I believe he did it too, but is it a prior bad act if he was found not guilty of it? If it were a regular guy, the jury would just know that he had been found not guilty in the past, with no bad act established. Or does the loss of the civil case actually count as a prior criminal act??
I assume he will be let off before six years, somehow.
The jury did what they were supposed to; it was the prosecution didn’t step up to the plate. The jury can only go by what is presented in court. Jurys do the best they can with the evidence they get. I really dislike seeing them attacked for simply doing their job.
I read an article elsewhere in which Goldman seems to be trying to take some credit for OJ deciding that he had to resort to some illegal activities for financial reasons.
I wonder if he would have been so quick to take the “credit” if a firearm had gone off and injured somebody during the crime.
He wasn’t “taking credit”. In fact, he didn’t say anything at all. Kim Goldman said something, and court transcripts back up her assertion: cite
Sigmagirl, the lecture you described isn’t posted anywhere I could find (yet), but the reading of the actual sentence(s) is very different from what you describe. Judge Glass is talking so fast it’s hard to follow it all. She only pauses once for more than a second, and she appears to making sure she didn’t forget to read some part of it.
Judge Glass, btw, has been on the bench since January 2003 and has an impeccable record. Lawyers from both sides have described her in their yearly evaluations of judges as “tough, but fair”.
I watched it live. She talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and sentenced one guy and talked and talked and talked and talked and drank from her cup and talked and drank from her cup and then sentenced OJ.
If what you’re listening to sounds as if she’s talking fast, it’s because they speeded it up to keep it under a half an hour.
And then she talked and talked. . .
First, I was speaking from a non-legal standpoint and was addressing justice and fairness, and not what is allowed to be introduced in evidence in our criminal justice system .
Second, in US v. Watts, the Supreme Court stated: “We therefore hold that a jury’s verdict of acquittal does not prevent the sentencing court from considering conduct underlying the acquitted charge, so long as that conduct has been proved by a preponderance of the evidence.”
A jury’s acquittal doesn’t magically mean the acts didn’t happen. It means that, in that case, with that jury, there wasn’t enough evidence presented to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the defendant did it.
You can use civil cases to establish prior bad acts at sentencing if there is a basis for it. To be honest, I don’t know (and doubt they would) that the prosecution raised the prior murders at the sentencing hearing.
By ‘anything else’ I bet she was referring to those Naked Gun movies.
That bothers me too. He was found not guilty in his murder trial. And his civil case was all about a money grab anyway.
Don’t get me wrong, the prosecution and police did an incredibly shitty job of gathering and presenting the evidence. I have rarely seen a prosecution bungled like the OJ Simpson case.
But, and this is a big but, there was more than enough evidence presented to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that OJ committed the murders. From the minimal amount of time the jury spent in deliberations and from some of the stupid comments from some of them afterwards, it is clear to me that they didn’t do their job. Even taking into to account the incredibly shitty job LA did with the case, there STILL should have been a conviction.
<shrug>
I’ll take your word for it that the lecture seemed to take a long time; I haven’t seen or heard it.
Perhaps you could watch the youtube clip I linked before saying “if” and then making up a reason. The clip is not sped up, and the CNN commentators comment on how fast she was talking. She adjourned court as soon as she was done sentencing Mr. Simpson.
There is no reason to think that Judge Glass wanted “face time”, as Sigmagirl seemed to be implying. Judge Glass has served honorably on the bench for almost 6 years now, and has a long history of integrity here in Las Vegas, was my point.
What standard in history – or your opinion – establishes any deliberation period as definitively minimal? Perhaps the jury established early in the deliberations that the prosecution’s case was weak and was actually arguing from a “how can we convict given the case that was presented” position.
Mind you, I believe he was guilty but you don’t know exactly happened in that jury room. Your characterization of the jury’s comments afterward doesn’t prove anything, and *could be *because of your preconceived notion that he should have been found guilty and your disdain for the jury because they wasn’t.
Case by case. Three hours of deliberation after the trial that lasted 8 months, with 150 witnesses, 50,000 pages of trial transcript, and DNA evidence is pathetic.
Of course they did. But, as I said, they did that without considering the evidence presented.
My characterization of the jurys comments could be because of my disdain. But they aren’t.
The judge, the prosecution, the defense, and the media all have blame in the fiasco. But so does the jury. The evidence that was presented to them proved, beyond any reasonable doubt, that OJ Simpson murdered two people. They chose to ignore that evidence.
Actually, I think that in Nevada, the sentence is a bit harsh, even for a gun crime. But Judge Glass is a known hard ass, so it was to be expected (I have little problem with hard assed but fair judges, BTW).
Having said that, had this crime occurred in CA, OJ would be proper fucked, including being required to do 85% of the time before becoming eligible for parole, not 30%…
I believe your husband is incorrect. IIRC, OJ had a prior conviction for spousal assault (I used to use the OJ case all the time as an example of the difference between “arrested” and “convicted”, as in “it’s against the law to use an arrest record against some one” )
What I was trying to say is that you didn’t sit on the jury during the trial nor were you in the jury room for deliberations. There’s no way for you to know guilt was proven beyond a reasonable doubt to that jury or that the jury simply ignored evidence. Just because it took a lot of time and testimony doesn’t mean O.J.'s guilt was established and your repeated conclusion about the amount of time and evidence accumulated proving guilt doesn’t make it so.
I rest my case. 
Bye-bye, you murderous bastard. It’s just too bad somebody didn’t castrate you before you had kids’ lives to ruin in the bargain. If ever somebody deserved this sort of paybacks raining down on them, it’s YOU.
That is true. I wasn’t.
Well, I know that guilt was not proven beyond a reasonable doubt TO THAT JURY. They came back with a not guilty verdict, which means THAT JURY decided it wasn’t proven beyond a reasonable doubt TO THEM.
What I AM saying is that, for THAT JURY to decide that it wasn’t proven beyond a reasonable doubt, they had to ignore or dismiss out of hand massive amounts of evidence and testimony. What I AM saying is that the evidence presented in the case WAS enough to prove, to most unbiased, rational, and intelligent people, that OJ Simpson was proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of murder. And the external evidence (the minimal amount of deliberation time and some jurors out and out stupidity and the evidence itself) supports my conclusion.
It is entirely possible that the jurors were, in fact, highly evolved computers that were able to digest and discuss not just the months of testimony of 150 witnesses and the physical evidence, but also go over all the scientific evidence including DNA, that was introduced. Maybe they were 12 Brainiac clones, each with the computational power of 12 supercomputers. But I’ll stick with my conclusion that they didn’t really give the evidence much unbiased perusal.
I understand the willingness, nay even the desire, to believe the best about juries and their verdicts. In this case, given the massive amount of evidence against OJ that was introduced and common fucking sense, the jury overcome any presumption I would give them. They fucked up. Big time. And, in doing so, joined a list of dozens of others who fucked that case up.
I’ll take it under advisement and issue a ruling in 3 to 4 weeks. 
I read something similar to that. Cite.
Relevant Portion.
Truth be told, I’ve always thought the Goldman family took a bit too much pleasure at the hounding of O.J. and anything bad that happened to him. Even as he’s likely responsible for the murder of their son, it just left me with a creepy feeling. Maybe it was just that mustache.
And while O.J. is certainly guilty in this case and would’ve served himself better had he kept a lower profile following his acquittal, I’m not quite comfortable with this. There’s no way the results of O.J. Trial one didn’t weigh on the minds of the jurors. No matter what the evidence was, this wouldn’t have been a completely fair trial. Not saying that this is a bad conviction. The evidence was there and the case was solid. It just leaves me feeling a bit conflicted.
Harborwolf I couldn’t get your link to work, but I cited the LVRJ about the same thing in post #24.
It wasn’t just an bold assertion from Kim Goldman, tho.
I read that OJ gets a big NFL pension that can not be touched.
