![]() “But in terms of police-community relations, this was a minor disaster given some of the major disasters that preceded it.” “In the annals of homicide investigation, was problematic in the extreme,” Zimring said. The officers were acquitted and rioting ensued. Johnnie prevailed.”Īlthough it was a showcase of deeply flawed police practices, the Simpson case was only “a minor disaster” for the LAPD, said Berkeley’s Zimring, noting that the police beating of Rodney King two years earlier was far worse. “He said it was condescending to African Americans. “Johnnie argued the opposite,” said Newton. Prosecutor “Chris Darden, he recounted, made a motion that no one should be able to use the racial slur in court. “‘The N-word’ comes out of this trial,” recounted Jim Newton, who covered the Simpson case from crime to verdict and now teaches and edits the magazine Blueprint at UCLA. The actual slur rang through the courtroom during the months-long trial, with witnesses testifying that detective Mark Fuhrman used the term on a regular basis.īut recordings were played during trial of the disgraced former detective – who had been investigated before the case went trial over allegations he had picked up a bloody glove near Brown Simpson’s and Goldman’s bodies and had taken a bloody glove to Simpson’s home – spewing racist rants, boasting of police brutality and using the N-word over and over. It also brought into wide usage an accepted euphemism for a reviled racial epithet – “the N-word”. “I said, ‘That will be debated for years to come.’ OJ is just going to continue to be a fascination for people.” “You see blacks on one side, whites on the other, blacks cheering, whites looking like they got hit by a meteor.”Īt the end of a broadcast that day she was asked: “So, Professor Levenson, in the 10 seconds remaining, what does this tell us about justice?” “Literally the streets divide in half,” she said. Levenson was at the courthouse every day of the trial and recalls the crowd’s response when Simpson was acquitted. It offered a window into a racially polarized America. According to the Los Angeles Times, Simpson beat Brown Simpson badly enough in 1989 that she required treatment at a hospital. Brown Simpson regularly called police to report abuse that she suffered at the hands of the athlete, although little came of that either. The case spurred discussion of domestic violence – of what traps women in dangerous relationships, of when and why partners can turn deadly – but did not result in legal reform. I think it was probably much more important for that reason than any impact it might have had on substance.” “This was an outlier in terms of the whole of the criminal process being a media event. “Nothing else approaches it in media magnitude since,” said Franklin E Zimring, Simon professor of law at UC Berkeley. Bill Clinton watched from the White House. When the verdict in his murder trial was announced, an estimated 150 million people tuned in, making it the most-watched event in TV history at the time. People still remember where they were when Simpson led police on a nearly two-hour, low-speed chase in a white Ford Bronco through the rush hour-clogged streets of Los Angeles. “It contributed to the growth of cable’s 24-hour news cycle. “More people watched the OJ preliminary hearing than watched the Gulf war coverage,” said Laurie Levenson, a professor at Loyola Law School who served as legal analyst for CBS during the gavel-to-gavel televised trial. OJ Simpson could not be re-charged with murder over knife find, say police Guardian In between weather, traffic and headlines came the occasional peek at an empty lectern bristling with microphones. The LAPD news conference was televised live on Friday morning by stations that set up cameras in downtown Los Angeles long before Neiman even appeared. That itself is a big question.Īnd, just like that June day in 1994 when Brown Simpson’s body was found, nearly decapitated, sprawled on the walkway steps of her condominium, audiences tuned in for news of a crime that riveted the nation and drew interest from around the world. Legal experts posit that he cannot be prosecuted for the crime again because the US constitution prohibits so-called double jeopardy, even if the knife really was used in the crime. Whether or not the knife is connected to the case, Simpson was acquitted of the brutal killings in 1995. The worker said he had found it on the athlete’s property, two miles from where Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman were stabbed to death in 1994. The weapon had been held for years by a retired police officer who, fittingly, was moonlighting on a movie set in the 1990s when a construction worker handed the knife to him.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |