Has anyone gone back to the O.J. jurors and said, “Do you still think he’s innocent? Do you regret acquitting him?” Have any of the jurors made any statements of any kind lately, what with all the fuss about the book?
Several of the jurors questioned his innocence immediately after acquitting him. In a CNN interview, Anise Aschenbach said: “I think he probably did it, and that’s the pits.” David Aldana gave a radio interview where he said: "“O.K., there’s a chance he could have done it. But as far as I feel, with all the evidence and everything like that, I would say more than likely not. But there is a chance he could have done it.” [cite ]
Aschenbach told Larry King that she and another juror voted guilty in the first vote.
Since the standard of proof in a criminal trial is “proof beyond a reasonable doubt,” then those two jurors correctly voted to acquit.
Saying that “he probably did it” is not good enough, since that’s the standard used in civil trials, of proof on a balance of probabilities. Saying that “there’s a chance he did it” is definitely not enough for a conviction, or even for a civil verdict.
If the prosecutors didn’t convince the jurors beyond a reasonable doubt that OJ was guilty, then they were duty bound to acquit.
The problem is that most legal analysts, including other prosecutors, said that the evidence and testimony given in the Simpson case was some of the most persuasive evidence they had ever seen in a homicide trial.
It was a stupid, stupid jury.
I remember hearing that the case should have actually been tried in the Santa Monica district rather than the downtown LA district. However, the prosecutors wanted to make sure that a pool of black jurors was available. Obviously, they were attempting to avoid a repeat of the Rodney King trial with an all white jury.
I think the jury feels just fine with the verdict. I always felt that the jury thought he was guilty. But ten of the jurors, nine black and one Hispanic, wanted white America to know how it felt not to get justice in the court system. Frankly, you’d have to be a moron to think he was innocent.
:dubious:
Well, this is dangerously close to politics in GQ, but huh? You have something to back up this wild-sounding claim?
While the evidence seemed to be incontrovertible, the way the prosecution presented the case, and the way Ito presided over the case, caused a lot of confusion. Add to that, the 10 minority jurors, and the overzealousness of the LAPD and you had the recipe for disaster.
I think the jury feels that they didn’t really find him “innocent” per se, but rather “not guilty” based on evidence.
The judge and the prosecution did a poor job in letting the defense twist the minds of the jurors to the point of “if there isn’t a photo or video of him commiting the crime, then we have no proof.”
Judge Ito failed to educate the jury on what exactly “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt” really means. He allowed those guys to confuse the jurors into thinking there had to be a smoking gun or they had to set him free.
Good read Q.E.D., :dubious: this is a dangerously close to politics question in GQ, don’t you think??
Poor choice of terms, perhaps, but that’s neither here nor there. My request for a cite still stands.
Argh! It really irks me when people say this. The jury was not all-white!
Well, there was certainly a lot of speculation on the jury nullification, to send a message and draw attention to the inequities in the justice system. As far as proof is concerned, I think you’d have to do some reading on the subject and form your own opinion, but it’s almost certainly a probability.
What I heard (sorry, it’s been ten years and I don’t remember where) was that Cochran did focus groups to determine attitudes of different groups. What he found, to his own surprise, was that the black women weren’t as tired of “immature men beating on women” as they were of “white women coming in and stealing all our good men.” Supposedly, he then concentrated on getting as many of them on the jury as possible. Throw in some indignation about Mark Fuhrman, and you get an acquittal.
The jury in the O.J. Simpson criminal trial. None regularly read a newspaper, but eight regularly watch tabloid TV shows. Nine thought that Simpson was less likely to be a murderer because he was a professional athlete.
I think it’s more likely that each juror had his or her own internal reasons for deciding to acquit. Perhaps a few DID want to send a message as claimed. Others didn’t find the evidence compelling. Probably at least a half-dozen other reasons, too. To assign any one particular reason to a group such as this is vastly oversimplifying things, IMO. There can be as many reasons as there are individuals.
I think that in hindsight, the evidence is beyond a reasonable doubt but at the time was blurred by the antics of the defence team. I think the OP was asking if the jurors had more recently been asked how they felt about their decision.
Excuse me if I hijack this because it leads to a questin I was going to ask on the same subject. I realize that once the innocent verdict was read that OJ could not have been tried for the same crime.
- What if Judge Ito made an error in his instruction to the jury or during the trial itself, could the state not have appealed the decision? This was a monster of a trial, surely the state could have found something wrong with Ito’s decisions.
- Could OJ not have been tried for other offences? For example, he did not surrender himself to police and instead fled in the famous Bronco freeway ride.
Looks like Walloon’s cite supports the above.
This is where you, and a lot of others, get sidetracked. The test is “beyond a reasonable doubt” NOT “beyond a shadow of a doubt”. In the most egregious of cases you can somehow find a “shadow of a doubt”. Everyone would somehow be innocent. “Reasonable” demands a more critical analysis. When the DNA, the circumstantial evidence, the timeline and the motive intersect a rational human will usually conclude that there is no “reasonable doubt”.
The Simpson jury can forever be cited one of the greatest abuses of the American justice system.