This, so much.
I haven’t been up on the serial killer theory much lately, and I didn’t realize that OJ was now implicated as a conspirator.
Why do you refuse to discuss the technicalities of this particular supposed frame-up in lieu of just addressing the much more general “Police were corrupt, therefore he was framed!” schtick. Tell us why the police would want to frame a high-profile who had access to high-priced attorneys when it would be much easier(and safer) to just let the case go through normal channels, then tell us how this supposed frame-up worked in the short amount of time they had to supposedly put it together.
Oh, fucking bullshit. You’ll find very few people on this board who are not aware of the extent of racism and corruption in the LAPD, particularly in the '90s. That doesn’t preclude someone from recognizing that your theory is *extraordinarily *unlikely on multiple levels. People aren’t rejecting your narrative out of blindness to the institutionalized racism in American society. They’re rejecting it because it’s nonsense that doesn’t pass even the slightest critical investigation.
I’m not saying the police aren’t ever corrupt, or racist or assholes, I’m saying that in this particular situation, planting the glove is inhumanly bizarre.
It is the night of the murder, you are tasked with going over to the famous Movie Star/Hall of Fame RB/TV Pitchman in furthering the investigation of the brutal murder of his ex-wife. So, you steal evidence to bring with you specifically to frame this man for the murder. A man, mind you, who routinely is away from home on business and lives a highly visible life where much of his activity is known to others.
This isn’t like dropping a little baggie of dope in some loser’s car. It’s not even like “enhancing” the evidence you already have that points to OJ, it’s making up the frame job with nothing to support the idea that OJ was within 1,000 miles of the crime scene.
The guy is literally putting his career on the line in order to frame OJ, with an exceptionally high chance of getting caught.
The core of the alternate defense seems to boil down to “OJ could not possibly have been stupid.”
Not convincing, especially given his later behavior for which he was convicted and jailed - stupid and arrogant beyond belief.
I think you are greatly overstating the public visibility of OJ Simpson at that time while underestimating the confidence a seasoned police detective would have that OJ was guilty given the statistical likelihood of an abusive ex-husband murdering his ex-wife during a crime of passion.
Because they were (likely correctly) assuming OJ did it, so the chance of him being 1000 miles away was basically zero. The real issue though is that Furman’s own testimony, even when taken at face value, makes little sense. He claims he first went to OJ’s house to inform him of his ex-wife’s murder and to make sure OJ could make arrangements for their kids. Then sees a small blood stain in OJ’s car. So he then decides to jump the gate to OJ’s house because he feared for OJ’s safety. It was only after trespassing that he finds the bloody glove that conveniently matches the other glove left at the crime scene. Do you really think the minute likelihood that a crazed maniac would kill two people, then go across town to kill one of his victims’ ex-husband, who also happens to be a famous ex-football player, represented the exigent circumstances necessary to trespass at OJ’s house just to make sure he was okay? Does that make logical sense to you, or is it more likely that they thought he was guilty, and wanted to snoop around in order to find some evidence of his guilt?
All things with Fuhrman had done multiple times at that point. He admitted on tape to framing people, planting evidence, wanting to kill a guy and bragging he would get away with it. He insulted superiors, and admitting to being a racist. Why do you think he is above framing OJ? This is a guy who said the following on tape:
Why should anyone trust this guy? Honestly, I don’t think OJ is innocent, but this idea that there is NO WAY the police tried to frame him seems pretty naive given the (fortuitous) glimpse we got into the character of some of the detectives.
Good heavens this could be the Oj groups in USENET damn near 20 years ago.
“OJ innocent because police corruption and racism exist therefore frame-job!”
Huh?
Are you actually saying that the chance of OJ being out of town on the night of the murder was basically zero, because Fuhrman assumed he was guilty? OJ routinely traveled out of town on business, was traveling out of town on business that very night. Fuhrman’s assumptions are completely irrelevant to OJ’s travel schedule, and Fuhrman has absolutely no knowledge of his schedule.
This doesn’t make sense? How does this not make sense, would the police NOT inform him of his wife’s murder and ensure the kids are taken care of?
This doesn’t make sense either?
What doesn’t make sense about this? OJ is kidnapped at knife point brought home to be robbed and murdered and Fuhrman is supposed to ignore every scrap of evidence that something bad might have happened?
You’re right, after seeing a bloody car in OJ’s driveway, I would NOT expect the detective to take a look around the property.
Both possibilities make light years more sense than “they thought he was guilty, and wanted to trespass on his property to plant evidence stolen from the crime scene.”
I am saying in any case where an abused woman is killed, the likelihood her abusive ex-husband did it is extremely high. The chance that a ex in any case has a clear, rock solid alibi is vanishingly small, so if a detective wanted to plant evidence to strengthen their case, the chances of them being wrong, or being caught, are pretty slim.
This makes no sense. I think we can agree OJ probably did it. Given that he in fact murdered them despite his travel plans says a lot, and it speaks to the stats being right in this case. Fuhrman didn’t need to worry about the off chance that OJ didn’t do it, or that he would be out of town because Fuhrman believed (correctly) that he did do it. Fuhrman doesn’t think about being wrong when planting evidence in this case any more than he would in another case.
Not really. This guy, who is by most accounts a dishonest scumbag, is so worried about OJ that he needs to hop a fence to make sure he is okay? Why wouldn’t he be okay? What are the chances that someone would murder two people in different places who dislike one another? Clearly a stranger would have no way to connect the two of them. Who else would hate both OJ and Nicole so much that they would decide one night to off them both with a knife?
First, IIRC, there was a small blood stain in the car. Certainly not something that indicates a struggle or a violent incident. Second, why are they looking in the car if they don’t suspect OJ had anything to do with the murder?
Why? For a guy who admits on tape that he would be obligated to kill a man in cold blood, and is confident his partner would not rat him out, I don’t know why you think planting evidence on a guilty guy would faze him.
A one-armed man in the pay of Budget Rent-A-Car did it in order to keep Simpson from trumping the with his portrayal of an athletic Avis employee in the famous line of commercials.
The motive here is unclear; what exactly was Fuhrman going to gain from this? Suggesting the he knew in advance what a media circus the trial would become is giving him far too much credit.
Obviously not, since he was acquitted. That the facts of the case do not support such speculation, on the other hand, is pretty obvious to any functionally intelligent person who has bothered to evaluate the case records. The defense was a complete manufacturing of a vast conspiracy from supposed inconsistencies that are readily explained by more prosaic hypotheses which are easily verified.
Stranger
If OJ was framed by a racist LAPD, why did the same police department handle him with such respect when they arrested him in 1989 for beating the same woman he later killed? Not to mention that OJ’s blood was found at the crime scene several hours before any blood samples were taken from him.
OJ was stalking his ex-wife. He thought Ron Goldman was her lover, broke in, and killed them both. He then ran away and hoped to escape because he knew he was traveling on business later, and hoped to use that as an alibi. He thought he could get away with it because he is an egotistical shit head like most murderers are.
Read his farewell note -
Don’t you think that an innocent man framed by the police would mention something about it?
[ul][li]Oswald acted alone[/li][li]OJ killed Ron and Nicole[/li][li]There is no Easter bunny.[/ul][/li]Regards,
Shodan
Well, it’s decades of police misconduct versus millenniums of guys brutally killing their current or former wives. There’s nothing that extraordinary about the concept of Simpson killing Brown - it’s a pattern that’s played out millions of times over all of human history.
Certainly before Simpson could be proved a murderer or the LAPD proved to have framed him, we’d need evidence.
Thanks for taking what i said completely out of context.
For the record… yet again…I believe that OJ Simpson killed his wife and Ron Goldman. I hope that is clear enough for even the dimmest of lights to understand. If someone doesn’t understand, please IM me and I’ll explain it to them further.
Now that we have got that out of the way: I don’t believe that the LAPD as an entity tried to “frame” him. There was no need for the entire department to frame him as the evidence of his guilt would have been found had the case been investigated properly. It’s likely that spots of blood were missed in his home, in the limousine which took him to the airport and it is possible that had they done a better job, the clothing and knife that were used could have been found at/around LAX, in Chicago or somewhere along the route Simpson took.
There’s also the fact that no one apparently had a motive to kill Nicole Brown or Ron Goldman, the fact that the murders were apparently not the prelude or the result of a robbery and Simpson’s alibi for the time period in question in suspect. And there’s the fact that Simpson’s self-professed crusade to find the “real killers” faded rapidly after his acquittal.
What I have a problem with is the fact that the only piece of evidence found was the mate of a glove which was found at the crime scene. There was no other evidence found around or near the glove (say clothing fibers, Bruno Magli shoe prints ( the type allegedly worn by Simpson during the murders), vegetative matter with blood found inside the home which compared to that of where the glove was found,etc) that stated that the glove was where it was “found” when it was found there.
If Mark Fuhrman, the detective who discovered the glove, had admitted that he had planted it, the case would have collapsed. Rather than allowing a man that they believed to be guilty to walk away, people involved in prosecuting the matter simply subsumed the found glove into the larger narrative and hoped that it wouldn’t distract from the other evidence and testimony.
It would be nice if people actually read what I wrote earlier instead of attempting to subvert it into my claiming that there some “conspiracy” by the LAPD to frame Simpson. I never said that, nor do I believe that.
I’m sorry, perhaps I was assuming that the critical thinking was a prerequisite for posting to this board.
My mistake.
“Extraordinarily unlikely” how exactly?
Fuhrman picks up the glove.
Fuhrman takes it Simpson’s house.
Fuhrman drops the glove.
Fuhrmans claims to have found it.
What part of that narrative is “extraordinarily unlikely?”
If anyone had admitted that Fuhrman planted the glove, the case would have collapsed as it would called into question ALL of the evidence presented. If you remember at that time there were/was:
- No eyewitnesses
- No confession
- A rather specious motive
- No murder weapon found
- A relatively paltry amount of forensic evidence found considering the brutality of the murders.
This would have been a difficult case even without the glove. Had the glove been called into question, the entire house of cards would have collapsed and the case would have either been dismissed or Simpson would have been acquitted anyway.
Fuhrman simply could have testified that he found the glove and not taken the Fifth. Not very difficult for an honest police officer to state under oath that he found the evidence that he claimed to in the manner and area that he claimed to. He did not.
Does that mean that Simpson didn’t do the killings?
No, of course it doesn’t.
If you for some reason have extrapolated that from anything that I have said, then I would advise you re-read it as NOTHING that I have stated even hints at that.
I stated that I don’t believe the narrative involving the glove. If you do, then that’s your prerogative. I don’t, and I have state multiple times why I do not.
Meh, to the extent that I’m invested in this issue, I’ll gladly pick-and-choose what to respond to.
No, “critical thinking” is not “a perquisite for posting on this board”.
If it were lots if people wouldn’t be able to.
These were not things Fuhrman knew about at the time he would have picked up the glove at the crime scene or dropped it at OJ’s house. Without that knowledge he could easily be exposed for framing OJ or his actions could have made it impossible for a competent prosecutor to convict him. It just turned out in OJ’s favor that there wasn’t a competent prosecutor.
The motive was not specious, what kind of motive would anybody have for killing Ron and Nicole?
There wasn’t a paltry amount of evidence. What else would you expect to find at a crime scene like that?
If the entirety of the case hinged on the bloody glove, there may be a valid reason for the jury to acquit OJ Simpson.
But that wasn’t even close to the only piece of evidence. You have a ton of other evidence, evidence never handled, discussed, or seen by Fuhrman, that prove beyond any reasonable doubt that OJ killed his ex-wife and Ron Goldman.
You have OJ’s blood at the scene of the crime and cuts on his body. You have bloody shoe prints. You have matching fibers at the crime scene. You have the victim’s blood on socks found at OJ’s residence. You have blood of the victims on OJ’s Bronco. You have a history of violence, motive, opportunity, lack of alibi, and a complete lack of any other reasonable options.
Be as pissed as you like about the bloody gloves, but they were just one piece of the mountain of evidence against OJ. Evidence the jury ignored to reach their conclusion.
I dunno, something like lying makes sense for Fuhrman to lie about having said “nigger” in the prior ten years. In his mind, he probably assumed no one could prove different. Obviously if he had known the defense had four people who could testify to the contrary he wouldn’t have lied, as it resulted in him being convicted of a felony, losing his job as a police officer and having to be on probation for some time.
But him planting the glove doesn’t really make sense. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, but to me it’s not the “simplest” explanation. The simplest explanation is, like almost all murderers O.J. had an ill conceived plan, executed poorly and sloppily. He was in an extreme rush and did a poor job of handling the evidence he was attempting to hide.
That is overwhelmingly the simplest explanation. All the other stuff are just arguments about whether or not it’s possible Fuhrman planted the glove. It’s certainly possible. His known racism also implies some “general motive”, but it doesn’t really demonstrate to me much of a specific motive like he would later have for lying on the stand.
I’ve always said the presence of a cop who perjured himself and in so doing was also proven a racist would have probably compelled me to question the entirety of the evidence against O.J. It wouldn’t have lead me to believe him innocent, but as a juror I would have been strongly inclined to believe it was at least reasonable doubt as to whether he was guilty. On another level, based on the totality of our knowledge about O.J. and what we’ve learned since I have no doubt he killed Goldman and Nicole, but that’s neither here nor there.
Even if you take away Fuhrman a jury of blacks from that party of the country probably was never going to convict O.J. It was their chance to “stick it” to the system especially after a white LA jury had acquitted the white police officers who had beat Rodney King. But take away Fuhrman and put it anywhere else in the country and it was probably an open and shot, ten day murder trial and conviction as another poster said.
From SPY magazine’s “1,001 Reasons Why the OJ Trial Is the Most Absurd Event in the History of America”* (Nov/Dec 1995 issue), under the section “Why Fuhrman Couldn’t Have Planted the Glove”:
- According to testimony by Robert Riske, the first officer on the crime scene, police had noticed all of the evidence before Fuhrman had arrived.
- All the evidence samples had been collected and logged before OJ ever gave police his blood sample.
- Fourteen officers arrived at the crime scene long before Fuhrman and saw no glove for him to abscond with.
- Fuhrman was never out of sight of other officers.
- Video footage showed that Fuhrman was not wearing his jacket during the investigation, making it impossible to conceal the bloody glove.
- Kato Kaelin reported hearing three loud thumps on the wall near where the glove was found, thumps that he heard before police knew of the murders.
- Fuhrman had no way of knowing whether Simpson would have an alibi for the time when the murders occurred.
- Fuhrman did not know whether eyewitnesses might emerge to say they saw the crimes committed.
- Fibers on the glove were later found to be consistent with those from the inside of OJ’s car, a fact Fuhrman could not have predicted when he reported finding the glove.
*Perhaps not the most rigorous source, but it’s at hand and I am not sufficiently interested to dig up anything else