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People of the State of California v. O.J. Simpson

Prosecution: Marcia Clark, Christopher Darden, Gil Garcetti Defendant: Orenthal James Simpson

Defense team: F. Lee Bailey, Johnnie Cochran, Robert Shapiro, Alan Dershowitz Charge: Double murder (victims -- Nicole Brown Simpson, Ronald Goldman)

Court: Superior Court of the State of California, County of Los Angeles

(downtown)

Judge: Lance Ito

Jury: eight black, one white, one Hispanic, two mixed race

The trial opened on Tuesday, January 24, 1995.

Christopher Darden led off the prosecution's opening statement by portraying Simpson as an abusive husband and a jealous lover of Nicole Brown Simpson.

Marcia Clark followed with a statement laying out the facts proving Simpson's guilt that the prosecution would establish during the trial.

The next day Johnnie Cochran gave an opening statement for the defense in which he presented a confused timeline of events and suggested that Simpson was so crippled by arthritis that he couldn't have possibly pulled off a double murder. Cochran told the jury that the defense would prove that the evidence against Simpson was \

Over the next 99 days of trial, the prosecution put forward 72 witnesses. The first set of witnesses suggested that Simpson had the motive and opportunity to kill. The second set of witnesses suggested that Simpson had in fact used his opportunity to kill his ex-wife and Ronald Goldman.

Finally, the prosecution began to put forward witnesses directly tying Simpson to the two murders. The evidence was technical and circumstantial, relating mostly of the results of blood, hair, fiber, and footprint analysis from the Bundy crime scene and Simpson's Rockingham home.

The most compelling testimony——if one assumed the accuracy of the testing——concerned two RFLP tests. The first indicated that blood found at the crime scene could have come from only 1 out of 170 million sources of blood——and that O. J. Simpson fit the profile. The second came from blood

found on two black socks at the foot of O. J.'s bedroom. According to prosecution testimony, only 1 out of 6.8 billion sources of blood matched the sample. Nicole Brown Simpson might well be the only person on earth whose blood matched the blood found on the socks. On cross-examination of the prosecution's DNA experts, the defense had little choice but to begin to develop the theory that either the blood samples were contaminated or they were planted by corrupt police officers.

The LAPD officer who found a bloody glove outside Kato Kaelin's bedroom turned out to be a godsend for the defense's corrupt-police theory. The officer, Mark Fuhrman, testified for the prosecution on March 9 and 10. Three days later, F. Lee Bailey began a bullying cross-examination of Fuhrman in which he asked the detective, whether, in the past ten years, he had ever used \nigger word.\

A second prosecution disaster followed. Prosecutor Christopher Darden, confident that the bloody gloves belonged to Simpson, decided to make a dramatic courtroom demonstration. He would ask Simpson, in full view of the jury, to try on the gloves worn by Nicole's killer. Simpson seemed to struggle with the gloves, then said, \, it would turn out that there were good reasons why they didn't fit——the gloves may have shrunk because of the blood, photos would turn up showing Simpson wearing ill-fitting gloves——but the damage had been done.

The defense introduced a key expert witness. Henry Lee is a Chinese-American forensic expert with solid credentials. Lee raised doubts with blood splatter demonstrations, suggested that shoe print evidence suggested more than one assailant, and his simple conclusion about the prosecution's DNA tests is \

The Jury Acquits

By the time closing arguments began in the Simpson case, the trial had already broken the record set by the Charles Manson case as the longest jury trial in California history. The jury had been sequestered for the better part of a year and was showing signs of strain and exhaustion. Judge Ito was under attack for the allowing the trial to drag on and his seeming inability to keep lawyers under control.

The jury spent only three hours deliberating the case that had produced 150 witnesses over 133 days and had cost $15 million to try. As America watched at 10 a.m. PST on October 3, 1995, Ito's clerk, Deidre Robertson, announced the jury's verdict: \the jury in the above entitled action find the defendant, Orenthal James Simpson, not guilty of the crime of murder.\

Goldman v. O.J. Simpson

Plaintiff: Fred Goldman (father of Ronald Goldman) and others Defendant: O. J. Simpson

Cause of action: wrongful death

Court: Santa Monica (suburb) Judge: Hiroshi Fujisaki

Jury: nine whites, one black, one Hispanic, and one person of mixed Asian and African ancestry

The trial, held in Santa Monica, took just three months and produced a very different result.

The judge in the civil trial, Hiroshi Fujisaki, proved he was no Lance Ito. He forbad media intervening and prevented the Simpson defense from introducing elements of racial discrimination or fanciful theories of a top-to-bottom conspiracy.

Simpson was forced to testify, clumsily trying to explain the unexplainable. Photos showing Simpson wearing the size 12 Bruno Magli shoes that he claimed not to own turned up first in one newspaper, then in others.

Verdict

After seventeen hours of deliberation, the jury concluded——using the preponderance of the evidence test applicable in civil cases——that O. J. Simpson had wrongfully caused the death of Ronald Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson. The jury ordered Simpson to pay compensatory damages of $8.5 million and punitive damages of $25 million.

Under California law, however, Simpson can continue to survive on the $25,000-a-month income from a judgment-proof pension fund.