White here, involved in many interracial and intraracial relationships over the years, early 30s when verdict happened.
I have in my mind that immediately after the murders, before the arrest various theories were raised in the press in some detail.
After the arrest, I never saw them discussed at all, not even to debunk plausibility, and they seemed plausible to me, having lived in very violent, racially charged cities my entire adult life until then. Maybe you have seen two tv series about it - Homicide and The Wire.
Anyways, I didn’t feel the prosecution met its burden of proof, because they never presented enough evidence to rule out alternate theories of the crime, even having seen there evidence and witnesses impeached, they left it to the jury to decide. Big mistake in retrospect.
Inparticular one early theory of the crime that dropped like a rock once OJ was arrrested, but which in public was never ruled out via persuasive direct evidence, was that Nicole Simpson’s friend, I forget her name, was in way over her head with some drug dealers, and either a message was sent, or possibly the wrong person was hit, or what was planned to be a threat got out of control.
You’d have to look a the relatively early news articles to find why that was even a theory at all. But one thing is clear - once OJ was arrested NO work was done to follow up on alternate theories, even to rule them out. At least clear in the sense that at trial, no evidence was presented that closed the book on alternate theories. And that is prosecution’s burden, not defense.
I remember waiting months and months for this to come up. that it didn’t told me he would not be convicted even if Furman sprouted a halo on the stand and the glove fit like, well, a glove.
Doesn’t mean he didn’t do it, it means we don’t know beyond the level that the prosecution alone is burdened with persuading, ,no matter how neat and tidy we want it to be.
In that sense, no other verdict was possible, and it is not a matter of getting away with anything, it is a matter of the Court making sure that the prosecution met its burden.
Note that the burden was different in the civil case, and so was the result. In the civil case, I don’t think presenting alternate theories even with evidence would have altered whether plaintiff met its lowered burden or not.
And in my experience in Baltimore, this has little to do with wealth, race, or celebrity status, only failure of prosecution to meet its burden, which happens all the time.
Arrest =/= guilty, and thank goodness for that.
