Simpson, O. J., Murder Trials
During the early morning hours of 13 June 1994, two slashed and mangled bodies--a white woman and white man--were discovered lying in pools of their own blood outside a condominium on Bundy Drive in one of Los Angeles's most fashionable neighborhoods. The woman had suffered seven stab wounds to the neck and scalp in what police described as a "rage killing." Her neck had been lacerated so deeply that her head was nearly severed from the rest of her body. The male victim had suffered dozens of stab wounds to the neck, chest, abdomen, thighs, scalp, face, and hands.
Shortly after the gruesome discovery, news quickly spread around the nation about the murders of Nicole BrownSimpsonand Ronald Goldman, and about evidence pointing toward the guilt of the black football legend Orenthal James (O. J.)Simpson, Nicole Brown Simpson's ex-husband. Unnamed sources informed the news media that Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) detectives had found blood matching Simpson's outside his ex-wife's Bundy Drive condominium and at his nearby Rockingham Avenue estate. Also, a bloody glove reportedly discovered behind Simpson's house was said to match one found at the Bundy Drive crime scene. But Simpson's attorneys steadfastly proclaimed the Hall-of-Famer's innocence.
On 17 June an LAPD commander made an announcement to the media: the prime suspect had failed to turn himself in to police as promised. Hours laterSimpsonwas spotted south of Los Angeles, on Interstate 5, in the backseat of a Ford Bronco with his friend A. C. Cowlings at the wheel. Ninety-five million viewers across the nation--one of the largest television audiences in U.S. history--watched helicopter video images ofSimpsonand Cowlings slowly leading a growing contingent of law enforcement vehicles back up the interstate. In Los Angeles spectators lined the freeway, hoping to get a glimpse of Simpson's vehicle. Many cheered on the fugitive. When the caravan finally made its way to Simpson's home, the celebrity suspect was swiftly arrested.Simpsonplead "100 percent not guilty" in Los Angeles Superior Court a month later (22 July 1994) and became the most famous murder defendant in U.S. history. Denied bail,Simpsonwas confined for the duration of the trial to Los Angeles County Jail.
The Criminal Trial
Opening arguments inPeople of the State of California v. Orenthal JamesSimpsonbegan in Los Angeles Superior Court on 24 January 1995. Prosecutors mounted a long, tedious case in which they called fifty-eight witnesses in their attempts to prove that O. J.Simpsonhad murdered Nicole BrownSimpsonand Ronald Goldman. The jury consisted of nine blacks, two whites, and one Latino. Christopher Darden, a black man who critics charged was added to the prosecution team primarily to appeal to the predominantly black jury, began the case againstSimpsonin an unconventional manner. Rather than begin with evidence tyingSimpsondirectly to the murders and crime scenes, prosecutors decided to open with a focus on Simpson's motive. Accordingly, Darden characterizedSimpsonas an enraged, obsessed wife batterer who committed the final act of control by murdering his ex-wife and her male friend. Darden pointed out, for example, that Nicole BrownSimpsonhad left behind a diary describing her ex-husband's abuse, as well as a safety deposit box containing photos of her bruised face and apology letters fromSimpson. To this motive, the lead prosecutor, Marcia Clark, added what she described as a "mountain" of circumstantial blood and fiber evidence linkingSimpsonto the Bundy Drive murder scene and linking the victims to his Ford Bronco and Rockingham Avenue estate. When police first interrogatedSimpson, for example, investigators noticed an oozing cut on the middle finger of his left hand. The location of this cut seemed to correspond to the location of blood drops at the Bundy Drive crime scene. That is, the drops appeared to the left of bloody, size-twelve footprints from rare Bruno Magli shoes--Simpson's size. Although prosecutors were unable to prove thatSimpsonever owned such shoes, DNA from one of the blood drops could have been produced only by about one in 170 million persons, and Simpson's blood matched it. Clark also introduced other evidence suggesting that a trail of Simpson's and the victims' blood led from the Bundy Drive crime scene to Simpson's Ford Bronco, up his Rockingham Avenue driveway, through his foyer, and into his master bedroom.
In contrast, Simpson's defense team called fifty-three witnesses in an attempt to show that a "rush to judgment" and willful misconduct by LAPD detectives worked to incriminate an innocentSimpson. The media dubbed this group of eleven attorneys and numerous investigators Simpson's Dream Team because of the participation of high-profile attorneys and legal scholars such as Johnnie Cochran, F. Lee Bailey, Robert Shapiro, Alan M. Dershowitz, and Gerald Uelman. Led by Cochran, a prominent black attorney based in Los Angeles, the team mounted a three-pronged attack. First, it argued thatSimpsonhad no motive to kill his ex-wife and that the prosecution's depictions of Simpson's obsession with his ex-wife were false. Second, the team argued that LAPD evidence collection practices in the case could not be trusted and that all the astronomical DNA statistics the prosecutors embraced were thus invalid. Finally, the attorneys reasoned that the detective Mark Fuhrman--the white officer credited with discovering key evidence in the case (e.g., the bloody glove)--harbored a racial hatred toward blacks that prompted him to plant evidence againstSimpson. During a controversial cross-examination by the defense attorney F. Lee Bailey that took place toward the beginning of the trial, Fuhrman denied that he had referred to African Americans in the past ten years as "niggers." But audiotapes surfaced late in the trial on which the detective could clearly be heard using the racial epithet dozens of times. To avoid perjury prosecution, Fuhrman pleaded his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination to all the questions the defense attorney Gerald Uelman posed, including, "Detective Fuhrman, did you plant or manufacture any evidence in this case?" The discrediting of Fuhrman formed the cornerstone of the defense's so-called conspiracy theory. During his closing arguments to the jury, Cochran compared Fuhrman's alleged actions and his audiotaped statements to those of Adolf Hitler. When Cochran told the primarily black jury that it could take a stand against racism in the LAPD by acquittingSimpson, outraged critics immediately accused him of soliciting jury nullification (that is, ignoring the evidence and subverting the law in the name of a political cause).
The trial judge, Lance A. Ito, permitted the trial to be televised live to the world via a courtroom camera operated by the cable television network Court TV. Some 1,159 journalists from the United States and more than a dozen foreign nations covered daily developments in the trial using a makeshift production facility outside the courthouse dubbed Camp O. J. One major development that received recurring media attention was a series of opinion polls suggesting the existence of a "racial divide" in opinion about Simpson's innocence or guilt. Dozens of national and regional opinion polls taken in the months following the murders and throughout the trial found that most white Americans believed in the prosecution's case againstSimpson, while their black counterparts were more sympathetic to his defense. This latter group was influenced by concerns about possible racial inequities in the criminal justice system--for example, the statistic that black males faced a 28 percent chance of entering state or federal prison in their lifetimes, compared with only a 4.4 percent chance for white males. Throughout the trial, media pundits, scholars, and the public debated what this schism might mean for the future of U.S. race relations.
Women activists cited the murder of Simpson's ex-wife as a tragic example of what can happen when society allows domestic violence to escalate unchecked. They noted, for example, that nearly one-third of all women homicide victims in the United States are killed by a husband or boyfriend. As a result of their campaign, calls to domestic-violence shelters across the nation increased, the U.S. Congress held a series of hearings on domestic violence, and many judges across the country handed down unusually tough sentences in domestic-violence cases.
Other activists saw the unfolding case as an example of how wealth can buy justice. Three months into the trial an editorial inNewsweekmade the point: "IfSimpsonwalks, as most lawyers think he will, what will have decided the outcome is not that O. J. is black, but that he is rich." Even before the verdicts some activists called for the institution of professional juries, nonunanimous verdicts, and disclosure of compensations for expert witnesses--all changes designed to facilitate criminal convictions.
On 3 October 1995, nearly sixteen months after the murders, Los Angeles and much of the nation came to a halt as the verdicts in the criminal trial were about to be read. Deliberating for less than four hours, the jury foundSimpsonnot guilty of murdering his ex-wife and her male friend. As television news media canvassed for public reaction to the verdicts, the racial divide was again highlighted. Several local and national news media juxtaposed images of elated black trial observers with those of somber whites. Blacks generally embraced the verdicts as a sign that the criminal justice system may have finally worked as it should for a black defendant: for them, the prosecution had not proven Simpson's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and the system had justly acquitted him. Whites, however, were in general convinced that the prosecution had amassed a "mountain of evidence" that proved Simpson's guilt beyond almost any doubt: for them, the verdicts were a miscarriage of justice facilitated by the defense's cynical playing of the "race card" before a predominantly black jury.
The Civil Trial
On 4 February 1997--in what continued to be a racially charged atmosphere--the nation again awaited the readings of verdicts in an O. J.Simpsoncase. This time, however, the legal venue was a civil court and the verdicts would determine Simpson's liability for the deaths of Nicole BrownSimpsonand Ronald Goldman. The burden of proof ("the preponderance of the evidence") was significantly lower in this trial than in the criminal trial ("beyond a reasonable doubt") that preceded it. And in the civil trialSimpsoncould be compelled to testify. The public, however, would have to rely solely on news media accounts of Simpson's testimony and other evidence because the trial judge, Hiroshi Fujisaki, had banned all cameras and audio recorders from his courtroom to avoid the media circus that he believed plagued the criminal trial.
This new trial differed from the earlier trial in another important respect: whereas the criminal trial had been held in a downtown Los Angeles courthouse serviced by a largely minority jury pool, the civil trial was held in a Santa Monica courthouse and featured a jury pool dominated by whites. Indeed, a predominantly white jury would listen to streamlined prosecution and defense cases (e.g., the judge forbade the lead defense attorney, Robert C. Baker, from exploring many of the conspiracy theories defense attorneys successfully argued in the criminal case). Photos ofSimpsonapparently wearing the Bruno Magli shoes and Simpson's own performance on the witness stand (e.g., in the face of seemingly incontrovertible evidence, he denied that he and his ex-wife had a troubled relationship or that he had ever hit her) were identified by some observers as decisive in the trial. Just weeks after an Orange County judge had grantedSimpsoncustody of his two young children, the civil trial jury agreed with prosecutors that he had probably murdered the children's mother and awarded the victims' families $8.5 million plus $25 million in punitive damages.
In the aftermath of this latest verdict, the racial divide in perceptions of the case remained. Domestic-violence and victim's rights activists continued to travel the talk-show circuit, a forum that theSimpsoncase dominated for over two years. And despite a conviction rate well above 90 percent in all criminal cases in Los Angeles, activists continued to lobby for changes to the criminal justice system that would facilitate the conviction of "obviously guilty" defendants likeSimpson.
O. J.Simpsonwas eventually forced to vacate his Rockingham Avenue estate after he fell behind in mortgage payments, thanks to an estimated $6 million in legal expenses for the criminal trial alone. To the delight of his ex-wife's sister, Denise Brown, and many who were convinced of his guilt, the estate he had called home for two decades would eventually be demolished by its new owner. ButSimpsoncontinued to maintain his innocence. He filed an appeal to the civil verdicts in July 1998. Later that year the decision grantingSimpsoncustody of his two young children was overturned, paving the way for a fourth trial in the case.
"Simpson, O. J., Murder Trials."Violence in America. Ed. Ronald Gottesman and Richard Maxwell
Brown. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1999.U.S. History In Context. Web. 26 Feb. 2013.