Suppose the archives of the LAPD are searched…and samples from the bodies of the murder victims are found to contain DNA belonging to OJ Simpson.
What next-could he be retried? Or would this be double jeopardy?
Incidentally-the mysterious “bag” that OJ left with his friend Bob Kardashian-has it ever turned up?
He can’t be retried by the People of California. He was acquitted, which serves as a bar to reprosecution.
Double jeopardy.
But the next time…he might be so lucky.
They didn’t convict him with DNA evidence the first time.
Unfortunately, CSI and its ilk did not exist in 1995 and your average joe on the street didn’t know anything about DNA.
Could the Feds get him for anything, like Civil Rights violations or some such? I would think a Federal Judge might take a dim view of a case like that.
99% of what I know about the law comes from here, so there is that.
Capt
I don’t think that’s the reason he was acquitted. OJ’s defense team (if he had to have one and could afford one) would just claim it’s a police conspiracy again.
If the DNA doesn’t fit, you must aquit.
:rolleyes:
Probably can’t be retried, for the reason that he was supposedly in jeopardy once, during his first murder trial, and the state can only put him in jeopardy once.
Now, if there’s an additional condition added, that he was not actually in jeopardy the first time – for example, because he bribed the jurors and therefore knew he couldn’t be convicted regardless of the merits – then he could be retried. AFAIK new evidence could be introduced, but I’m not really sure. But the state does have the right to put him in jeopardy once, if only once.
Note - IANAL.
No. Unless some evidence were to emerge that Simpson acted out of racial animus or was motivated by the religion, national origin, or sexual preference of his victims. (And “sexual preference,” does not mean Simpson’s belief that Nicole preferred not to have sex with him.)
DNA evidence wouldn’t even be all that significant in this case, anyway. All that it would prove would be that he had physical contact with the victims, which wasn’t in dispute to begin with.
I don’t know what CA follows, but the federal constitution would only permit a new trial IF the charge was Conspiracy to commit murder, meaning not the actual trigger man.
True, didn’t the jurors end up thinking DNA worked the same as blood types?
With the technology available at the time, it sort of did. You couldn’t determine a certain match, like you can today.
As somebody who survived the first OJ trials, I swear I will start a riot if some idiot tried to start that circus up again.
Then again, news today seems to follow that same obsessive pattern for every story so I think that battle’s pretty well lost.