Saturday, October 04, 2008

O.J. Simpson Draws An Unlucky Thirteen

Some 13 years to the day after he was acquitted of killing his former wife and her friend in the so-called Trial of the Century, a Las Vegas jury returned guilty verdicts against O.J. Simpson after deliberating for 13 hours following an armed robbery and kidnapping trial that had played out as so much faint background noise to the dramas of a presidential campaign, Wall Street rescue plan and other headline-grabbing events.

Simpson and Clarence Stewart, the only remaining co-defendant of the original five who had not pleaded guilty in return for testifying against the former football star, ad pitchman and movie actor, were convicted on all charges and then led out of court in handcuffs.

The panel of nine women and three men -- none of them black unlike the 1995 double-murder trial in Los Angeles -- deliberated more than 13 hours after listening to nearly three weeks of testimony. The case was highlighted by hours of secret audio recordings, victims who professed to like Simpson and witnesses who tried to cash in on their ties to this once enormously popular man.

Prosecutors said Simpson was the mastermind of the robbery of two sports collectibles dealers in a hotel room last year, rounding up the five men and telling two of them to bring guns and ordering one of them to brandish his weapon and "look menacing."

Simpson and Stewart were charged with a dozen crimes, including armed robbery and kidnapping. They had pleaded not guilty, while Simpson said he was trying to recover items stolen from him and did not see any weapons.

And so Simpson, like the proverbial cat, has finally run out of lives.
At the 1995 trial, nine of the 12 jurors were black, while reactions to the verdict broke down along racial lines with most African Americans unconvinced of Simpson's guilt and most whites convinced that the case against him was solid.

My own view as a journalist who covered the trial is that Simpson was as guilty as sin but justice was done in its own messy way because the prosecution did not prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

There is irony in Simpson's contention that blacks were intentionally eliminated from the Las Vegas jury.

This is because in a society that judges a person by the color of their skin, Simpson had something that few well-known black Americans can claim: He was so accomplished and at one time was so popular that, in advertising agency parlance, he was "race neutral."

That is to say that when most people looked at him they saw not a black man who happened to have overcome a disadvantaged childhood in a broken home, but a handsome and gifted athlete who had found fame and fortune by parlaying outstanding college and professional football careers into a successful career off the field selling everything from men's footwear to rental cars, and later as a not-bad Hollywood actor. Who just happened to be black.

Two years after the murder trial, the Brown and Goldman families were awarded $33 million in compensatory and punitive damages in a civil trial that to Simpson seemed like a big joke.

He had bottom crawled to Florida after the murder trial where liberal bankruptcy laws have shielded him from many of his creditors, and aside from an occasional dust-up on a golf course or in a nightclub, as well as his off again, on again "fictional" account of the murders, he was mercifully out of the news if not out of trouble until the Las Vegas incident.

Perhaps no one knows when Simpson hit bottom -- probably not even The Juice himself -- but it probably occurred sometime in the run-up to the murders, which I believe were a consequence of a cocaine-fueled binge, a fit of jealousy, or both.

In any event, it is sadly obvious that Simpson, whose good looks have faded at age 61, has been crawling along the bottom since then. I will leave it to greater minds to do the moral calculus as to whether his conviction in Las Vegas somehow makes up for his acquittal in 1995. In any event, as extraordinary as it seems, he now faces serving life in prison for the second time in 13 years.

More here.
Pool photograph/Getty Images

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