There are certain events that occur during your lifetime about which you will always remember where you were and whom you were with when they occurred. The attack on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the airplane crash in Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001 is one. If you’re old, like me, you remember where you were on November 22, 1963 when President Kennedy was killed. So, the recent reports that a knife had been found on the former estate of OJ Simpson that could be the murder weapon, caused memories of that trial and verdict almost twenty-one years ago to come flooding back into my memory.
The discovery of the knife was as bizarre as almost everything else associated with the trial. A construction worker during the demolition of the Simpson estate allegedly found the knife and turned it over to a Los Angeles police officer. That officer, rather than turning the knife in to the department, kept it as a souvenir. This year, after trying to learn the Simpson case number which he was going to have engraved into the knife, it was confiscated by the department for testing.
The not guilty verdict in the Simpson case was initially stunning. The trial had lasted almost one year but jury deliberations took less than one day. In my view, it was the only criminal trial I watched in which there was not a single piece of exculpatory evidence. The swiftness of the deliberations led the world to assume that Simpson was about to be convicted. The verdict was also one of the most racially polarizing issues the nation had seen although recently, the Washington- Post reports that a majority of the African-American community now believes that Simpson was guilty.
With the benefit of two decades hindsight, it is easier to understand why the verdict was reached.
The trial judge was caught up in his own newly found celebrity and completely lost control of the trial. The prosecutors were totally inept putting a racist cop on the stand to account for the recovery of a key piece of evidence, a bloody glove allegedly worn by Simpson. To compound this error they allowed the witness to deny his racist views only to have them revealed in all their ugliness on tapes of interviews he had given to a writer. Moreover, the racism displayed in the tapes was emblematic of the culture that permeated the Los Angeles Police department which patrolled African-American and Latino neighborhoods like an army of occupation without any pretense of protecting and serving.
And of course there was the “Dream Team” of defense lawyers and experts who played to the antipathy that the minority members of the jury had for the Los-Angeles Police Department and the ugly racist sentiments expressed by the detective who discovered the glove. Of course, you couldn’t have a “Dream Team” that didn’t have a Kardashian on it. This was the genesis of the national affliction we are forced to bear by the incessant self-promotion of this family.
Most recently the Los-Angeles Police Department announced that the knife is unconnected to the murder of Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman but not before the Los Angeles Times reported that Simpson was “nervous” about the knife’s discovery and how it might affect his chances for parole in Nevada. Also, this week Alan Deshowitz, one of the members of the “Dream Team,” declared on CNN that it is possible O.J. Simson was both guilty and framed by the Los-Angeles Police Department.
In the end, it appears that O.J. may be the only inmate in the country who is serving a lengthy prison sentence in one state for a crime that he was found not guilty of in an another state.
God sees.
I remember this casee quite clearly because, as you may recall, I DVRed it on CNN and watched it at night, every night. The Syracuse Newspapers called the night before the verdict was to be read, and asked me what I thought the verdict would be, and I said he would be acquitted (apparently everyone else had a life, since everybody else said he would be convicted). I still cannot understand to this day how Marcia Clark can parlay one of the worst performances ever as a prosecutor to fame and fortune. But from jury selection to her closing (which amounted to C’mon, you KNOW he did it), I would suggest that law students have to review the trial just so you know what NOT to do. I would throw popcorn at the screen and the cats would chase it. As for the Dream Team, Johnny Cochran was a master, the Innocence Project got a huge boost (a good thing) and Alan Dershowitz never did a fucking thing because there was an acquittal. But hey, Claus Von Bulow got acquitted to, and Dershowitz STILL wrote a book. I should probably start working on mine.