Is O.J. guilty of murder (NOT a debate but a legal question)

Factual Questions
1

So as not to hijack the already lengthy GD thread I’ll open this one. This isn’t to debate whether he did or didn’t kill his wife and Ron Goldman as the truth is irrelevant, but to ask a question I’ve wondered from time to time.
O.J. was found not guilty of their murders at his criminal trial.

He was found liable for their murders at his civil trial.

The exact same thing is true in the case of Robert Blake and his wife.

While I really don’t think anybody’s going to get sued for saying it of either one of them, I have wondered whether it’s technically libelous to say “O.J. and Robert Blake are murderers” (assuming no qualifications such as ‘in my opinion’ or ‘everyone believes’, etc.). On the one hand a jury of their peers said they were, and on the other hand a jury of their peers said they were responsible for the deaths and the deaths happened to be murders, so I was curious if the civil conviction made them legally the same as murderers.

Thanks for any answers.

2

Nope. Guilt in the sense of which you talk is established (or in this case, not established) at the criminal trial.

3

Oh, and to add to my answer with something true in English law and thus probably true in US law: criminal verdicts may be used to establish liability in civil courts, but not vice versa :slight_smile:

4

But you can still call him a murder, because that term doesn’t just have legal meaning, but also colloquial meaning…

You can’t call him a convicted murderer though.

5

What if it’s not colloquial but specific in its details? I.e., would it be libelous for a newspaper to come out and label OJ specifically as “the murderer of Nicole Brown and [that other dude]” without inserting “alleged” or “accused”?

6

Don’t think so, but IANAL.

Reminds me a lot of the Stephen Lawrence case over here in the UK though, and there no one was ever found guilty in criminal courts.

Very, very famous headline in the Daily Wail, image for you here, has to have been of the most iconic front pages since ‘Gotcha!’.

7

Of course, even if you did call OJ a murderer and he did sue you for Slander/Libel (depending on whether you spoke or wrote the defamatory statement), he’d be hard pressed to show ANY damage to his reputation due to your statement.
So you MIGHT have to pony up $1.98 in damages.

8

I’m not quite sure what you are asking, but he was found not guilty of murder. To be found guilty the jury would have had to decide the prosecution met its burden of proof “beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty.” That is a very high standard of proof.

To be found civilly liable of wrongful death the jury needed to find by “a preponderance of evidence”, which is a way of saying by more than half. For punitive damages, which were awarded, they needed to find that he acted with malice by “clear and convincing evidence”, which is more than half, but less than “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

As you can see, the civil case did not require as high a proof, and the plaintiff’s lawyers had the advantage of seeing how the earlier case went, putting OJ under oath before and at trial and had additional evidence in the form of photos of shoes. They also had a West LA jury pool and the issue was not so easily turned into whether the cops were trying to frame OJ.

Why didn’t OJ simply assert double jeopardy? Well because double jeopardy does not apply to civil suits or suits brought by other jurisdictions. Why didn’t he claim the jury verdict exonerated him? You are asking whether “res judicata” or “collateral estoppel” apply. Res judicata means that the matter has already been adjudicated and cannot be adjudicated again. It does not apply because “the People of the State of California” were the party in the first case, not the Goldman or Brown families.

Collateral estoppel is issue preclusion. It can be applied when the parties are not the same when a party (OJ) has had an opportunity to come to court and fully litigate all the issues, and if one or more of the same issues is present in another case, it can preclude it from being relitigated. It requires that the burden of proof be the same or higher for the party with the burden of proof. If, for example, OJ had been found guilty of the criminal matter, it could have been asserted to keep him from contesting the fact that he was responsible for the deaths of the victims.

But in the particular case, he was found not guilty of criminal responsibility. So why weren’t the plaintiff families barred from relitigating? Because they were different parties and the criminal verdict was not binding on them: they were not parties to the criminal case and could not have been.

The fact that collateral estoppel doesn’t apply is because the civil case had a lower burden of proof really never comes into play because of the difference in party identities. But technically the lower burden of proof in the civil case would also allow the families to relitigate.

9

Taking the notoriety away- suppose it’s not OJ or Blake or anyone famous but just Billy Joe the Mechanic who was accused of killing someone, went to trial, and found not guilty. Is it libelous to call him an “alleged murderer” since the judge and jury ruled on the allegation?

10

A statement not made during a legal proceeding is not required to adhere to any formal, legal definition of the word “murderer.” If you were sued for such a statement, you could explain that you were using the word in a sense supported by most dictionaries, to mean someone who intentionally took a human life with malice aforethought. The only way for the suit to succeed would be to show (with the burden of proof) that O.J. did not do this - which would be quite challenging.

11

I question this. If a newspaper were to call Simpson a murderer after he was acquitted in a court of law, they’d have a difficult time claiming that truth is an absolute defense. Truth is what a court of law says it is.

It’s true, in all senses, that in the U.S. the burden of proof is on the plaintiff. But even for a public figure like Simpson, New York Times v. Sullivan applies. That means that the supposed libeler has to have made the charge “knowing it to be false or with reckless disregard to its truth.” A newspaper could easily be shown to know the charge of murder against an acquitted suspect was false.

The context of the claim would be an issue. If a columnist were to call Simpson a murderer who beat the system, it was probably be legally protected opinion. But if it were said in a supposed neutral front-page article, the paper would have a much tougher time in court. These cases are notoriously difficult to win so it’s hard to predict what the outcome would be in absence of the specific facts.

But damage to Simpson’s reputation is not an issue is such a case. And if he prevailed he’d be entitled to punitive damages, a sum designed to discourage the libeler from doing it again.

12

It is libelous per se to accuse someone of a criminal act. You can assert truth as a defense, but a jury would have to agree with you. For OJ or Blake, that is likely that a jury would agree.

13

Opinions are not considered libelous or slanderous, at least that is how courts in the USA have ruled. When something is clearly an opinion, like if I say “You’re a jerk,” even if it’s damaging, it’s not held as libel.

For instance if I said “Brad Pitt is a jerk” and you said “Wow, if Markxxx thinks he’s a jerk, than I won’t see his movies anymore.” OK this is not libel even if it killed Pitt’s career. Because my statement, even if damaging is clearly just an opinion.

You’ll remember Oprah was involved in a similar case saying by the beef industry when she said something along the lines she’d think twice about eating beef anymore. And people said “Well if Oprah thinks it’s bad, we won’t do it either.”

Well the jury found her not guilty.

This is why editorials in papers are judged with different standards than reporting the same crime. An editorial is an opinon and is placed in such a way in the paper as it cannot be confused with fact (at least it should be). This allows the same paper to have to have different standards for libel and slander.

Also remember there is a different standard for political figures. The courts have ruled it is MUCH harder to slander or libel someone holding public office than it is a private citizen. Although it certainly is possible. This is why Obama and other presidents have to take more abuse, besides the public relation factors.

So by saying OJ is a murder if you say it in a context of an opinion, such as “I don’t care if he was found not guilty I say he’s guilty.” it wouldn’t be held libel or slanderous

14

Wrong. Wrong, wrong. You cannot make a statement of fact into an opinion by saying “it is my opinion that you are a murderer.”

OJ isn’t going to sue you if you are wrong, but if you accuse someone of a crime by stating the name of a crime, that is not an “opinion”, it is a statement of fact under the law, and the public figure doctrine does not protect you if you have no reasonable basis to state that. Now it is a very limited set of circumstances, but let’s take the wild accusations about Bill Clinton being accused of smuggling drugs through the Mena airport and having witnesses killed. If he wanted to take the time out of his life to involve himself in a lawsuit over it, he could sue the idiots who making those accusations. Those idiots would then have to prove truth as a defense, or that they had such good evidence that they didn’t say it recklessly.

The reason you can say anything about the President of the United States is not the public figure doctrine, but because the Prez or ex-Prez doesn’t have the time or the inclination to try to sue you for your hundreds of dollars.

See Gertz v. Welch and NYT v. Sullivan and their progeny.

15

Surely it is flat out true that, since such an allegation was made, he is an alleged murderer, quite regardless of whether he actually murdered anyone or even of whether anyone any longer believes that he did.

16

The common law defences are Truth*, Fair Comment, Public Interest or Privilege (both absolute or qualified).

Saying “xyz” is a murderer is a statement of fact. To establish a defence to defamation, you will hve to prove that what you said was true, not that you believed it to be true, but that it actually was true. So running this defence in a trial is risky since

  1. you have to prove that the person was actually a murderer.

and

  1. The fact in the senario the OP put forward a criminal trial has already aquitted the person, about 30 second after the you raise it, the judge will throw the case out as an abuse of process, since you are using a civil court to decide a criminal question, and the barrister/attorney will find themselves debarred, struck of the roll, tar and feathered, spanked, shot, sent to Australia etc etc.
17

And the OP’s question is, no OJ is not guilty of murder, no competant court in any jurisdiction has found him guilty of that crime.

You are guilty when the court says you are.

18

So you believe the burden of proof is on the defense?

19

In Civil law the general rule is, "he who asserts musty prove. You assert something, it is your duty tlo prove it. Read the whole thing, I specifically said using civil courts to decide criminal issues.

20

I believe AK84 is a practitioner in the United Kingdom, if I’ve surmised correctly. English and Scottish law differ considerably on the topic of defamation from American law, in no small part due to our First Amendment.

Although this doesn’t prove anything, this is not the first time I’ve heard that the burden of proof lies with the party claiming the truth defense in the U.K. (which is the traditional allocation of the burden for any affirmative defense, anyhow).