O. J. Simpson Trial(英)

The Trial of Orenthal James Simpson

by Doug Linder (2000)

　　Although the 1995 criminal trial of O. J. Simpson for the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman has been called "a great trash novel come to life," no one can deny the pull it had on the American public. If the early reports of the murder of the wife of the ex-football-star-turned-sports-announcer hadn't caught people's full attention, Simpson's surreal Bronco ride on the day of his arrest certainly did——ninety-five million television viewers witnessed the slow police chase live. The 133 days of televised courtroom testimony turned countless viewers into Simpson trial junkies. Even foreign leaders such as Margaret Thatcher and Boris Yeltsin eagerly gossiped about the trial. When Yeltsin stepped off his plane to meet President Clinton, the first question he asked was, "Do you think O. J. did it?" When, at 10 a.m. PST on October 3, Judge Ito's clerk read the jury's verdict of "Not Guilty," 91% of all persons viewing television were glued to the unfolding scene in the Los Angeles courtroom.

　　June 12, 1994

　　Exactly what happened sometime after ten o'clock on the Sunday night of June 12, 1994 is still disputed, but most likely a single male came through the back entrance of Nicole Brown Simpson's condominium on Bundy Drive in the prestigious Brentwood area of Los Angeles. In a small, nearly enclosed area near the front gate, the man brutally slashed Nicole, almost severing her neck from her body. Then he struggled with and repeatedly——about thirty times——stabbed Ronald Goldman. Ronald Goldman was a twenty-five-year-old acquaintance of Nicole's, who had come to her condominium to return a pair of sunglasses that her mother had left earlier that evening at the Mezzaluna restaurant. (A person would later post a sign outside the Mezzaluna reading, "Don't forget your sunglasses.")

　　Just after midnight, Nicole's howling Akita, with blood on its belly and legs, attracted the attention of a neighbor, who then discovered the two bodies. The ill-fated investigation of the Brown-Simpson and Goldman murders began.

　　Nicole Brown Simpson's ex-husband, former football great and media personality O. J. Simpson, meanwhile, was aboard American Airlines flight #668 to Chicago. Simpson had taken off from Los Angeles at 11:45 after receiving a ride to the airport in a limousine driven by Allan Park, an employee of the Town and Country Limousine Company. The limousine had left the Simpson estate on Rockingham Avenue about half an hour late, after Park called to report at 10:25 that no one answered his ring at the door. Park observed a man he assumed to be Simpson enter his house at 10:56.

　　Police called Simpson early Monday morning at the O'Hare Plaza Hotel in Chicago, where Simpson had planned to attend a convention of the Hertz rental car company. When informed that his wife had been killed, Simpson did not ask how, when, or by whom. He did——according to his later testimony——smash a glass in grief, badly cutting his left hand. Prosecutors would have a different explanation for the injury. Simpson boarded the next flight to Los Angeles, arriving home about noon to find a full-scale police investigation underway. Police tape stretched across his front gate and cardboard tags marked bloodstains on the driveway.

　　The Investigation Focuses on Simpson

　　Los Angeles police questioned Simpson for about a half hour that day. They asked Simpson a number of questions about the deep cut on his right hand. Simpson initially claimed not to know the source of the cut. Later in the interview he suggested the hand was cut when he reached into his Bronco on the night of the murders, then reopened the cut when he broke a glass in his Chicago hotel room after being informed of Nicole's murder. From the standpoint of the police, the interview was remarkably ine

pt. Officers did not ask obvious follow-up questions and whole areas of potentially fruitful inquiry were ignored. So unhelpful was this interview that neither side chose to introduce it into evidence at the trial.

　　Eventually, however, police accumulated enough evidence indicating Simpson's guilt in the murders that they sought and obtained a warrant for his arrest. Under an agreement worked out with Simpson's attorney, Robert Shapiro, Simpson was to turn himself in at police headquarters by 10:00 on the morning of June 17, the day following Nicole's funeral. When Simpson didn't show by the agreed upon time, police told Shapiro that they would be driving to his Brentwood home to pick him up. Sometime after one o'clock, four officers knocked on Simpson's front door. Soon they and Shapiro discovered that Simpson had disappeared——off, it turned out, on perhaps the most famous ride in American history since Paul Revere warned Bostonians of the arrival of the British. Simpson left behind a letter. Addressed to "To whom it may concern," it had all the markings of a suicide letter. It ended: "Don't feel sorry for me. I've had a great life, great friends. Please think of the real O. J. and not this lost person. Thanks for making my life special. I hope I helped yours. Peace and love, O. J." Around 6:20 a motorist in Orange County saw Simpson riding in the white Bronco of his friend, A. C. Cowlings, and notified police. Soon a dozen police cars, news helicopters, and some curious members of the public were following in pursuit of the Bronco. The slow-motion chase would finally end with Simpson's arrest in his own driveway. After making the arrest, police discovered $8,750 in cash, a false beard and mustache, a loaded gun, and a passport in Cowlings' vehicle.

　　For the prosecution, the biggest mistake of the trial may well have been to file the Simpson case in the downtown district rather than——as is normal procedure——in the district in which the crime occurred, in this case Santa Monica. Implausibly, the prosecution explained its decision as an effort to reduce the commuting time of prosecutors and better accommodate the expected media crush. More likely, the decision was a political one, based on concerns that a conviction by what would be a largely white jury in Santa Monica might spark racial protests——or even riots similar to those that occurred following the trial of four LAPD officers accused of beating Rodney King. The prosecutors probably believed that their case against Simpson was so strong that even the more racially diverse jury likely in downtown Los Angeles would have no choice but to convict.

　　Filing downtown would be only the first of many decisions that may have cost prosecutors the case. The decision of prosecutors not to seek the death penalty cost prosecutors the advantage of not having a "death-qualified" jury, which numerous studies suggest, would be more likely to convict. (A death-qualified jury is one from which all jurors whose opposition to capital punishment might prevent them from imposing a death sentence have been excluded. Typically, excluded jurors are disproportionately black and female.) Prosecutors also would be criticized for ignoring the advice of their own jury consultants, who urged them to use their peremptory challenges——to the extent that they might do so constitutionally——to exclude black and female potential jurors. ( Once the trial began, there would be other blunders. To name just a few: the decision to have Simpson try the glove used in the murder, the decision to call Mark Fuhrman to the stand, and the strategy of presenting so much evidence from so many witnesses over so many weeks that the case lost much of its force.)

　　On July 22, 1994, Simpson answered the question " How do you plead?" at his arraignment with "Absolutely one hundred percent not guilty, Your Honor." Months of discovery, jury selection, and hearings on issues such as whether to permi

t cameras in the courtroom and the admissibility of DNA test results followed.

　　The Trial Begins

　　The opening day of trial——Tuesday, January 24, 1995—— finally came. Under drizzling skies, reporters and camera person converged for what writer Dominick Dunne called "the Super Bowl of murder trials." Judge Lance Ito in his opening remarks told those assembled in the courtroom that he expected to see "some fabulous lawyering skills." Christopher Darden led off the prosecution's opening statement by portraying Simpson as an abusive husband and a jealous lover of Nicole Brown Simpson. Darden told jurors, "If he couldn't have her, he didn't want anybody else to have her." Marcia Clark followed with a statement laying out the facts proving Simpson's guilt that the prosecution would establish during the trial. The next day Johnnie Cochran gave an opening statement for the defense in which he presented a confused timeline of events and suggested that Simpson was so crippled by arthritis that he couldn't have possibly pulled off a double murder. Cochran told the jury that the defense would prove that the evidence against Simpson was "contaminated, compromised, and ultimately corrupted."

　　Over the next 99 days of trial, the prosecution put forward 72 witnesses. The first set of witnesses suggested that Simpson had the motive and opportunity to kill. The second set of witnesses suggested that Simpson had in fact used his opportunity to kill his ex-wife and Ronald Goldman.

　　The first group of witnesses included relatives and friends of Nicole, friends of O. J., and a 9-1-1 dispatcher, all produced to demonstrate Simpson's motive and his history of domestic abuse. Nicole's sister, Denise Brown, described seeing O. J. at the dance recital of his daughter, Sydney, on the day of the murder. She testified that Simpson looked "scary,"

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