WASHINGTON (AP) — OJ Simpson, the football star and actor who was acquitted in a sensational 1995 trial for the murder of his ex-wife but convicted of her death in a civil lawsuit and later jailed for armed robbery and kidnapping, has died at the age of 76.
Simpson, who was acquitted by a Los Angeles jury in what the U. S. media called “the trial of the century,” died on April 10 after a war with cancer, his circle of relatives announced on social media on April 11.
Simpson steered clear of criminality when it was discovered that he was not to blame for the 1994 stabbing deaths of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and his friend Ronald Goldman in Los Angeles. Simpson then served nine years in a Nevada criminal prison after being convicted in 2008. He was charged with 12 counts of armed robbery and kidnapping at gunpoint of two sports memorabilia dealers at a Las Vegas hotel.
Nicknamed “The Juice,” Simpson was one of the most productive and popular athletes of the late 1960s and 1970s. He overcame an illness from his formative years as an electrifying running back at the University of Southern California and won the Heisman Trophy as the ultimate no-nonsense high school football player. After a record-breaking NFL career with the Buffalo Bills and San Francisco 49ers, he was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Simpson turned his football stardom into a career as a sports host, advertising pitcher and Hollywood actor in films, the Naked Gun series.
That all changed after Nicole Brown, Simpson and Goldman were found fatally lacerated in a bloody scene outside their Los Angeles home on June 12, 1994.
Simpson has temporarily become a suspect. He ordered to turn himself in to police, but five days after the killings he fled in his white Ford Bronco with a former teammate, armed with his passport and a costume. A low-speed chase in the Los Angeles domain ended at Simpson’s mansion. and then charged the murders.
What followed was one of the most famous trials in 20th-century America and a media circus. There’s it all: a prominent rich defendant; a black man accused of killing his white ex-wife out of jealousy; a woman murdered after divorcing a guy who had beaten her; a “dream team” of beloved and charismatic defense attorneys; and a big mistake on the part of the prosecutors.
Simpson, who at the beginning of the case said he is “not 100 percent guilty at all,” greeted jurors and uttered the words “thank you” after the predominantly black panel of 10 women and two men acquitted him on Oct. 3, 1995. .
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Prosecutors argued that Simpson killed Nicole in a fit of jealousy and presented an extensive investigation of blood, hair and fibers linking Simpson to the murders.
The defense countered that the prominent defendant had been framed by a racist white police officer.
The trial fascinated the United States. At the White House, President Bill Clinton emerged from the Oval Office and watched the verdict on his secretary’s television.
Many black Americans celebrated his acquittal, viewing Simpson as the victim of a fanatical police force. Many white Americans were dismayed by his exoneration.
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Simpson’s legal team included prominent criminal defense attorneys Johnnie Cochran, Alan Dershowitz and F. Lee Bailey, who thwarted the indictment.
Prosecutors made a memorable mistake when they ordered Simpson to go through a pair of blood-stained gloves discovered at the scene of the homicide, convinced that they would be perfectly compatible and show that he was the killer.
In a very theatrical display, Simpson struggled to put on the gloves and told the jury that they had no match with him.
In delivering the highlights of the trial, Cochran referred to the gloves in his closing arguments to jurors with a rhyme: “If it doesn’t suit you, you’ll have to acquit. “He looks at gloves as “the greatest legal mistake of the 20th century. “
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“What this verdict tells us is how fame and money can buy the defense, they can turn a case with overwhelming incriminating physical evidence into one riddled with moderate doubt,” UCLA law professor Peter Arenella told The New York Times after the verdict.
“A predominantly African-American jury was more vulnerable to allegations of police incompetence and corruption and was more willing to impose a higher burden of proof than required for evidence beyond a moderate doubt,” Arenella said.
After his acquittal, Simpson said, “I will pursue as my number one purpose in life the killer or killers who killed Nicole and M. Goldman. . . They’re somewhere. . . I didn’t need it, I couldn’t. “, and killed no one. “
Subsequently, the Goldman and Brown families filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Simpson in civil court. In 1997, a predominantly white jury in Santa Monica, California, uncovered Simpson for both deaths and ordered him to pay $33. 5 million in damages.
“Regardless, we have justice for Ron and Nicole,” Fred Goldman, Ron Goldman’s father, said after the verdict.
Simpson’s “dream team” did not constitute him in the civil trial in which the burden of proof was lower than in a trial for criminals: a “preponderance of evidence” that “beyond a reasonable doubt moderated. “New evidence also weighs heavily on Simpson, adding photographs of Lo dressed in the kind of shoes that had left blood prints at the murder scene.
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After the civil case, some of Simpson’s belongings, as well as memorabilia from his football days, were confiscated and auctioned off to pay for the damages he owed.
On October 3, 2008, exactly thirteen years after his acquittal in the murder trial, a Las Vegas jury found him guilty on charges including kidnapping and armed robbery. The charges stem from a 2007 incident at a hotel-casino in which Simpson and five men, at least two of whom were armed, stole thousands of dollars’ worth of sports memorabilia from two merchants.
Simpson said he was just taking care of his own property, but was sentenced to up to 33 years in prison.
“I didn’t need to hurt anybody,” Simpson, dressed in a blue criminal jumpsuit with chains on his legs and wrists, said at his sentencing. “I didn’t know I was doing anything wrong. “
Simpson was released on parole in 2017 and moved into a closed ring in Las Vegas. He was granted early parole in 2021 due to his intelligent behavior at age 74.
The saga of his life was chronicled in the 2016 Oscar-winning documentary OJ: Made In America, as well as in television dramas.
Orenthal James Simpson was born in San Francisco on July 9, 1947. He contracted rickets at the age of two and I was forced to wear splints until I was five, but he recovered so well that he became one of the most outstanding football players of all time.
During nine seasons with the Buffalo Bills and two with the San Francisco 49ers, Simpson was one of the greatest running backs in NFL history. In 1973, he was the first NFL player to rush for more than 2,000 yards in a season. He retired in 1979.
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Simpson also became an advertising host, best known for his years of television commercials for Hertz rental cars. As an actor, he acted in films such as The Towering Inferno (1974), Capricorn One (1977) and the police parody. He filmed The Naked Gun in 1988, 1991 and 1994, as a goofy police detective.
Simpson married his first wife, Marguerite, in 1967 and they had three children, including one who drowned in the family pool at the age of two in 1979, the year the couple divorced.
Simpson met his wife Nicole Brown when she was a waitress at the age of 17 and he was still married to Marguerite. Simpson and Brown married in 1985 and had two children. She then called the police after incidents in which he had beaten her. Simpson pleaded no contest to domestic violence charges in 1989.