It’s tricky. Sometimes the best response is a limited one. You are basically telling the jury that the stuff the defense put out there is so ridiculous as to only merit a cursory response. Of course, if the jury buys the defense argument, you risk appearing as if you have no real response to it. But in any event, the prosecution must control the narrative to win.
Several things about the OJ case that haven’t been brought up have baffled me when people claim his innocence. First, the blood. How many times have you ever cut yourself so badly that you dripped blood around your house? What, probably less than a handful of times in your life, right, even if you work construction? And of those times, you bandaged your hand and wiped up the blood drops on your flooring, right?
Of course, if it is at night and you weren’t aware of the dripping blood, maybe you didn’t. So, of those times in your life where you cut yourself and were unaware, did it just happen to be on the same night and during the same time that your ex-wife, whom you had a rocky relationship with, was brutally murdered right across town? Did you cut yourself AGAIN the next morning by slamming a glass into a sink?
Either OJ is the unluckiest bastard that ever lived or he is guilty.
Second, the Bronco was outside the gate. OJ told the cops that he got his car phone out of the Bronco (when he cut himself) and then pulled it outside of the gate and parked it on the street. Since when do you leave town and pull your car outside of your protected gated home and deliberately park it on the street so that it may be broken into when you are gone? Remember, he didn’t say that he wasn’t thinking and just left it there (like he really did). He said that as he was packing he made a concerted choice to take it from his driveway and park it on the road. Even though he was “rushing around” packing, he decides that he doesn’t like the Bronco where it is, so let’s just pull it on the street? He had immeasurable places to park it on his estate.
I don’t have a gated house, but if I’m leaving town, I don’t use on street parking.
I don’t really believe he is innocent, but I can easily see how the jury came to a not guilty verdict based solely on the case presented to them. I think if you took a lot of different juries and presented them with the same case I think the majority of time the verdict would be not guilty. I don’t think the jury came to the verdict through racial bias or stupidity.
He is, because those people still exist. They tend not to know jack shit about the actual case, evidence, *gestalt *of evidence pointing to OJ, etc. Most seem to be anti-gummint/conspiracy-theory leaners or those who think OJ was an uppity black man who got his from the white establishment.
It really boils down to one simple inquiry and the damning answer: Where was OJ’s innocence in the first four or five days? He acted guilty and talked guilty until the lawyers started whining about phantom drug dealers and how nice OJ was.
Go ahead, walk up to any other Hollywood celebrity and accuse them of a high crime. See if they get all hang-dog and evasive and take strange suicidal actions for five days before saying one word about innocence or even asking pertinent questions about what they are supposed to have done.
I know some people who think he hired a hitman, and didn’t actually commit the crime himself, and they genuinely believe this, but to me, that does not look like the kind of thing a professional hitman would do. They don’t commit bloody knife murders; they shoot people, kill with one shot, and don’t walk through the blood.
Which reduces his guilt not one whit and does not explain much of the evidence and timeline anyway.
No, it looks like the kind of killing an amateur with a lot of violent movie training might do, especially the from-behind neck slashing, which he reportedly acted out in the Navy SEAL role he had just worked on. An amateur who was surprised in the act and used no skill whatsoever to manage his second victim, just brute force knife work.
Not just the issue about using a knife instead of a gun, in a confrontation with two people, but… If the “hitman” had waited a few hours, OJ would have had an ironclad alibi - IIRC he flew to Chicago the next morning. Wouldn’t that be in Hitman School 101 - the first thing to do is be sure the person who hired you has an alibi? “Innocent OJ” is truly the most coincidentally unlucky person in the world - cut himself badly the same time a knife assailant kills his wife and her friend, misses having an alibi by 6 hours, the assailant had the same expensive shoes as him (hitman business must be pretty lucrative?) etc.
then there’s the question about why Goldman didn’t just start running. What are the odds a hitman can run faster than a guy scared for his life? It’s not like hitmen are known for their running ability.
I’m aware of that. They still don’t make frenzied knife attacks, and then walk through the blood. Even people who are not professionals, and have been hired by a drinking buddy, or their sister-in-law, to commit a murder, and then screw it up and get caught, usually screw it up by using a registered gun that is traced back to them, or depositing the money all at once into their personal checking account, or accepting a job in the first place from someone who then goes an blabs to someone else about how clever they are-- or calls a tipline to claim a reward. They don’t screw it up by looking like they spent some time at the murder scene taking out their rage at the victim.
This looked like an angry murder. It was either personal, or the kind of thing a serial killer who is angry at all women, or at the world, does. Since there were not other knife killings in the area that fit the pattern, and Nicole Brown does not seem to have had a lot of people ticked off at her enough to rip her apart with a knife, that pretty much leaves one person.
Yes, I am aware that there was a serial killer in the area who is now on death row somewhere else, and his family believes he killed Ms. Brown; however, he didn’t commit knife murders in sneak attacks; IIRC, he strangled his victims, after courting them. He killed women he lived with, and was in at least one case engaged to.
But like I said upthread, I always thought Gary Condit killed Chandra Levy, so nothing will shock me.
Yes they do - even in this thread you have people making assertions which aren’t possible given the totality of the evidence.
Thinking that OJ hired a hitman (ignoring the obvious problem that the prime reason for hiring a hitman is to have an alibi) is no different thinking wise from thinking firman planted the glove cause he was a racist (which ignores the issue that firman couldn’t have gotten the glove, was 18th person at Nicole’s, couldn’t have possibly known someone else wasn’t confessing right now, and a whole slew of other problems).
To argue or think the blood on his driveway wasn’t his - ignores the cut and his confession that it was his.
To argue the gloves don’t fit misses the point that there were pictures of him wearing the gloves, that they “fit” a man with larger hands than OJ on the stand who wasn’t acting like a toddler trying not to get in his clothes, that there were records of Nicole’s purchase of them, and about a dozen other things that explain away this supposed problem.
People have difficulties with complicated cases - they seize on one thing that doesn’t make sense to them - such as the people that say “where was the plane sized hole in the pentagon?” The fact that there would then be a plane missing if this were true seems to escape them - or then they make up even more ridiculous excuses of what could have happened to the plane.
People really do believe OJ didn’t do it. Or they claim there was “reasonable doubt”. There were problems with the way the prosecution presented their case. None of these amounted to reasonable doubt - at least using any argument I’ve ever heard. Any of the supposed problems with the evidence are nailed down by numerous other facts or problems that make such issues irrelevant.
The level of “reasonable doubt” afforded OJ would be enough to get most criminals in jail out. You can find OJ guilty with probably two or three pieces of evidence - there are dozens of ways to find him guilty on evidence that would have taken a day or two to present. The prosecution tried to do a slam dunk and use a 100 nails to drive their point home and people look at a few of those nails and find problems with it.
People think OJ is innocent
People think Osama didn’t do 9/11
People think Oswald was framed
People think we didn’t walk on the moon
People think Obama wasn’t born in the US
The NPR link has one of the most pertinent quotes from a Columbia University law professor:
“Those who really didn’t appreciate the degree to which the prosecution failed in its burden of proof wanted a conviction, no matter what,” Williams says.
The collection of evidence and the chain of custody of the evidence could logically be seen to have been compromised. The addition of a key witness (Los Angeles police detective Mark Fuhrman) who perjured himself in open court, all left room for reasonable doubt, many jurors said in post-verdict interviews.
That still didn’t stop calls for “better juries” and fewer “downtown juries” (code for black/brown/not highly educated juror pools).
If you are a) not a lawyer very familiar with the case or b) not someone who saw the entire trial you are just another person with an opinion based on limited expertise; just like me. Thinking that taking a few snippets from a nine month trial to support your view honestly seems pretty silly. Frankly, I’m really OK with not being able to feel I know with a high degree of certainty what the answer is, but I think the comparisons you are making are way off base.
Can we agree that having one of the detectives on the case plead the fifth rather than answer questions is devastating to the prosecution?
Of course OJ is guilty. We know this. But you can’t, you really can’t, have the cops plead the fifth when you’re trying to put a murderer behind bars. It looks bad to the jury, you know. It absolutely raises reasonable doubt.
And that is the point of the this thread. To discuss the trial of the century and what went wrong. (Or what went right if you have OJs point of view)
Nobody here seems to have problems with difficult cases. And nobody here thinks he did not do it. Some of you guys are getting kind of heated up over this…
Is this the new standard for heated?:eek: The bar is getting reallllly low IMHO. I don’t feel very heated; I’m actually enjoying myself. You’re comment is the only one kind of harshing my mellow at the moment.
And…the glove found on OJ’s property (that was supposedly planted by Fuhrman) had a cut in the identical spot as the cut on OJ’s finger!!! Why didn’t the prosecution scream that from the rooftops?
If Fuhrman planted the glove that night, how did he know that OJ would slam a glass in his hotel sink in Chicago the next morning, thereby cutting himself in EXACTLY the same spot?
