OJ Simpson’s death has prompted extensive ruminating on the meaning of his life, 30 years after his acquittal for the murder of ex-wife.
So what? He murdered her. Unless DNA science is fake and LA police soaked one of his gloves in blood at the murder scene to frame him (even though many of them idolised him as an athlete and celebrity), OJ Simpson killed Nicole Brown Simpson on 12 June 1994, along with her friend, Ron Goldman.
Shortly before her death Ms Brown Simpson told police: “He’s going to kill me.” Years later, he came close to confessing in an interview with the publisher Judith Regan.
The fact of his acquittal reinforced for a global audience the idea that a defendant’s chances in the US criminal justice system depended more on lawyers than evidence. It also
- stunned white Americans who liked to think of that system as colour-blind;
- came as no surprise at all to black Americans who’d lived through the beating of Rodney King and the LA riots of 1992; and
- mocked the idea that a long record of domestic abuse – such as Brown Simpson had alleged by the time of her death – might count for something in a murder trial.
The legacy of King. After a high-speed police chase along the freeways of the San Fernando Valley in March 1991, King, a 25 year-old black man, was tasered and severely beaten by four white officers filmed by a bystander. When the officers were acquitted, South Central LA exploded.
The legacy of the riots. On day three of the riots King asked a knot of TV cameras: ‘Can we all get along?” The answer was no. South Central, majority black in a supposedly progressive city riven by racial disparities, was policed by what the writer Ta Nehisi Coates has called a brutal army of occupation. It was certainly seen that way by Simpson’s jurors.
A mountain of evidence. The Simpson murder investigation began with his low-speed pursuit in a 4×4 apparently heading for Mexico. It ended with closing arguments in which prosecutors presented a pyramid of uncontested evidence – blood spots, shoe-prints, panicked phone calls, the glove.
- All of it pointed to Simpson, including all the DNA.
- None of it counted to the mainly-black jury, looking for reasonable doubt and finding it in the testimony of Mark Fuhrman, a detective who refused to answer when asked if he had planted evidence. He also had a record of vile racist language, much of it on tape.
The Fuhrman factor. Fuhrman’s lawyers had advised him to plead the 5th in answer to all questions, but his silence on planting evidence was taken, in the words of one crusading lawyer, as “the ultimate vindication for all those people who were the subjects of 20 years of racism, harassment and abuse”.
The race card. Simpson had actively distanced himself from black activism as a footballer and film actor. Even so, his lawyers successfully recast him as a victim of the systemic police racism that would give rise to Black Lives Matter nearly two decades later.
The verdict divided America starkly and traumatically – not precisely along racial lines but into two tribes with wholly incompatible sets of facts. The pattern would persist and deepen with the arrival of social media, trolls and Trump.
The victims were all but forgotten in the criminal trial, but not in a civil action brought two years later by the Brown and Goldman families. They won $33.5 million in damages in principle. In practice Simpson never paid a dime.
What’s more… the Simpson trial, by elevating one of his lawyers from C- to B-list notoriety, gave the world his daughters, the Kardashians.
More than 70 countries are holding elections this year, but much of the voting will be neither free nor fair. To track Tortoise’s election coverage, go to the Democracy 2024 page on the Tortoise website.
aLSO, in the nibs
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