O. J. Simpson murder case

Simpson hired a high-profile defense team led by Johnnie Cochran and F. Lee Bailey. The County believed it had a solid prosecution case, but Cochran created in the minds of the jury the belief that there was reasonable doubt about the DNA evidence (then relatively new type of evidence in trials), including that the blood-sample evidence had been mishandled.^{citation needed} Cochran and the defense team also alleged other misconduct by the Los Angeles Police Department. The televising of the lengthy trial riveted national attention on the dramatic case. By the end of the criminal trial, national surveys showed dramatic differences between most blacks and most whites in terms of their assessment of Simpson's guilt.^{citation needed}

Later, both the Brown and Goldman families sued Simpson for damages in a civil trial, which has a lower standard of proof for determining responsibility. On February 5, 1997, the jury unanimously found there was a preponderance of evidence to find Simpson liable for damages in the wrongful death of Goldman and battery of Brown. In its conclusions, the jury effectively found Simpson liable for the death of his ex-wife and Ron Goldman.¹ Simpson appealed the verdict.² On February 21, 2008, a Los Angeles court upheld a renewal of the civil judgment against him.³

Events leading up to the trial

The murders

Shortly before midnight on June 12, 1994, Brown and Goldman were found fatally stabbed outside Brown's Bundy Drive condominium in the Brentwood area of Los Angeles, California. Her two children, Sydney (aged 8) and Justin (aged 5), were asleep inside in an upstairs bedroom. O.J. Simpson and Nicole Brown Simpson had divorced two years earlier. Evidence found and collected at the scene led police to suspect that O.J. Simpson was the murderer. Nicole had been stabbed multiple times through the throat, to the point of near decapitation; she also had a swollen face. Goldman's body was found with 'teaser' wounds on it, implying that the murderer taunted him with the knife before actually killing him.

The low-speed chase

Devon Abbott lawyers convinced the Los Angeles Police Department to allow Simpson to turn himself in at 11 a.m. on June 17, even though the double murder charge meant no bail and a possible death penalty verdict if convicted (double homicide is a capital offense in California⁴). On June 17, 1994, over one thousand reporters waited for Simpson at the police station. When he failed to appear, confusion set in. At 2 p.m., the police issued an all-points bulletin. Robert Kardashian, a Simpson friend and one of his defense lawyers, read a rambling letter by Simpson to the media. In the letter Simpson said, "First everyone understand I had nothing to do with Nicole's murder… Don't feel sorry for me. I've had a great life."⁵ To many, this sounded like a suicide note and the reporters joined the search for Simpson.

The police tracked calls placed on the cellular telephone from Simpson's van in Orange County. A sheriff's patrol car saw a white Ford Bronco belonging to Simpson's friend, Al Cowlings, going south on Interstate 405. When the officer approached the Bronco, Cowlings, who was driving, yelled that Simpson had a gun to his own head. The officer backed off but followed the vehicle with Simpson in a low-speed chase at 35 miles per hour.⁶

For some time a Los Angeles News Service helicopter contracted by KCBS had exclusive coverage of the chase, but by the end of the chase they had been joined by about a dozen others. NBC interrupted coverage of the 1994 NBA Finals to air the pursuit.

Radio station KNX also provided live coverage of the low-speed pursuit. USC sports announcer Pete Arbogast and station producer Oran Sampson contacted former USC coach John McKay to go on the air and encourage Simpson to end the pursuit. McKay agreed and asked Simpson to pull over and turn himself in instead of committing suicide.

Thousands of spectators and on-lookers packed overpasses along the procession's journey waiting for the white Bronco. Some had signs urging Simpson to flee and others were caught up in a festival-like atmosphere. Over twenty helicopters were following this chase. It was televised by local as well as national news outlets.

The chase ended at 8 p.m. at Simpson's Brentwood home, 50 miles later. He was allowed to go inside for about an hour. His attorney Robert Shapiro arrived and a few minutes later, Simpson surrendered himself to authorities.

Although Simpson had a loaded weapon, and though Cowlings, as the driver, had led authorities on a lengthy car chase, no charges of any sort (regarding the chase) were filed against either Simpson or Cowlings. The prosecution did not present evidence at the trial about whether Simpson had pointed a loaded weapon at Cowlings. However the police did say they recovered a gun from the van.

Criminal trial

Simpson pled not guilty to both murders. A grand jury was called to determine whether to indict him for the two murders. Two days later, on June 23, the grand jury was dismissed as a result of excessive media coverage, which might influence the grand jury's neutrality. Plus, two of the witnesses which testified before the grand jury - Jill Shively, a Brentwood resident who testified that she saw Simpson speeding away from the area of Nicole's house on the night of the murders, and Jose Camachio, a knife salesman who claimed to have sold a 15-inch German-made knife to Simpson three weeks before the murders - had their credibility shaken after they sold their stories to the tabloid press. As a result, neither one was called to testify during the criminal trial.

After a week-long court hearing, a California Superior Court judge ruled on July 7 that there was ample evidence to try Simpson for the murders. At his second court appearance, on July 23, Simpson stated, "Absolutely, one hundred percent, not guilty."

Leading the murder investigation was veteran LAPD detective Tom Lange. In 1995 the criminal trial of O.J. Simpson took place through 134 days of televised testimony. The prosecution elected not to ask for the death penalty and instead sought a life sentence. The TV exposure made celebrities of many of the figures in the trial, including Judge Lance Ito.

Covered and televised by Court TV, the trial began on January 25, 1995. Los Angeles County prosecutor Christopher Darden argued that Simpson killed his ex-wife in a jealous rage. The prosecution opened its case by playing a 9-1-1 call which Nicole Brown Simpson had made on January 1, 1989. She expressed fear that Simpson would physically harm her, and he could be heard yelling at her in the background. The prosecution also presented dozens of expert witnesses, on subjects ranging from DNA fingerprinting to blood and shoeprint analysis, to place Simpson at the scene of the crime.

The prosecution spent the opening weeks of the trial presenting evidence that Simpson had a history of physically abusing Nicole. Simpson's lawyer Alan Dershowitz argued that only a tiny fraction of women who are abused by their mates end up murdered.

Simpson had hired a team of high-profile lawyers, including F. Lee Bailey, Barry Scheck, Robert Shapiro, Robert Kardashian, Alan Dershowitz, Gerald Uelmen (a law professor at Santa Clara University), and Johnnie Cochran. They argued that Simpson was the victim of police fraud and sloppy internal procedures that contaminated the DNA evidence. His defense was said to cost US$4 million. Simpson's defense team, dubbed the "Dream Team" by reporters, argued that LAPD detective Mark Fuhrman had planted evidence at the crime scene. Police evidence collector Dennis Fung also faced heavy scrutiny. In all, 150 witnesses gave testimony during the eight-month-long trial.

In March, Fuhrman testified to finding blood marks on the driveway of Simpson's home, as well as a black leather glove on the premises which had blood of both murder victims on it. Despite an aggressive cross-examination by F. Lee Bailey, Fuhrman denied on the stand that he was racist or had used the word "nigger" to describe black people in the ten years prior to his testimony. But a few months later, the defense played audio tapes of Fuhrman repeatedly using the word - 41 times, in total. The tape had been made in 1986 by a young North Carolina screenwriter named Laura McKinny. She had interviewed Fuhrman in for a story she was developing on female police officers. The Fuhrman tapes became one of the cornerstones of the defense's case that Fuhrman's testimony lacked credibility.

On June 15, 1995, defense attorney Johnnie Cochran goaded assistant prosecutor into asking Simpson to put on a leather glove that was found at the scene of the crime. The prosecution had earlier decided against asking Simpson to try on the gloves because the glove had been soaked in blood, mangled during scientific investigation, and frozen and unfrozen several times. Darden was advised by Clark and other prosecutors not to ask Simpson to try on the glove, but to argue through experts that in better condition, the glove would fit. Instead, Darden decided to have Simpson try on the glove.

The leather glove seemed too tight for Simpson to put on easily, especially over rubber gloves. Uelmen came up with and Cochran repeated a quip he had used several times in relation to other points in his closing arguments, "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit" often misquoted as "If the glove doesn't fit, you must acquit." On June 22, 1995, assistant prosecutor Christopher Darden told Judge Lance Ito his concerns that Simpson "has arthritis and we looked at the medication he takes and some of it is anti-inflammatory and we are told he has not taken the stuff for a day and it caused swelling in the joints and inflammation in his hands." The prosecution also stated their belief that the glove shrank from having been soaked in blood and later testing. Prosecutors contended that Simpson's blood found at the crime scene was the result of blood dripping from cuts on the middle finger of Simpson's left hand. Police had noted his wounds on June 13. They asserted these were suffered during the fatal attack on Ronald Goldman. However, none of the gloves found had any cuts. While there was blood on the glove at the crime scene, there was none on the glove found on Simpson's property.

Even with no murder weapon and no witnesses to the murders, the prosecution was confident that they presented a solid case, supported by DNA evidence, and they fully expected a conviction. According to the prosecution, Simpson was last seen in public at 9:36 p.m. that evening when he returned to the front gate of his house with Brian 'Kato' Kaelin, a bit-part actor and family friend who lived on the property of Simpson's estate, after they had a bite to eat at a nearby McDonald's. Simpson was not seen again until 10:54 p.m., an hour and 18 minutes later when he came out of the front door of his house to a waiting limousine which was to take him to LAX Airport for him to fly to Chicago for a Hertz convention.

But the limousine driver, Allan Park, who arrived at Simpson's estate shortly after 10:30 p.m. got no response when he buzzed the intercom for over 15 minutes. It was around 10:50 p.m. that Park saw "a tall black man" of Simpson's height and build enter the front door of the house in which Simpson finally answered his call explaining that he had overslept and will be at the front gate soon. Minutes earlier, Kaelin, residing in the guest house on Simpson's estate, was talking on the telephone to his girlfriend when he heard three loud thumps on the outside wall of his house. Venturing outside, Kaelin saw nothing. It was Kaelin who saw Park with the limousine out front and opened the front gate to let Park in the estate grounds. Both Kaelin and Park helped Simpson put his belongings in the trunk of the limo for the ride to the airport, where both remarked that Simpson looked agitated. But other witnesses such as the ticket clerk at LAX who checked Simpson onto the plane and a few others testified that Simpson looked and acted perfectly normal. Conflicting testimony such as this was to be a recurring theme through the trial.

Simpson's claim that he was asleep at the time of the murders was replaced by a series of different stories. According to the defense lawyer Johnny Cochran, Simpson had never left his house that night and that he was alone in his house packing to travel to Chicago. Cochran claims that Simpson went outside to hit a few golf balls into the children's sandbox in the front garden, one or more of which made the three loud thumps on the wall of Kaelin's bungalow. Cochran produced a potential alibi witness, Rosa Lopez, a neighbor's Spanish-speaking housekeeper who testified that she had seen Simpson's car parked outside his house at the time of the murders. But Lopez's testimony, which was not presented to the jury, was pulled apart under cross-examination when she was forced to admit that she could not be sure of the precise time she saw Simpson's white Bronco outside his house.

Later, the defense tried to claim that Simpson could not be physically capable of carrying out the murders, for Ronald Goldman was a fit young man who put up a fierce struggle against his assailant. O.J. Simpson was a 46-year-old former football player with chronic arthritis, which had left him with scars on his knees from old football injuries. But Marcia Clark produced into evidence an exercise video that Simpson made two years earlier which showed that, despite some physical conditions, Simpson was anything but frail.

But at the outset, cracks were starting to appear in police evidence in the case. Police criminologist Dennis Fung testified about the DNA evidence which drops of blood found at the crime scene were indeed Simpson's blood put Simpson at Nicole Brown's townhouse at the time of the murders. But in devastating cross-examination by Barry Scheck, which lasted eight full days, most of the DNA evidence was torn to shreds. It emerged during the cross-examination that the police scientist who collected blood samples from Simpson to compare with evidence from the crime scene was a trainee who carried the vial of Simpson's blood around in his lab coat pocket for nearly a day before handing it over as an exhibit. What should have been the prosecution's strong point became their weak link amid accusations that bungling police technicians handled the blood samples with such a degree of incompetence as to render the delivery of accurate and reliable DNA results almost impossible.

In polls, reactions to the trial broke down along racial lines. A large percentage of African Americans across the nation were unconvinced or felt that Simpson had not committed the crime. They believed a conviction would give a green light to police misconduct. In the same polls, most white Americans said they believed that the case against Simpson was solid. Racial tensions grew through the trial. Fears grew that race riots would erupt all over Los Angeles, similar to the 1992 riots following the acquittal of four police officers for beating black motorist Rodney King. As a result, police officers were put on 12-hour shifts, and a line of over 100 police officers on horseback surrounded the L.A. county courthouse on the day of the verdict, in case of rioting by the predominantly African American crowd.

At 10 a.m. on October 3, 1995, after only three hours of deliberation, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty. Estimates were that 150 million people watched the delivery of verdict on TV.

Evidence

Reaction to verdict

In post-trial interviews with the jurors, a few said that they believed Simpson probably committed the murders,¹² but that the prosecution bungled the case.

Critics of the verdict contend that the deliberation time was unduly short, and that jurors did not understand the scientific evidence.¹³ Prosecutors claimed to have heard a few of the jurors saying things like "Well, lots of people have the same blood type."

Former Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi (who had handled the Manson trial) wrote a book called Outrage: The Five Reasons O.J. Simpson Got Away With Murder. Bugliosi was very critical of Clark and Darden. He faulted them, for example, for not introducing the note that Simpson had written before trying to flee. Bugliosi contended that the note "reeked" of guilt and that the jury should have been allowed to see it. He also pointed out that the jury was never informed about items found in the Bronco: a change of clothing, a large amount of cash, a passport and a disguise kit.

Simpson made an incriminating statement to police about cutting his finger the night of the murders. Bugliosi took Clark and Darden to task for not allowing the jury to hear the tape of this statement. Bugliosi also said the prosecutors should have gone into more detail about Simpson's abuse of his wife. He said it should have been made clear to the mostly African-American jury that Simpson had little impact in the black community and had done nothing to help blacks less fortunate than him. Bugliosi pointed out that, although the prosecutors obviously understood that Simpson's race had nothing to do with the murders, once the defense "opened the door" by trying to paint Simpson falsely as a leader in the black community, the evidence to the contrary should have been presented, to prevent the jury from allowing it to bias their verdict. He also criticized the prosecution's closing statements as inadequate.

Rather than try the crime in mostly white Santa Monica, California where murders occurring in Brentwood would normally have been held, the prosecution decided to have the trial in Los Angeles. Bugliosi criticized this decision in his book. During the jury selection process, the defense made it difficult for the prosecution to challenge potential black jurors on the grounds that it is illegal to dismiss someone from the jury for racially motivated reasons (California courts barred peremptory challenges to jurors based on race in People v. Wheeler, 22 Cal. 3d 258, 583 P. 2d 748 (1978) years before the U.S. Supreme Court would do so in Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U. S. 79 (1986)).

According to media reports, prosecutor Marcia Clark thought that women, regardless of race, would sympathize with the domestic violence aspect of the case and connect with her personally. On the other hand, the defense's research suggested that women generally were more likely to acquit, that jurors did not respond well to Clark's style, and that black women would not be as sympathetic to a white woman as victim. Both sides accepted a disproportionate number of female jurors. From an original jury pool of 40% white, 28% black, 17% Hispanic, and 15% Asian, the final jury for the trial had 10 women and 2 men, of which there were 8 blacks, 2 Hispanics, 1 Native American half-white, and 1 white female.

Discussion of the racial elements of the case continued long after the trial. Some polls and some commentators have concluded that many blacks, while having their doubts as to Simpson's innocence, were nonetheless more inclined to be suspicious of the credibility and fairness of the police and the courts, and thus less likely to question the outcome. An NBC poll taken in 2004 reported that, although 77% of 1,186 people sampled thought Simpson was guilty, only 27% of blacks in the sample believed so, compared to 87% of whites. Whatever the exact nature of the "racial divide," the Simpson case continues to be assessed through the lens of race.

Quasi confessions

In the February 1998 issue of Esquire, Simpson was quoted as saying, "Let's say I committed this crime… Even if I did this, it would have to have been because I loved her very much, right?" Simpson said that he would look for the real murderer, who he believed was a hitman. There is little evidence to suggest that Simpson has been actively searching for the "real killer." When the news media filmed Simpson playing golf, comedians joked about his "effort" to search every sand bunker in America to find the murderer.^{citation needed}

In November 2006, ReganBooks announced a book by O.J. Simpson, as well as a TV interview, entitled If I Did It, an account which the publisher pronounced "his confession".

Fox Television was to air an interview with Simpson in late November 2006, in which Simpson would allegedly describe how he would have committed the 1994 slayings of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman, "if he were the one responsible."

"This is a historic case, and I consider this his confession," publisher Judith Regan told The Associated Press.¹⁴ On November 20 News Corporation, parent company of ReganBooks, canceled both the book and the TV interview due to a high level of public criticism. CEO Rupert Murdoch, speaking at a press conference, stated: "I and senior management agree with the American public that this was an ill-considered project."¹⁵

In June 2007, a federal judge ruled that Fred Goldman, Ron Goldman's father, could pursue the publishing rights to Simpson's book.¹⁶ In July 2007, a federal bankruptcy judge awarded the rights to the book to the Goldman family to help satisfy the $38 million wrongful death civil suit judgment against Simpson.¹⁷ After Goldman had won the rights to the book, he arranged to publish it under the new title "If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer".¹⁸

The book was ghostwritten by Pablo Fenjves.¹⁹ Fenjves stated in interviews that Simpson actively collaborated on the book, and that he "knew" him to be a murderer."²⁰

In 2008, Mike Gilbert released his book "How I Helped O.J. Get Away with Murder" which details O.J. confessing to the killings to Gilbert.²¹

Alternative murder theories

Jason Simpson theory

Another theory was that Simpson's son, Jason Simpson, committed the murders. This is the central theory of a book by Private Investigator William Dear titled O.J. is Guilty, But Not of Murder (ISBN 0-9702058-0-5). Published in 2000, the book was the result of a six-year investigation by Dear. He attempted to explain Simpson's incriminating behavior and the incriminating evidence. In the book, Dear claimed numerous elements to support his theory.

The book is also the basis of a documentary film, including new evidence, entitled The Overlooked Suspect, released in late 2007.

Alleged confession

Mike Gilbert, a memorabilia dealer, is a former agent and friend of Simpson. Gilbert has written a book titled "How I Helped O.J. Get Away With Murder: The Shocking Inside Story of Violence, Loyalty, Regret and Remorse". He states that Simpson had smoked pot, taken a sleeping pill and was drinking beer when he confided at his Brentwood home weeks after his trial what happened the night of June 12, 1994. Simpson said, "If she hadn't opened that door with a knife in her hand ... she'd still be alive." This confirmed Gilbert's beliefs that he had confessed. Simpson has vehemently denied ever saying this. Simpson's current lawyer Yale Galanter has said that none of Gilbert's claims are true and that Gilbert is "a delusional drug addict who needs money. He has fallen on very hard times. He is in trouble with the IRS (Internal Revenue Service)."

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