[Syd Thrift]

The real issue with the OJ case isn't to me even that a murderer went free, it's how cavalier the LAPD was with evidence that the one time there was heat and light shed on it, there was enough reasonable doubt to get a not guilty verdict. How many cases that didn't get the same amount of light, where the defendant wasn't able to hire some of the... well, I'm not going to call Robert Kardassian or F Lee Bailey the "best" lawyers money could buy, but they were some of the lawyers that money could buy, but how many times did the LAPD actually succeed in convictions based on even less evidence than what they had for OJ? Some of those people were probably guilty, sure, but I bet some of them weren't. And then there's the plea bargains made in the face of possibly manufactured/planted evidence. Everyone likes to pretend that when you plead guilty, that means you must have done it, but an awful lot of the time the reality is that a person, possibly someone who already has a criminal record, looks at the calculus of beating the rap for something they didn't do vs spending even more time than the plea bargain gives them, and decides that with the system as broken as it is, it's in their best interest to accept the deal.

To the extent that this was "payback for Rodney King", which sounds like some post facto stuff to me, like I don't remember any of the jurors saying that at the time, and I still don't see other jurors piping up to support that one who made the statement, it was less Rodney King exactly and more that 9 black jurors heard the prosecution weave a tale that started out rock-solid, turned out that much of the evidence was either potentially planted or not nearly as rock-solid as it was initially made out to be, and, because many of them most likely knew someone who'd been given a similar runaround, were immediately skeptical. Also though it wasn't a hung jury and the three white jurors also decided in favor of reasonable doubt.

And I just want to point out here that *even at the time* the foreman of the jury wrote a book called "Madame Foreman" where she said she thought OJ probably did it but that prosecution didn't prove reasonable doubt. I understand how frustrating that sounds but that is, in fact, how the legal system works.