PAROLED OJ SIMPSON STILL SURE OF HIMSELF
A look back at the polarising figure’s trial shows how it shaped ideas about law and race
He has tumbled in the public eye from revered football hero and actor, to reviled wife abuser and murder defendant, to indebted and hapless convicted robber, but OJ Simpson went before a Nevada parole board on Thursday flashing his usual self-assurance, telling the board that he was “a good guy” and asserting, implausibly, “I basically have spent a conflict-free life”.
Whether or not the four board members believed him, they voted unanimously to grant him parole when he first becomes eligible on Oct 1 after nine years in state prison on charges stemming from a 2007 armed robbery in a Las Vegas hotel room. Appearing on a video link from Lovelock Correctional Centre, Simpson spoke to the board in Carson City as, officially, just another inmate who looked like a good bet for release, a 70-year-old who has been a model prisoner and has no other criminal record.
But, of course, it is the 1994 knife slayings of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman, for which he was acquitted after one of the most watched trials in history, that have cast the longer, darker shadow over his life and reputation. No celebrity so big had been tried for a crime so severe, and a generation later he stands as someone who unwittingly helped shape the modern news media and popular ideas about the law, police, race relations and Los Angeles, the city he once called home.
“Obviously, there was a 10,000-pound elephant in that room,” Simpson’s lawyer, Malcolm Lavergne, said after the parole hearing. “Mr Simpson is obviously a very polarising figure.”
Visibly greyer and more halting in his movements than when he was convicted, Simpson seemed to have lost none of his confidence in himself or his ability to persuade. Giving an account of the hotel robbery that, as one parole commissioner noted, “differs a little from the official record”, he continued to insist that he had not known that some of his accomplices were armed with guns; that the items he took had actually belonged to him; and that other people were to blame but that “they got a get-out-of-jail-free card” for testifying against him.
Watching the parole hearing, streamed live on countless networks and websites, it is hard now to remember that in the mid1990s there was just one cable news channel and social media did not exist. The internet, reality television and the media ecosystem of wall-to-wall coverage of anything sensational were in their infancy.
Yet an entire nation stopped what it was doing in 1994 as Simpson led police on a surreal pursuit down Southern California freeways in a white Ford Bronco. It was the most watched television event of that year, and again the next year, when a jury pronounced him “not guilty”.
The case made household names of defence lawyers like Johnnie Cochran and Robert Kardashian — whose family would go on to greater notoriety after his death — and legal analysts like Jeffrey Toobin, the author and writer for The New Yorker; Greta Van Susteren, who became a longtime Fox News host; and Harvey Levin, who later created TMZ. For millions of Americans, the trial served as an introduction to DNA evidence, a concept so new that expert witnesses had to explain it.
“I think a lot of the things we take for granted now in media started with this so-called Trial of the Century,” said Jere Hester, news director of the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism. “It planted the seed for reality TV, and not just the Kardashians. It planted the seed for TMZ.”
Simpson’s arrest and trial exposed a deep racial divide in views of the police and criminal justice. Many white people found his acquittal unthinkable, while many blacks rejoiced and hailed him as a hero. Today, in the era of Black Lives Matter and multiple videos of police officers using force against black people, that chasm is common knowledge, but in 1995 it was a revelation to many Americans.
Wayne Bennett, a black lawyer in Philadelphia who blogs about race on a site called “The Field Negro”, was a law student then and he said the predominant view among his peers was: “This is payback. I don’t even have a problem with them finding him not guilty. Even though looking at the facts, we knew he was guilty.”
Before he was charged with murder, and it became public knowledge that Simpson had repeatedly beaten Nicole Simpson, he was an admired, charming fixture at clubs and golf courses in Los Angeles, and at restaurants in Brentwood, his affluent, mostly white neighbourhood.
But his arrest came at a time of huge mistrust in minority neighbourhoods of the Los Angeles Police Department, which had a reputation, heightened by the videotaped beating of Rodney King in 1991, for racism and excessive force. Before a mostly black jury, Simpson’s defence team played to that mistrust, highlighting racist comments made by Mark Fuhrman, one of the detectives investigating the killings, to argue that Simpson had been framed.
The acquittal of four officers charged in the King beating led to riots in 1992 that left about 60 people dead, and three years later officials feared that a conviction of Simpson would lead to another burst of violence.
But Los Angeles has changed, in no small part because of the aftermath of the King case. Police abuses still occur and inflame tensions in minority communities, but by most accounts they are rarer, and in many of those cases the officers are themselves minorities, reflecting the effort to change the complexion of what was historically an overwhelmingly white and male department.
In 1997, in a civil trial, a jury found that Simpson was responsible for the deaths of Goldman and Nicole Simpson, and awarded their families $33.5 million in damages; he has paid a tiny fraction of that amount. Shunned by former friends and business associates, he moved to Florida, where — unlike in California — a “homestead exemption” law allows a person to shield significant assets, including a home, from creditors.
In 2007, while in Las Vegas to attend a wedding, he went with several people to a hotel room. He said he had been told that Bruce Fromong, a sports memorabilia dealer he knew, was there selling things that Simpson said had been stolen from him.
They took hundreds of items, Simpson was arrested, and suddenly he was back in the spotlight. It did not help his cause that the robbery occurred on the same day as the release of If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer, a book based on interviews Simpson gave, describing — in theory, strictly hypothetically — how he could have carried out the 1994 slayings.
In 2008, 13 years to the day after his acquittal in the murder case, Simpson was convicted of multiple felony charges. He was later sentenced to nine to 33 years in prison. One of his lawyers at the time, Yale Galanter, said that the charges were excessive and suggested that the prosecutors and jurors had been influenced by the earlier case, which they denied.
“A lot of people lost confidence in the criminal justice system when he was acquitted of the murders, and I think a lot of people saw the Nevada case as payback justice, kind of a rough justice,” said Laurie Levenson, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. “It has contributed to a cynicism about the law.”
After years of fading from view while he served his time, two high-profile television projects moved Simpson to centre stage again last year. ESPN’s OJ: Made in America, a multi-part documentary that won an Academy Award, spanned his life story: poor child in San Francisco, sports star in college and the NFL, charming pitchman and actor, abusive husband, California defendant and, finally, Nevada convict. FX’s The People v OJ Simpson: American Crime Story, a miniseries dramatising the murder investigation and trial, won several Emmy Awards.
But the Nevada Board of Parole Commissioners, while acknowledging the passions aroused by the murder case, insisted that it could not take them into account.
It could have denied him parole and made him wait years for another chance.
“We just want him to come home,” Arnelle Simpson, 48, the oldest of Simpson’s four children, told the board. “I know that he is remorseful. He truly is remorseful.”
Simpson has said he wants to return to Florida, and officials there and in Nevada said they were trying to negotiate an agreement for that move. If he violates the conditions of his parole — which are likely to bar him from having weapons or associating with criminals — he could return to prison to serve out his full sentence.
“I wouldn’t bet on him just sneaking into obscurity,” Ms Levenson said. “He loves attention. It’s as if that Bronco chase never ended.”