O.J.: MADE IN AMERICA – made for
TV A-
USA (450
mi) 2016 d: Ezra Edelman
An extraordinary, well-researched and in-depth
documentary, made as part of the 30
for 30 series for ESPN, the film is part of a continued effort by ESPN to
link sports as an integral part of American history. While
ostensibly a biography of former football star O.J. Simpson, known as “The
Juice,” one of the first blacks to become acceptable to corporate America,
featured in a variety of lucrative advertisements, running through airports for
Hertz rental cars, OJ
Simpson Hertz Commercial 1978 - YouTube (30 seconds) before shortening
his athletic career to make movies, becoming a familiar household name for
several decades, even earning a spot as one of the announcers for Monday Night Football, this film
also examines the surrounding racial climate in Los Angeles, including a
scathing indictment of race relations and the rampant police brutality directed
primarily towards blacks. Whether intentional or not, this extensive
seven and a half hour exposé, told in five parts, of the life and times of O.J.
Simpson is at heart a deeply probing study of the effects of denial, both
personal and societal, where for decades the largely white LAPD (Los Angeles
Police Department) continued to brutalize blacks with impunity, where there was
no accountability within the justice system, routinely allowing bad cops who
should have been fired or jailed for their excessive use of force to go free,
while the impact of societal indifference to the overwhelming presence of
racism resulted in riots and civil unrest from the Watts riots in August of
1965 to the LA riots in April of 1992 following a verdict acquitting four white
police officers in the vicious beating of Rodney King. During this
period the seething anger in the black community from the daily routine of
military style arrests was barely even noticed by whites who refused to
recognize any racial disparity, though these aggressive tactics only targeted
minorities. At the same time, in a strange inverse of racial roles,
Simpson’s white wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, a daughter of wealth and privilege,
was subject to years of domineering abuse from Simpson, both physical and
psychological, where domestic violence took the form of stalking and spying,
which led to outrageous jealous accusations that escalated into repeated violent
attacks, where the seriousness of the incidents was ignored and covered up and
instead allowed to fester and grow more dangerously malignant, culminating in
her murder where she and an innocent friend Ron Goldman were brutally stabbed
to death on June 12, 1994, where Simpson was the only suspect. A
lengthy 10-month trial followed vividly captured on television, with gavel to
gavel coverage on CNN, including daily clips with extensive legal analysis on
the other stations, branded as “the trial of the century,” the story above all
other stories, where the amount of attention became little more than celebrity
worship, becoming the most publicized criminal trial in American history, where
the defense actually put the LAPD on trial, a tactic that successfully earned
Simpson an acquittal of all charges in October 1995, though no other suspects
ever materialized. White America was astounded and outraged by the
verdict, while blacks were elated in the outcome, though it wasn’t Simpson they
were happy for, but the fact that the trial outcome discredited the undisputed
power of the LAPD, where the evidence suggested police officers may have
routinely lied and mishandled evidence in criminal cases all
along. This division along racial lines becomes the central focus of
the film, mixing football glory with the Watts riots and the Rodney King
beatings, where there’s an attempt to make it all appear seamless, like an
impressionistic mosaic where it’s all happening simultaneously, viewed as part
of the same moments in history.
The film traces Simpson’s youth to the housing projects of
Potrero Hill in San Francisco, the remnants of abandoned army barracks, where
his family had migrated west from the backbreaking farm work of Louisiana that
offered little hope for a future. While his mother Eunice worked the
graveyard shift as a hospital administrator, his father was largely absent,
leaving Simpson alone and unsupervised for long periods of time where he and
other kids often committed petty thefts. When he and some other kids
were caught playing craps in the high school rest room, a teacher hauled them
into the principal’s office, informing on what he saw before exiting the
office, with Simpson following him out the door. When the principal
asked where he was going, he indicated he was just helping return this group of
offenders to the office, getting away scot free. Perhaps more
significantly, Simpson stole the beautiful girlfriend Marguerite from his best
friend, eventually marrying her. Together they had three children
(one drowned in a tragic pool accident a month before his second birthday), but
his tendency, like his own father (who we learn later was gay, a noted drag
performer in San Francisco during the 80’s), was to never spend much time at
home, but to roam whenever and wherever he wanted. Simpson made a
name for himself as a running back playing football in junior college, becoming
the most sought after athlete to enter a Division 1 school, earning an athletic
scholarship to play at USC, which designed their entire offense around his
running game, as his speed and size stood out, where if he could break through
the line, he could score touchdowns with spectacular runs. USC is a
private institution serving the wealthy and privileged, nearly entirely white,
yet it’s surrounded by a black ghetto, where life on campus couldn’t more
closely resemble an ivory tower existence, where Marguerite described it as
“like a resort, it’s beautiful.” This college experience allowed
Simpson access to some of the richest men in southern California, all of them
white, allowing him to realize his dream of being someone important and
recognizable. Simpson made headlines playing football, where some of
his amazing runs are among the greatest ever seen in college, winning the Heisman
Trophy in 1968 as the most outstanding college football player, where he still
holds the record for winning the award by the largest margin of
victory. As many as 70 of Simpson’s friends, former teammates, and
business acquaintances are featured in the film, providing extensive background
information from people of all walks of life who knew or worked with this man,
where his outer demeanor couldn’t have been more pleasant, as he was affable,
loved plenty of company, and was generous to a fault, while surrounding himself
with people of wealth and influence. In fact, Simpson refused to see
himself as black, claiming “I’m not black, I’m O.J,” distancing himself from
the black community during the height of the Civil Rights era of the 60’s, separating
himself from other notable black athletes of the times who promoted black
activism, such as Muhammed Ali, Jim Brown, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Bill
Russell who collectively made claims of black discrimination, jeopardizing
their potential earnings by taking a more militant stand against the continued
mistreatment of blacks in American society. Simpson, who was also a
track star (he was part of the USC sprint relay team that broke the world
record in the 4X110 yard relay in 1967, a time that was never equaled in an
event that no longer exists, having been uniformly upgraded to meters in 1976),
avoided other black athletes who supported a boycott of the 1968 Olympics, a
position endorsed by Martin Luther King, Jr., an event largely boycotted only
by black athletes, however, where black sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos
won medals but wore black gloves and raised a fist high into the air in a black
power salute during the playing of the national anthem during the medal
ceremony (The
man who raised a black power salute at the 1968 Olympic Games ...). Both
were immediately ushered home by the Olympic committee which later stripped
them of their medals a few months later on October 17, 1968.
Despite one’s knowledge of the O.J. case, this film unearths
a plethora of witnesses that drop bombshell after bombshell of new revelations,
helping the viewer put not only the incident and the trial in its proper
perspective, but the times in which they occurred, ultimately revealing a tale
of two cities, where Southern California depicted a Hollywood police culture
through Dragnet (1951 –
59), a popular TV series where hardnosed police detectives went strictly by the
book, never wavering an ounce from official department policy, where everyone
is treated in the same professional manner, regardless of the crime committed,
but they always end up solving the crime and getting their man. But
there’s an entirely different version of the police that citizens witnessed in
plain sight, spending little time in black communities except to ride in and
make arrests, where racial discrimination and police brutality were standard
operating procedures. Surviving an era of notorious police corruption,
Chief Parker reigned from 1950 until mid-July of 1966, when he died while
receiving a commendation, the longest serving police chief of Los Angeles
history, where they named a police headquarters after him. But in
order to keep the troops in line, transforming the department into the modern
age, he resorted to quasi military procedures, creating an overtly racist
police department with the superintendent actually recruiting officers from
Klan rallies, where the involvement with black communities was to swoop in to
arrest an offender, place him in a car and drive away, with no interaction
whatsoever with the surrounding community. In this manner, the
police and the black community remained separate entities with no contact with
each other, each growing more and more distrustful of the other, where the
police became thought of as an all-white occupying force, using brutal tactics
with nearly every arrest, literally manhandling and beating offenders,
developing a reputation for strong-armed tactics, none of which appeared in the
police reports or court testimony, where their official position was a mythical
illusion, while the reality was starkly ugly and brutal, like living in a war
zone, traumatizing an entire community where blacks were routinely beaten when
making arrests, a tactic rarely seen in the white
neighborhoods. This led to an open rebellion in the Watts riots of
1965, and the fatal shooting of an unarmed Leonard Deadwyler by police in May
of 1966, allegedly for making a sudden move during a traffic stop after running
several red lights, as he was anxiously trying to get his pregnant wife (in the
car) to the closest hospital, which was nearly 20 miles away, as there were no
hospitals at the time in poor black neighborhoods. His wife hired a
young 28-year old Johnny Cochrane as her lawyer to sue the city for negligence,
where under arcane rules at the time, a defense attorney was not allowed to ask
questions directly to the court, forcing Cochrane to whisper questions into the
ear of the deputy district attorney, who would begin each question with, “Mr.
Cochrane wants to know,” which is simply amazing to see in archival footage,
while also documenting the shooting
of Eula Love in front of her own home in 1979 by two white police
officers, who were never charged with any misconduct, all of which led to
declining confidence in the police. Racial tensions only exacerbated
following the murder of
teenager Latasha Harlins in 1991, happening just days after the Rodney
King beating, who was shot in the back of the head by a Korean-American store
owner who apparently thought the 15-year old black girl was stealing a juice
box, but never saw the money in her hand. While fined $500 and
sentenced to community service, the convicted killer, subject to 16 years for
voluntary manslaughter, never served any jail time. The black
community was outraged afterwards, where this event was considered one of the
catalysts of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, burning the store to
the ground, with the mayor’s office estimating that 65 percent of all
businesses vandalized were
Korean-owned.
Into this racial divide walks O.J. Simpson, a black man
beloved by white people as they view him as not threatening, a football hero
with a winning smile and a warm personality, who they view as a “safe” black
athlete that shies away from all the protests and political
controversy. The film intercuts footage of Bobby Kennedy on the
campaign trail announcing the death of Martin Luther King with clips of Simpson
joining comedian Bob Hope on stage as the USC football team is recognized for
their successful season, with Hope congratulating USC as one of the few college
campuses in the nation without “a riot, a demonstration, or even a
sit-in.” As the nation was riveted by a variety of social issues,
from poverty, racism, civil rights, feminism, and the Vietnam war, Simpson
showed no interest in any of that, where he was drafted #1 by the Buffalo Bills
in the pros, but in his first year he played on a beleaguered team whose coach
was fired for ineptitude. Going through a revolving door of coaches,
the team floundered until they brought back a heralded former coach Lou Saban
in 1972. Drafting a formidable offensive line that was deliberately
constructed around his running talents, Simpson immediately ran for over a
thousand yards in each of the next five seasons, winning the rushing title four
times, having a record-breaking year in 1973 when he was the fastest player to
reach 1000 yards in just 7 games, becoming the first and only player to break
2000 yards in a 14 game season (the NFL expanded to 16 games a season in
1978). Simpson was an All-Pro for six seasons and remains the only
player to run for over 200 yards in six different games. His career
was cut short by an injury in 1977, traded to San Francisco afterwards where he
played for only two more years, and was inducted into the football Hall of Fame
in his first year of eligibility in 1985. Simultaneous to his
football career, he built a 25-year acting career in Hollywood, perhaps most
noted for his comic appearances on the film NAKED GUN (1988), playing a police
officer constantly finding himself in the midst of mayhem in a wildly
exaggerated, hilarious satiric spoof of a bumbling and professionally inept
police department, a critical and commercial success that led to two sequels in
1991 and 1994, each one grossing between $50 and $90 million
dollars. Simpson was a household name, sponsoring ads for Hertz,
Chevy, Pioneer Chicken, HoneyBaked Ham, and various soft drinks, viewed as an
American success story, even joining the booth of Monday Night Football games in the mid 80’s coinciding with
his induction into the Hall of Fame. During this run, Simpson met a
young 18-year old Nicole Brown in 1977 while she was working as a waitress at
an exclusive, upscale, Beverly Hills nightclub for the rich and famous called
“The Daisy.” Though still married to his first wife, Simpson
proclaimed he would marry Nicole almost at first sight, dating heavily at the
time, where the story is reported she returned home after their first date with
ripped pants, explaining afterwards that he was a bit
“forceful.” Simpson also bought his infamous Rockingham mansion that
same year in 1977, located in the exclusive, all-white Brentwood neighborhood,
a hilly, canyoned, affluent and secluded community on the Westside of Los Angeles, California, known for
its thick foliage and gated security fences, where blacks constitute 1% of the
population. Divorced from his first wife in 1979, Simpson married
Nicole in 1985, five years after his retirement from football. Their
marriage would produce two children, Sydney and Justin, though once again,
Simpson had a reputation for straying from the family nest. Hard to
imagine what those two kids must think of this film, as it may be the first
time they have ever been exposed to such extensive detail about their father’s
life.
Eight different times the LAPD visited the Simpson home on
domestic violence calls, yet in a culture of enablement that hero worships
athletes and completely lets them off the hook (think Johnny Manziel in today’s
age), the police failed to file reports and just walked away, where nothing was
ever done about it. There was never any demand for personal
accountability with Simpson, who was never referred for counseling or anger
management behavior. Considering all the friends and associates,
including members of the police force, so many knew what was going on, but so
few did anything about it, which is the real tragedy behind this event, as
looking back in hindsight, it feels so preventable. Yet domestic
violence remains to this day, some twenty years later, largely ignored by
society at large, where people want to sweep these incidents under the rug and
pretend they never happened, especially when there’s high-profiled athletes
involved who are used to a sense of entitlement. We’ve learned
victims aren’t to be believed due to their own internalized fear, as Nicole
Simpson was petrified at the time and scared for her life, where even she
denied publicly that there was any truth behind the reports of violence,
claiming everything was fine, knowing just the opposite was true, as she was
being terrorized by her husband, secretly keeping in a safety deposit box the
photos of the repeated beatings to her face, which are simply monstrous and
grotesque, as well as the handwritten letters of apology from Simpson, which
were only discovered after her murder. Simpson pleaded no contest to
spousal abuse in 1989, where he was sentenced to community service, which was
basically spent organizing a celebrity golf tournament. Finally
divorced in 1992 after seven years of marriage, there were attempts at
reconciliation, where Nicole moved to her own condominium just five minutes
away on Bundy Drive in Brentwood, yet Simpson continued to lord over her, as if
she was his personal property, becoming especially abusive when she befriended
gay men, even resorting to spying on her through the window of her own home,
observing her having sex with other men, which was usually followed by blind
rage, where a 911 call in 1989 records him going ballistics, breaking down the
back door of her home while screaming and attacking her. Never was
he ever arrested nor did he spend a single night in prison. All of
that came afterwards, as it was after midnight on the night of June 12, 1994
when the bodies were discovered by a neighbor out walking his dog, where even
more horrific are the gruesome murder photos of the double murder with both
victims lying in a pool of their own blood, both stabbed repeatedly and
ferociously at the home of Nicole while both kids were sleeping upstairs, completely
unaware of what happened, ironically in the same neighborhood where Marilyn
Monroe’s ambiguously debated death occurred 32-years earlier in the early
evening hours of August 4, 1962. Goldman worked as a waiter at the
restaurant where Nicole and her family had eaten dinner earlier, discovering a
pair of glasses left behind by Nicole’s mother. After his shift was
over, Goldman went to Nicole’s house to return them. Simpson had no
alibi for the time of the murders, but took a late night flight to Chicago,
where a limo driver picked him up at his residence just before 11 pm, claiming
the house was dark when he arrived a half hour earlier, with no answer to
repeated buzzing at the intercom. The limo driver testified at the
trial that he saw a “tall black man” enter the front door of the residence
coming from the driveway, after which the house lights were turned on and
Simpson answered the intercom, claiming he overslept and would be right
out. The luggage was already packed and was observed sitting outside
the front door when the driver arrived. Simpson reportedly took a
midnight flight to Chicago on business, where blood along with a matching glove
missing from the crime scene were found at his residence, so a warrant was
served for his arrest by the morning of the 17th, where Simpson was expected to
be charged with the double murder, where as many as 1000 journalists were
waiting for him to turn himself in to police headquarters that morning
accompanied by legal counsel, but he was a no show. By 2 pm that
afternoon the police considered him a fugitive from justice.
In the end, finally confronted with arrest, what does this
bold and brazenly violent man do when confronted with arrest? He
pathetically runs away and tries to hide, escaping with a large sum of cash and
his passport in his white Ford Bronco, the same one found with blood from the
crime scene, where a helicopter news team is able to pick out the vehicle and
follow it down the freeway on Interstate 405, covering the event on
uninterrupted live news television, where the car was being driven by Simpson’s
longtime friend Al Cowlings, eventually tailed by a squadron of twenty police
cars that keep their distance, all slowed down to about 35 mph, with 9
helicopters joining the chase, where Simpson reportedly had a gun to his
head. It’s a surreal moment when people on the freeway swerve over
to his car and wave and cheer, or urge him to pull the trigger, with the whole
world watching while it’s all captured on television. Once O.J.
failed to surrender, the event became a media sensation, with an entire nation
asking simultaneously, “What’s happened to O.J.?” who even today is considered
“the most famous American ever charged with murder.” Once cellphone
contact is made with an obviously irritated Cowlings, who dials 911 to get the
police to back off, it turns out O.J. is running home to his mother, eventually
returning back to his Rockingham estate, obviously ashamed of what he’s done,
unable to live with himself and accept the consequences of his own
actions. With a gun to his head, was he going to commit suicide live
on national TV? Arriving at his home, but refusing to get out of his
car, a police hostage negotiator finally talks Simpson into surrendering, but
only under cover of darkness. As he’s being driven away in a police
van, engulfed by a mass of people who were there to support him and cheer him
on, O.J. responded, “What are all those niggers doing in
Brentwood?” Those comments are painfully ironic. It’s
staggering that a man who refused to identify himself as a black man was
suddenly forced to identify with being black in his defense, where the rallying
cry was that he was a victim of a sick system, the racially detestable LAPD
that obviously had their own motives. Law professor Alan Dershowitz,
part of the famed “Dream Team” of lawyers selected for Simpson’s defense,
actually tipped off one of his former students, Jeffrey Toobin (now with CNN)
who was working as a legal analyst for The
New Yorker magazine, about Mark Fuhrman’s history as a dirty cop,
which caused him to comb the basement files in the bowels of the LAPD searching
for lawsuits filed against him. Instead, what he discovered was a
suit Fuhrman filed against the LAPD for forcing him to continue working in the
Watts neighborhood, which was causing him insurmountable psychological stress
and aggravation due to his personal hatred for blacks and Hispanics, using a
litany of racial slurs to describe them, where his deep-seeded prejudice and
hostility towards minorities was indisputable, leading to Toobin’s report of
the significance race plays in this particular case, An
Incendiary Defense - The New Yorker Jeffrey Toobin, July 25,
1994. Mark Fuhrman was a cop with serious problems, where his
lawsuit was filled with repeated incidents of excessive use of force against
blacks, claiming that he actually enjoyed breaking the arms and legs of blacks,
repeatedly using the n-word to describe them, where he was so psychologically
damaged from hatred against blacks that he wished to be relieved from
duty. This guy was a time bomb about to explode, but supposedly
improved his outlook with the help of therapy, yet he was the first detective to
arrive on the premises of O.J.’s residence on the night of the murder where he
claims he discovered bloody footprints leading from Simpson’s white Ford Bronco
directly into his bedroom, while also discovering another bloody glove matching
a similar glove at the crime scene. From the police position, this
was overwhelming evidence against Simpson, but considering the cop, the defense
believed he planted evidence.
The degree of hysteria surrounding the wall-to-wall news
coverage never felt like a murder case, instead it felt like a media circus,
where news was no longer circumspect and investigative, with its facts beyond
reproach, but newspapers and the media were guilty of overkill, saturating the
daily news cycle with this one story, simply feeding the public exactly what it
wanted, where the national news started resembling the salacious details of
outlandish made-up stories seen in The
National Inquirer. There’s no doubt that the trial seemingly
went on forever at the time, consuming nearly an entire year, becoming
thoroughly fixated on this one subject only. Mark Fuhrman was a
tainted cop, who stated under oath that he never used the n-word while carrying
out his duties as a police officer, yet court documents suggested otherwise, as
his own case file mentioned it repeatedly, while also providing 12 hours of
taped recordings of Fuhrman providing realistic ideas for a fictional
screenplay about cops in LA which was filled with Fuhrman using the n-word,
also exaggerated claims of framing people, torturing and killing victims while
getting away with it, creating a fantasy world of a city run by out of control,
white supremist cops, but his fictionalized world incredibly matched the black
stereotype of dirty cops in the LAPD. Only in Hollywood could
someone actually unearth something like that. Barry Scheck was the
attorney who became associated as a DNA expert, yet his job was not only to
question the police handling of evidence, questioning the professionalism of
their own standards and in turn the validity of the scientific evidence proving
Simpson’s blood was at the crime scene, but more importantly, his job was to
confuse the jurors and provide a seed of doubt in their eyes, suggesting it was
entirely possible that the LAPD planted evidence on the crime scene that was
favorable for a conviction. To this end, he mesmerized a viewing
audience with scientific theories that sounded plausible, but what they had to
do with this specific case was clouded in confusion. To a white
audience, this would be inexcusable, as science is science, hard to refute, but
to a black community that was used to authorities fudging the evidence, this
happened all the time, so it was not only plausible, but likely. The
defense attorneys hammered home this possibility, which, when added to a racist
cop, suggests evidence could easily have been planted. The question,
though, was whether it was ever established evidence was planted in this
case. Scheck’s arguments were all supposition and maybes, never once
directing any proof to that assertion. Due to the prevalence of
blacks on the jury, black defense attorney nonpareil Johnny Cochrane didn’t
have to argue in complicated legalese, but simply had to ingratiate himself to
the jury and become relatable and trustworthy, as opposed to the prosecution
attorney Christopher Darden whose style was closer to burying his head in his
notes like a prepared speech while making little eye contact with the
jury. Having to explain the extraordinary scientific certainties of
DNA evidence largely went over the head of the jury, where the complexity
became lost over time, as what they could more easily understand was what
Johnny Cochrane constantly reminded them of, how cops routinely mishandle and
tamper with evidence, as that’s closer to their real life experiences of being
black growing up in Los Angeles.
Yolanda Crawford and Carrie Bess, two black women who were
members of the jury speak openly throughout the film, offering candid views as
the trial proceeds, which is like keeping a scorecard throughout the event,
both offering a vantage point that amounts to a window directly into what the
jury was thinking. In one instance, Bess provides her own brutal
assessment, “I lose respect for any woman who’d take an ass whooping when she
don’t have to.” While sitting in jail, O.J. generated $3 million
dollars towards his own legal defense by signing autographs, which was still
legal at the time as he was not convicted of committing any
crime. The merchandise sold like hotcakes, expertly adding the signature
to other memorabilia like jerseys, photographs, or
footballs. Simpson’s legal bill was $50,000 per day over ten months,
amounting to a $15 million dollar defense, the best that money could buy, and
don’t think they didn’t earn it by putting on a show. A perfect
example is the judge allowing the jury to visit Simpson’s home, despite the
fact no crime took place there, as the murder occurred at Nicole Simpson’s
nearby address. In preparation for this visit, the defense team observed
a winding staircase with pictures on the wall, none of which featured any
family members or any other black people, as they were all photos of Simpson
with his prominent white friends. The defense removed those photos
and replaced them with family shots and photos of Simpson with black
people. While this is a sham of reality, becoming utter theatrical
spectacle, the showmanship of the defense was allowed by the judge, who himself
became mesmerized by the public spectacle surrounding the case. One
of the defense attorneys mentioned that if O.J. had been Hispanic, there would
have been a Mariachi band greeting the jury in the driveway. Losing
co-attorney Marcia Clark remains quite infamous even to this day, especially
following such a devastating loss, receiving a $4 million dollar book deal and
her own TV show after the trial, yet to this day, she remains oblivious to what
happened, as she continues to believe the LA cops failed to achieve credible
evidence in their initial interview with Simpson, which was without an attorney
present, instead allowing him to ramble incoherently instead of pinpointing
where he was at a specific time and place. Co-counsel Christopher
Darden was guilty of the most basic legal rule— don’t ask a question for which
you don’t know the answer—incorrectly allowing O.J. to try on the bloody gloves
before he was certain of the result. Little did he know what went on
behind the scenes leading up to the dramatic event, which is they didn’t fit,
as Simpson strained and struggled to get them on, largely due to the fact his
physician took him off his arthritis medicine for the two or three weeks
leading up to that event, so he could barely move his hands. Judge
Ito was wrong to remain so starry-eyed about being the center of Hollywood
attention, allowing the defense far too much leeway in straying from the strict
legal confines of the case, yet she never blames herself for anything that went
wrong. She continues to bear no responsibility whatsoever for the
fact that she and her partner got schooled on national TV by a more prominent
legal team, whose professional expertise ran circles around the prosecutor’s
case.
From a Los Angeles jury pool that was initially 40% white,
28% black, 17% Hispanic, and 15% Asian, the final jury composition was 10 women
and 2 men, consisting of 8 black women, 1 black man, 1 Hispanic man, and 2
white females, one of whom was also half Native American. Two of the
jurors had college degrees, nine had graduated high school and one had no
diploma. In the initial vote, only two found him guilty, as O.J.
became a symbol of black persecution, where it was all about Fuhrman and racial
injustice in the city of Los Angeles, where O.J. became the perfect victim,
because he had the money for his legal team to portray him that way. Even
worse, after the racist revelations, when Fuhrman was brought back to the
stand, he pleaded the 5th to every single question, refusing to answer on the
grounds that it could incriminate him, something no police officer had ever
done before. It was simply incredible. Having O.J. try on
the gloves over a smaller latex glove was ridiculous, and he sold it for all
it’s worth, as did the legal team, coming up with the defense slogan of the
trial which was reiterated in the final summation: If it doesn’t fit,
you must acquit. But the heart of Cochrane’s closing argument had
little to do with Simpson, instead demanding that the jury stop the malicious
practices of the LAPD, challenging them and their racial integrity by asking
them, whose side are you on? “Stop this cover up. If you
don’t stop it, then who? Do you think the police department’s going
to stop it? Do you think the DA’s office is going to stop
it? Do you think we’re going to stop it by ourselves? It
has to be stopped by you.” Then in a moment of legal hyperbole,
Cochrane compared Fuhrman to Hitler, claiming it was our moral obligation to
stop hatred before it dominates our lives. The irony, of course, is
that he was using racial injustice to defend a man who cared nothing about the
black community, where lost in the process was what actually happened to Nicole
Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. After 267 days of witnesses and
evidence presentation, 1105 pieces of evidence, 45,000 pages of trial
transcripts from 133 witnesses, the verdict was reached in 3 and a half
hours. Hard to believe there was any real jury deliberation, where
the overall belief was people were simply exhausted and tired of the entire
process and wanted to go home, reaching a verdict before the morning was done. To
the moving strains of Dvořák’s “Going Home” Largo from his 9th “New World”
Symphony, Antonin
Dvorak - New World Symphony ~Largo~ - YouTube(12:07), which happens to be
the same music used at Vice President Joe Biden’s son’s funeral last year, the
not guilty verdict is announced and Simpson is released from custody, causing
utter jubilation in the black community. As it turns out, more than
70% of blacks believed in Simpson’s innocence, while more than 70% of whites
believed he was guilty, so the predominantly black jury acknowledged they felt
a moral obligation to reverse the ”injustice” of the Rodney King verdict and
finally give a black man his just due, a decision that elated blacks across the
country, tired of a history of oppression and police brutality, where the
thinking was it was good to see the police take one on the chin for a
change. Whites, on the other hand, were shocked and outraged, none
more anguished in the court than Goldman’s mother Sharon, who was simply
distraught, as there was no one else’s blood at the crime scene, just O.J.
Simpson, Ron Goldman and Nicole Simpson, two of whom were
murdered. That left only one remaining suspect, and he was just set
free of a double murder. There are no other suspects in the
case. Ironically, one of the black men on the jury put up an
upraised fist when the decision was read in a black power salute, where it
turns out he happened to be a former member of the Black Panther Party. Who
knew? The jubilation of blacks was accompanied by absolute
resentment towards whites, an event that was unprecedented, as they literally
danced on the graves of two murdered white people. The message being
sent was—now you know how it feels—as blacks have historically been arrested
and convicted for crimes they never committed, while arresting white cops have
always gotten off scot free. Now that the shoe was on the other
foot, it was a strange kind of justice, as it didn’t address the charges of
murder in the courtroom, but instead took on a larger issue, namely a history
of lynchings and murder of black people at the hands of whites. But
the bottom line is that after this one euphoric day, life goes on, and blacks
have the same hard road ahead of them, where this likely changes
little. In the end, the winner was not the black community, but a
rich black man named O.J. Simpson.
While essentially a prolonged and well documented discussion
on race in America, the fallout from the trial remains divisive, even among Simpson’s
legal team, where Robert Shapiro went on The Barbara Walters Show to announce he felt relying upon the
race defense had betrayed a sense of moral justice, claiming he would never
work with Cochrane again and refused to ever speak to F. Lee Bailey. Whites,
especially his neighbors in Brentwood, unleashed a furor of anger and hostility
towards O.J. where he was ostracized, as people felt he was a wife beater and a
murderer, calling him names whenever they saw him in public. O.J.
was no longer welcome at the prestigious golf country clubs where he was once
the only black member. It was left to the Goldman family to bear the
brunt of the outrage and the agonizing pain of their loss, making sure they
hounded Simpson for the rest of his life seeking justice, even if it was only
in a civil and not a criminal case, where one only had to prove it was more
likely than not that he committed the crime, making sure Simpson could not
profit on his victory, as two years later he was found guilty in a civil court
and ordered to pay $33.5 million dollars in damages for the two murders, more
money than he was worth. As a result, Simpson lost the house in
Brentwood, which was subsequently torn down, and he moved to South Beach,
Florida, financially supported by his substantial football pension which could
not be touched by the courts, living a tawdry life of excess and degradation,
hanging out in strip clubs, doing as many sexual threesomes as he could, where
he was associating strictly with the lower elements of society, hangers on,
people that continued to fawn all over him like the celebrity he was, living
the high life, all the while thinking there would be money and girls in it for
them. He got a $700,000 book advance for a story suggesting how he might
have done it, entitled If I Did It,
Confessions of a Killer, which was a weird and twisted way others felt
they could get a confession out of him, but it was all a game, an act, where he
felt the world was passing him by and he was losing his business opportunities
to cash in on his celebrity status. A judge squashed the book deal,
awarded the rights to the Goldman family, his biggest debtor, who published the
book as if it were O.J.’s own confessions of murder. In a strange
way, this twisted, make-believe fantasy mirrored the fictitious screenplay by
Mark Fuhrman, where in each case a searing reality rose out of supposed
fiction. While O.J.’s life was in disorder, his agent and others
were stealing his sports memorabilia, hiding it, storing it somewhere, and then
selling it to the highest bidder. When O.J. heard about this, he
considered it stolen merchandise and in September of 2007 became interested in
getting it back, setting up an anonymous buy with a man in Las Vegas who
supposedly had $100,000 worth of O.J. memorabilia to sell. Simpson decides
to bring a couple guys with guns to scare the life out of these posers,
assuming they would back off, which they did, but for their own protection they
captured it all on video, which is all the evidence they ever needed. Cops
were called, and O.J. was once again arrested, where one of his own testified
against him, claiming he led the assault, and they threw the book at him in
what amounts to overkill, receiving the harshest justice possible, as he was sentenced,
exactly 13 years to the day from when he was originally exonerated, to a 33
year sentence, matching the number of millions owed in restitution for the
double murder he supposedly did not commit. He was charged with
burglary and armed kidnapping for screaming out for no one to leave the room,
but no one was abducted, no one was harmed, yet he was truly victimized by a
system that once miraculously set him free. Now he’s languishing in
a Nevada state penitentiary wondering how the hell he got there, becoming just
another screwed black victim of “white justice in
America.”
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