling on the gloves, saying they were too tight.

The defence team of Johnnie Cochran, Robert Shapiro, F Lee Bailey and Barry Scheck argued that the blood evidence was either the result of sloppy police work or had been produced by a conspiracy of racist police officers.

The defence made much of the fact that Mark Fuhrman, one of the LAPD officers to search Simpson's house after the murders, had repeatedly used racist terms in a taped 1994 interview with a screenwriter. During cross-examination earlier in the trial, Fuhrman had denied ever using such terms.

Summing up

In his closing arguments, defence lawyer Cochran made an emotional appeal to the jury, which consisted of nine African-Americans, two whites and one Hispanic, in which he compared Fuhrman to Adolf Hitler and urged the jury to "do the right thing" and send the police a message about racism with their verdict.


Defence attorney Shapiro later declared in a television interview: "Not only did we play the race card, we dealt it from the bottom of the deck."
The 10-woman, two-man jury took only three hours to reach its verdict, which was televised, live the following morning.

The speed of the jury's deliberations, following four months of testimony drew sharp criticism from some observers - others greeted the acquittal with jubilation.

The aftermath
Presiding Judge Lance Ito came under fire from many critics for allowing the trial to be televised, thereby creating a highly fused trial-by-media atmosphere. Effectively, what really went on trial was the inherent racism of the US criminal justice system and not OJ Simpson.

But the legal process didn't end there because the families of Goldman and Nicole Simpson refused to give up after the acquittal. They brought a civil action of wrongful death against Simpson, and this trial, which began on October 23rd 1996, turned out to be more successful.

The burden of proof (balance of probabilities) in a civil trial that the pursuing lawyers must prove is less than in a criminal trial (beyond reasonable doubt). In addition, the trial was not televised and therefore less politically charged, and the jury was predominantly white.

In February 1997, a Californian jury found Simpson liable in the deaths of Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman. The jury awarded $8.5 million in compensatory damages to the Goldman family, and later that month ordered Simpson to pay $25 million in punitive damages to the Brown and Goldman families.

The money has never been paid - as Simpson's lawyers argued their client was broke. Simpson now lives on the income from a $4 million pension fund established when he was a professional footballer, which cannot be touched by the court for legal reasons. He has custody of his two children.