Orenthal James Simpson was a complicated man.
He lived a life layered with great achievement and perhaps even greater infamy.
For close to 10 months, in 1995, as a reporter for WIVB TV/News4Buffalo, I spent an average of 60 hours a week chronicling Simpson’s trial for the slashing murder of his estranged wife and a restaurant waiter. It had been dubbed the “Trial of the Century” (though truth be told it was more the “Trial of the Second Half of the Century,” proceeded in 1935 by the trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, the accused Lindbergh baby kidnapper).
Over the course of a roughly 45-year career in journalism, “covering the O.J. trial” has become one of the hallmarks of my time as a reporter. It is the one story that everyone asks about. The one story, above all others, where people ask me, “Did he do it? Was there justice? What was the trial like?”
I can’t tell you, with any degree of certainty, what the answer to those first two questions is.
Did he do it? Possibly. There was evidence to link him to the brutal crime and I heard and saw every bit of it.
A mountain of evidence as prosecutors insisted? No. There were plenty of reasonable questions about the way the Los Angeles Police Department conducted their investigation of the murders; the analysis of the evidence that was collected and how it was collected, as well as lingering questions about what role race may have played in how the investigation was undertaken.
I have said since the day that Simpson was acquitted of the murders in criminal court that I find no fault with the jury’s verdict. Based on the evidence they were presented, I viewed the verdict as reasonable. But always with the caveat that the jurors had less evidence available to them, than reporters and the general public.
Some evidence was deemed inadmissible. Some was not discovered until years later, during a civil liability trial.
And while the criminal jury acquitted Simpson, the civil jury found him liable for the deaths. Yet those were different trials with dramatically different standards of proof.
Was there justice? Only God knows that.
As for what the trial was like: It was a circus. The exact same phrase historians have used to describe the Lindbergh trial.
Maybe that’s because the underlying elements of both trials were the same.
I wasn’t around for the Lindbergh trial, but reading contemporary accounts of it, the trial sounded just like the Simpson case. Celebrity was at the heart of it and that celebrity led to a media feeding frenzy.
Race also played a role. The accused Lindbergh kidnapper was an immigrant.
The media exposure of the Simpson case made everyone involved “famous.” Not only was the defendant famous, but the judge, the prosecutors, the defense attorneys, the police investigators, the forensic scientists, and even the most minor witnesses became famous. (Had anyone, outside of LA, heard of a Kardashian before the Simpson trial?)
Prior to the Simpson trial, I had covered dozens of high-profile criminal cases and their trials. None of them bore even a slight resemblance to what happened inside the LA County Courthouse during the Simpson proceedings.
The public appetite for all things Simpson’s trial became so voracious that the broadcast TV networks replaced the daily soap operas with a live broadcast of the proceedings. Trust me when I tell you that was at a time when no one dared disturb the viewing window of the soap operas.
But this, this, was the original TV reality show. Its ratings would have blown away “The Apprentice.”
As someone who has argued tirelessly to open our courts for broadcast, to provide people who may never in their lives come in contact with our court system with a better understanding of how they work, I have to say this was far from the courts’ finest hour.
If Simpson, a football hero turned popular actor turned commercial pitchman, turned accused and later held civilly liable killer was complicated, his trial was even more so. Almost 30 years after his acquittal of a double murder I’m not sure I’ll ever figure out what, if any lessons there were in the O.J. Simpson trial.