By R. Cort Kirkwood (The New American)
O.J. Simpson’s prostate-cancer death occasions recalling not his remarkable football career, but instead his acquittal in the murder of his wife, Nicole Brown, and her friend, Ron Goldman, on June 12, 1994.
The evidence showed that Simpson was guilty; the jury nullified what should have been an obvious verdict, as one of the jurors admitted years later. And so Simpson lived the rest of his life in relative peace, although a jury found him responsible for the murders in a civil wrongful-death trial, and he landed in prison for nine years after a sports memorabilia heist in 2007.
The judge, Lance Ito, and prosecutors Marica Clark and Chris Darden, permitted Simpson’s attorneys, led by the late Johnnie Cochran, to racialize the case, and suggest that Simpson was the victim of a racist conspiracy of white cops who planted his blood at the scene of the crime.
It was preposterous, but it worked.
After the federal criminal retrial and conviction of the white Los Angeles cops who were acquitted in state court of beating black career criminal Rodney King, the jury’s acquittal of Simpson was a second major step in exploiting race during criminal trials.
