Is anybody paying attention to the O. J. Simpson trial? Well, Dominick Dunne is, but is anybody else? This time O. J. is on trial in Las Vegas for armed robbery and kidnapping and the trial centers around sports memorabilia he says was taken from him.
The last O. J. trial was in 1997 (stemming from the 1995 murder of his wife and Ron Goldman) and was all anybody was talking about at the time. I had taken time off from working full time to finish up my last two years of college, so I was pretty much free during a lot of the day to watch the trial. And I watched every single minute of it, even the monotonous DNA testimony that was so boring it made you want to stick hot needles in your eyes. What a media frenzy that trial was! Prosecutor Marcia Clark was scrutinized relentlessly for her hair, her make-up, the mole on her face, her personal life, etc. Remember Judge Lance Ito? He got it too, lampooned on the late-night talk shows. Mark Furhman became a celebrity as did Kato Kaelin, the infamous house guest.
When the verdict finally came, I was working at an attorney's office, waiting on a teaching job. Oh but what a great place to work during the O. J. trial! There were four lawyers in the office and two paralegals; we had grand conversations over O. J.'s guilt or innocence. It seemed so obvious that he was guilty. So obvious. But the overhanging question was always "But did Marcia PROVE it beyond a reasonable doubt?!?" And the debates went on. We called her "Marcia" as if we knew her personally; the trial was broadcast live on television, all day long. Every day.
When the verdict finally came, the nation waited on pins and needles. Everyone was interested. At the law office we all gathered in the conference room where the television was. Everyone just stood around the table waiting, silently as Ito read the verdict. We tried to guess what it was by his expression. The verdict was read, "Not guilty" and everyone moaned with disbelief. And then life went on.
We went back to work. O. J. vowed to spend "the rest of his life" looking for his wife's killer. People say that unless the killer is on a golf course, O. J. won't find him. Dominick Dunne says that O. J. has finally realized "how wrecked his life is" and that there is a sense of sadness about him.
It seems nobody is really interested in O. J.'s trial. Dominick Dunne is there as he was for every moment of the last one. Marcia Clark has requested a press pass but has not yet attended. Twitter is microblogging it for the Las Vegas Sun, posting updates every three or four minutes! Lots of folks, I guess, are hoping that O. J. gets convicted this time because he got off last time. Our system is not supposed to work like that, but you never know about juries. He was convicted in the civil suit filed by the Goldmans and will likely never pay the settlement that was awarded the Goldmans. I wonder if they are watching.
(Image credit: New York Times; Pool photo by John Locher)
3 comments:
The O. J. Simpson murder trial was a travesty of justice. The evidence (physical and circumstantial) was so overwelhming. But even if they had direct evidence the jury would have overlooked it, too.
I didn't pay as much attention to the trial like a lot of other people did, but I did follow it some. In my gut, I felt I knew what the outcome was going to be before the verdict was read.
Celebrity worship was the biggest road block for a fair trial. I believe even if they had a video tape of O.J. committing the murder; then, doing a interview confessing he did it and giving slo-mo play-by-play analysis, the jury still wouldn't have convicted.
The judge, Lance Ito, in my humble opinion, basically threw the jurisprudence out the window. He allowed the defense more leeway to pull too many shenanigans that he normally wouldn't have allowed had the defendant been someone else. In essense, he went too far one way to appear to be "fair".
About a year before the murder of Nicole Simpson, I was assigned as a crime scene investigator. So I took interest in the trial for another reason, crime scene forensics.
The trial did change the way we did business in crime scene investigations. Every time I went to a crime scene school during and after that trial, the standard phrase from the instructors would be, "You do this technique this way, unlike what the did in the O. J. Simpson case..."
Just thinking of the OJ trial makes me sad. It is one of my most memorable high school moments. Two english classes were stuffed into one room and we had a TV with rabbit ears and we managed to get a good signal just long enough to hear the verdict. Some students actually cheered but most of us were horrified. It was incomprehensible to me that people could get something that was so obvious so wrong. It was such a sad moment and the first time that I ever felt let down by our legal system. A hard lesson for an idealistic teenager who had always believed that justice would prevail. I'm sad just remembering that day.
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