Juice Meets The Deuce?
I’m hard pressed to think of what OJ and Henry Kissinger will have to talk about for eternity.
Hid hijack of thread
Not really. To summarize:
DNA evidence that matches OJ. But DNA evidence was very new at the time, the lab was inexperienced, and followed sloppy procedures that likely contaminated the samples.
A glove found at the crime scene, and a matching glove found at OJ’s house. Found by a cop with a proven history of falsifying evidence.
A footprint made by a very rare shoe. A photograph of OJ wearing a similar shoe. But defence expert witness showed that the photograph was a fake, and prosecution was unable to challenge that.
Plenty of hearsay. But hearsay is notoriously unreliable. There’s a good reason why the Jury didn’t get to hear it.
And having OJ try the glove on, that was the prosecution’s idea. It failed.
All of which amounts to insufficient evidence to prove guilt.
is the testimony of a proven liar who was subsequently convicted and imprisoned for perjury. I can’t trust anything he said.
No, not a frame. A bit of help to the prosecution. Perfectly okay, because OJ was guilty anyway.
You are missing a big point here. Fuhrman had previously investigated OJs violence towards his wife. He knew the history very well. When she turned up dead, he had every reason to select OJ as prime suspect.
Not really. Fuhrman had already selected OJ as his suspect. He knew that OJ couldn’t have an alibi, because he knew that OJ was guilty.
And you are answering the wrong narrative. It isn’t a case of a cop deciding to frame an innocent person. It’s a case of a cop planting evidence to help convict a guilty one. He wouldn’t be the first or the last.
Am I sure that he planted the evidence? No, I am not. Maybe he did find the glove as described. But I don’t trust it.
I heartily endorse every word of your well-informed post.
Who has Kato Kaelin not known peripherally? He’s like celebrity herpes.
They could do an ‘eternal podcast’ reviewing How To Get Away With Murder from a professional standpoint, or maybe GQ’s Tech Support series as “Homicide Support”.
Stranger
While my wife never called the TV stations, I got an earful from her every day when I got home from work.
Hid long reply to hijack of thread
This was the defense claim; you can’t rely on DNA identifying OJ Simpson because of “sloppy procedures” that “contaminated the samples”.
Except contaminated samples won’t produce such false positives. If the samples ere contaminated, they wouldn’t point to OJ. Rather, they wouldn’t point to anybody.
The reality was the jury (and most of America) was inexperienced with DNA, so it was new and confusing. Now, when we are told that the DNA shows that evidence at the scene matches somebody, people are more accepting of the science.
I’ve already addressed this. But I must ask for a cite that he had a “proven history of falsifying evidence”. I can’t find anything. Usually, cops with a proven history of committing crimes aren’t kept on the job.
An Incendiary Defense | The New Yorker
Yes, a very rare shoe which most people wouldn’t be able to afford. And a size 12, which also excludes most people.
I don’t agree with your recollection.
The Shoes That Proved O.J. Simpson's Guilt | Highsnobiety
Such as? Hearsay isn’t usually admissible, so I’m not sure what you possibly mean.
Again, your recollection of events is flawed.
Fuhrman was never imprisoned. He got probation and paid a $200 fine. For lying about racist statements, not about planting any evidence.
FUHRMAN BARGAINS OUT OF JAIL TIME – Chicago Tribune
That’s quite a leap to “he decided to frame him before even knowing if it was even remotely plausible to do so”.
This wasn’t a decision made after the investigation was nearly complete, as some sort of “nudge” towards a conviction. You are claiming that he framed OJ before even knowing if he was in town.
Furman may have been a liar. He may have been a racist. But he wasn’t stupid.
What if the man was giving a speech to a room full of people at that very moment, in some ballroom in another state?
Remember the schadenfreude when he was sentenced to 33 years for the Las Vegas robbery (eligible for parole in 9, and paroled in just shy of 9 IIRC)? It felt like they were throwing the book at him, in a way they might not have for another similar robbery where the perpetrator had not previously obviously and literally gotten away with murder.
I get that ordinary lowlifes do 9 years for robbery all the time, but celebs generally don’t. This represented a small amount of a very rough sort of justice to my way of thinking, though they should have of course denied parole repeatedly.
OJ was banned from writing checks at the store I work at. Seriously.
Our computer system has a master list of everyone who’s written a bad check at any of our locations going back to 1990 or so. One day I was running the customer service desk with nothing going on, so I started looking through the master list to find any names I might recognize, and it turns out that years ago he wrote a bad check for $100 and some change at our Reno location.
I guess we don’t have to watch out for him any more.
(We’ve also got Gary Ridgway in there, and a Donald Trump, but not the Donald Trump - this one’s middle initial is different.)
Let’s not forget the civil suit that followed the criminal trial. And its outcome-- my bold.
Civil trial
In 1996, Fred Goldman and Sharon Rufo, the parents of Ron Goldman, and Lou Brown, father of Nicole Brown filed a civil suit against Simpson for wrongful death.[417] The plaintiffs were represented by Daniel Petrocelli and Simpson by Robert Baker.[418] Presiding Judge Hiroshi Fujisaki did not allow the trial to be televised, did not sequester the jury, and prohibited the defense from alleging racism by the LAPD and from condemning the crime lab.[419] The physical evidence did not change but additional evidence of domestic violence was presented as well as 31 pre-1994 photos of Simpson wearing Bruno Magli shoes,[420] including one that was published 6 months before the murders, proving it could not be a forgery.[421] Results from a polygraph test that Simpson denied taking showed “extreme deception” when he denied committing the murders. Fuhrman did not testify but Simpson did on his own behalf and lied several times.[422]
The jury found Simpson liable for the murders and awarded the victims’ families $33.5 million in compensatory and punitive damages.[351] Simpson filed for bankruptcy afterwards and relocated to Florida to protect his pension from seizure. His remaining assets were seized and auctioned off with most being purchased by critics of the verdict of the criminal trial to help the plaintiffs recoup the costs of litigation. Simpson’s Heisman Trophy was sold for $255,500 to an undisclosed buyer. All the proceeds went to the Goldman family who said they have received only one percent of the money that Simpson owes from the wrongful death suit.[423][424]
This citation is from Wikipedia, which presents a lengthy blow-by-blow account of the whole saga.
Hid hijack of thread
The defense summarized their reasonable doubt theory as “compromised, contaminated, corrupted”.[2] They argued that, during the collection phase of evidence-gathering, the evidence was compromised by mishandling and 100% of the DNA of the real killer was lost; and then contaminated during the processing phase, with Simpson’s preserved DNA being transferred to all but three exhibits. They alleged that the remaining three were corrupted as the police planted that blood evidence.
Get that? The samples were contaminated by accidentally transferring OJ’s DNA to the items. Thus the DNA match doesn’t prove a thing.
This was a pretty big thing. He participated in various tape recorded conversations in which he stated that he had falsified probable cause.
His most damaging statements were withheld from the jury for legal reasons that I don’t understand.
Yes, that’s the point. The hearsay evidence WAS excluded, and rightfully so. But you can see people in this thread complaining about the evidence that the jury didn’t see.
ignorance fought.
cite?
Take this silly argument out of the thread. This is a serious hijack.
@Peter_Morris
Moderating
If the Goldman family has not received all of the money they were awarded in the civil suit, do they have any claim on his estate?
That’s a really good question. As I recall, certain assets were protected from the judgment—primary residence, pension, that kind of thing. The intention is that civil judgments shouldn’t leave someone destitute and on the street. Well, that’s no longer a concern.
Golf clap.
There is some poetic justice in an exemplar of toxic masculinity felled by a cancer in that particular gland.
Not to mention a racist jury.
The whole first trial was a mockery of the judicial process. A high school kangaroo court would have been run better.
The judge, the jury, and the prosecutors in particular would have been funny if they weren’t so pathetic. The Marx Brothers would have made a better prosecutorial team than the one at Simpson’s first trial.
He was a bad man, but he did some good things. I think his Hertz commercial was the first mainstream commercial, aimed at a white audience, that featured a Black man. That was a step forward.
And hey, he showed that a Black man who is rich and famous can get away with the same kind of judicial mockery that rich famous White guys get away with.
I heard a story on NPR yesterday that mentioned it.
The Hertz campaign, which ran for years, was one of the first times an American audience saw a Black spokesperson for a major national company.