OJ Simpson is Dead

[Amazin69]

Originally Posted by Le Grande Orange

Did Simpson ever actually pay the judgement? There are plenty of cases in which the financial penalty never gets paid.

The civil system exists to allow an individual to seek redress for damages that do not rise to the level of a criminal offense.

Once again you do not seem to understand the difference between criminal and civil cases.

A conviction in a criminal case can put you in PRISON, possibly for the rest of your life. A conviction in a civil case means having to pay a fine — which in some cases never gets paid.)

I understand very well that imprisonment and crippling damage awards (let's not forget that OJ's Las Vegas troubles came because he was so broke he was trying to sell his memorabilia and then it was stolen from him and he was trying to recover the items from the thieves) are different kinds of punishment. However, since all these are grouped together in the text of the 5th Amendment ("Life, Liberty, or Property") having a separate trial for each of these possible punishments still smells like a cheap dodge around the double-jeopardy protection.

You are free to disagree. As I noted above, I don't believe the Supreme Court has ever ruled on this. They seem more interested in the "separate sovereigns" concept (most recently in Gamble v United States [2015]), about the Feds being able to prosecute a case that had already been decided by a state court.

(Honestly, "separate sovereigns" seems like bullhockey, too. It was established back when colonists were worried that English citizens might seek protection from suits in the Colonies by running home and having an English court throw it out, but even in the days before the Civil War, the relationship between the Federal government and the states was OBVIOUSLY different than that between two nations. This all feels like the Court relying on an outdated ruling to take away defendants' rights.)

But whether O.J. could be tried by both a state court and Federal one (in the civil case) is different from your assertion that he can be tried an infinite number of times, as long as the punishment differs each time. JMO.

And if "the civil system exists to allow an individual to seek redress for damages that do not rise to the level of a criminal offense", please explain how hacking through Nicole's throat with a knife doesn't rise to that level, exactly?

[Amazin69]

Originally Posted by thehef

Furman may have had his character flaws but he was no idiot. I can't see him trying to plant evidence - which he'd have a short window to do - in what he'd know was just about to blow up and be the most publicized and scrutinized event of the year. It's one thing to be confident of planting evidence on some gang-banger that's pretty much guilty anyway and where nobody's gonna give the "evidence" a second look. It's quite another for Furman to think "I'm gonna frame OJ by grabbing some Bruno's out of his closet and drag them through the blood..."

IMO, this is one of the more unlikelier possibilities out there.

And yet, not only did Fuhrman take the fifth when asked if he had planted evidence, not only did the glove that OJ allegedly "threw away" seem suspicious (what, he got rid of the rest of the clothes as if by magic, but he just tossed the glove a few feet, managing to wake Kato Kaelin in the process? And, gosh, isn't it lucky for the cops that OJ just happens to have a glove pulled off at the crime scene and the other is found on his property?), but some of the blood evidence certainly seemed to have been planted, as when the DNA specialist criticized the blood for not having enough alleles to be beyond a doubt, and WHAMMO! The cops "found" other blood in car (below the glove box, IIRC), and wouldn't you know it, THIS blood had ALL the alleles present! It was so pristine, it might just as well have been taken from the blood sample that O.J, had given the police ! (cough, cough…)

IIRC, one of the changes that resulted from the trial is that the chain of custody on evidence is nowadays much more regulated and secured.

And the LAPD would pull this **** all the time, in the biggest of cases. Just two years previously, the cops had been forced to turn over photographs of the 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy that they had confiscated from a private photographer at the scene, which allegedly showed damage to the ceiling tiles (IIRC) that would have contradicted the theory that Sirhan Sirhan was a lone assassin. (For starters, the autopsy showed that Kennedy had contact burns from the gunfire and all the shots came from behind, whereas Sirhan was several feet in front of Kennedy.)

This is not the Jamie Enyart case, where they took 15-year-old Jamie's film and kept it for 20 years, only to tell Jamie it was missing when 1988 rolled around. (Jamie got $450,600 in damages.)This was a case where the photographer got a ruling for the cops to turn over the pictures and then the LAPD claimed that the pictures had been stolen out of a police car when the officer stopped for food en route to delivering them. (Really.)

The LAPD, "the gang in blue", lied in court and planted evidence all the time. This was known. This is what all the documentaries were about. This is why we had the Rodney King riots. And it had not stopped. Rafael Perez and Rampart/CRASH were just around corner.

The idea that Fuhrman would have been deterred because it was a celebrity case is IMO silly. The police covered up a ton of stuff. (And they knew the DAs wanted to win a big case, as there had been a run of failed prosecutions of celebrities, which wouldn't stop until they were able to convict Phil Spector.) They thought they were invincible

[Ragnar]

I heard something about the OJ case on a sports talk radio station last night. I find this very hard to believe. Vegas was giving 1000-1 odds on a not guilty verdict.

I can't believe they would be that stupid. Even I'd throw up 100 just for the hell of it. Besides, they usually cap those type bets. At least they do now.

[BaseballMan]

Originally Posted by Amazin69

The actual FACTS are

• In the criminal trial, several witnesses testified that OJ was signing autographs on the plane, in fine spirits, no cuts on his hand, which he did not try to hide.

(His hand did later have a cut, but he claimed he got that in Chicago. Whether it was mere coincidence, or OJ trying to draw suspicion away from his son is unclear.)

Witnesses are the least reliable forms of evidence.
How do you know they are telling the truth or not?
How do you know they were even looking at his hand?

[BaseballMan]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

Lest we forget, Fuhrman literally pled the 5th when the defense point blank asked him if he had planted evidence. I’m sorry, but if I’m on a jury and that’s what I hear, that’s a yes for me, dog. If the prosecution wanted to point out that there were reams of evidence and Fuhrman being a jerk didn’t change that, they should have pointed that out. Instead they left it completely in the air for some reason.

I would have a reasonable doubt on Furhman's evidence but not on the whole case.
You would still need to show that it's possible that Furhman was able to have others assist him .
If he was the only person working on the case i would agree with a not guilty verdict by reasonable doubt.
Furhman would have had me thinking of whether his evidence was legit but I would still have to weighbitcagainst everything else.
Two things could both be true at the same time.
OJ was a murderer and Furhman was racist.
It could still be possible

[Ty Cobb]

“Let it go, Indiana.”

[Syd Thrift]

Originally Posted by BaseballMan

I would have a reasonable doubt on Furhman's evidence but not on the whole case.
You would still need to show that it's possible that Furhman was able to have others assist him .
If he was the only person working on the case i would agree with a not guilty verdict by reasonable doubt.
Furhman would have had me thinking of whether his evidence was legit but I would still have to weighbitcagainst everything else.
Two things could both be true at the same time.
OJ was a murderer and Furhman was racist.
It could still be possible

Except for some just straight up looney-tunes responses here about OJ's son, I'm not seeing anyone saying OJ wasn't a murderer. It sure looks to me like everyone who's arguing in favor of the not guilty verdict is saying that yeah, we think he probably murdered Simpson and Goldman. The issue is that "probably" isn't enough to convict a person, or at least it shouldn't be, and on top of that the jury is not presented with the mountain of evidence that we how have that supports Simpson being the murderer. Instead, they were presented with a specific set of evidence that they kind of trashed themselves by trying for the idiotic theater of making Simpson put on the bloody glove (WOW SHOCKER YOU CAN MAKE IT NOT FIT YOUR HAND HOWEVER COULD I NOT SEE THAT COMING), putting the guy who supposedly did the evidence-collecting front and center when they knew he was an LAPD cop with an LAPD cop history, and otherwise just plain doing a horrible job of presenting the case. Juries are very, very specifically instructed to not go out and do research on their own, and this one, being sequestered for months and existing in a mostly pre-Internet period, simply did not have the resources to just go out there and magically acquire all the extra data we have today or for that matter that we had in early 1995.

Again, you claim to have read "Outrage". Perhaps you should re-read it. Bugliosi if memory serves does think that the jury ought to have seen past all the shenanigans but he also lays out the case that prosecution completely and utterly messed up time and time again, on a near-constant basis throughout the trial. He even talks about how he would have addressed the Fuhrman situation along with the mountain of evidence (hint: not by ignoring it and hoping the jury would, like, forget or something) and what he'd have done otherwise to prosecute the case differently.

[Amazin69]

Originally Posted by BaseballMan

I would have a reasonable doubt on Furhman's evidence but not on the whole case.
You would still need to show that it's possible that Furhman was able to have others assist him .
If he was the only person working on the case i would agree with a not guilty verdict by reasonable doubt.
Furhman would have had me thinking of whether his evidence was legit but I would still have to weighbitcagainst everything else.
Two things could both be true at the same time.
OJ was a murderer and Furhman was racist.
It could still be possible

You do know that Philip Vannatter took the blood from the crime scene to OJ's house, rather than "booking" it into evidence, right? He claimed that he wanted to book all the evidence together at the same time, which not only has nothing to do with proper procedure…but then he didn't actually book the evidence for a further three days. More than enough time for him and Fuhrman (and whomever else) to work their "investigative magic".

Indeed, the whole search of OJ's house was bogus. Fuhrman and co. busted down the gate when OJ didn't answer (for the excellent reason that he was on the plane to Chicago at the time) and did all their planting, er, "searching" without a warrant. They justified this by saying they feared for OJ‘s safety, which is a laugh. As if the spouse isn't automatically the prime suspect. As if Fuhrman hadn't personally responded to a domestic violence call between OJ and Nicole a few years before.

Honestly, a better judge than Ito would have tossed all the "evidence" from OJ's house pre-trial. And then dismissed the charges before jeopardy had attached, so the DA could build a real case.

The LAPD, ladies and gents! Your tax dollars at work! (Mine literally, as I have mentioned.)

[Amazin69]

Originally Posted by BaseballMan

Witnesses are the least reliable forms of evidence.
How do you know they are telling the truth or not?
How do you know they were even looking at his hand?

You can give them all the credence you want, but in the absence of any contrary evidence (nobody said the opposite), they should be given some credence. None of the plane witnesses had a reason to lie. None of them were likely to have confused the dates, since they don't meet OJ Simpson every day.

What's more likely, Fuhrman and Vannatter doing what Fuhrman essentially confessed they had done before? (And what we later learned from Rafael Perez, the LAPD did consistently.) Or random passengers on a plane who had never met OJ deciding to risk prison time by lying under oath? I know which I find more likely.

To quote Damon Runyon:

The race is not always to the swift, nor battle to the strong
But that's the way to bet

Bet on Fuhrman being Fuhrman. Trust me.

[Amazin69]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

Except for some just straight up looney-tunes responses here about OJ's son…

Gratuitous insults aside, what is your reason for dismissing the Jason theory? Other than "I just know OJ did it!"

Because your putative psychic powers aren't evidence, in case you didn't know. That's why we have trials, after all.

[BaseballMan]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

Except for some just straight up looney-tunes responses here about OJ's son, I'm not seeing anyone saying OJ wasn't a murderer. It sure looks to me like everyone who's arguing in favor of the not guilty verdict is saying that yeah, we think he probably murdered Simpson and Goldman. The issue is that "probably" isn't enough to convict a person, or at least it shouldn't be, and on top of that the jury is not presented with the mountain of evidence that we how have that supports Simpson being the murderer. Instead, they were presented with a specific set of evidence that they kind of trashed themselves by trying for the idiotic theater of making Simpson put on the bloody glove (WOW SHOCKER YOU CAN MAKE IT NOT FIT YOUR HAND HOWEVER COULD I NOT SEE THAT COMING), putting the guy who supposedly did the evidence-collecting front and center when they knew he was an LAPD cop with an LAPD cop history, and otherwise just plain doing a horrible job of presenting the case. Juries are very, very specifically instructed to not go out and do research on their own, and this one, being sequestered for months and existing in a mostly pre-Internet period, simply did not have the resources to just go out there and magically acquire all the extra data we have today or for that matter that we had in early 1995.

Again, you claim to have read "Outrage". Perhaps you should re-read it. Bugliosi if memory serves does think that the jury ought to have seen past all the shenanigans but he also lays out the case that prosecution completely and utterly messed up time and time again, on a near-constant basis throughout the trial. He even talks about how he would have addressed the Fuhrman situation along with the mountain of evidence (hint: not by ignoring it and hoping the jury would, like, forget or something) and what he'd have done otherwise to prosecute the case differently.

I never disagreed with the prosecution screwing things up.
Clark was outmatched by Cochrane and Darden should have been replaced.
Trying on the glove has to be one of the dumbest moves a lawyer has made.
Let's not forget that Judge Ito wasn't the best choice either.
Didn't Judge Ito's wife and Clark or Darden have a beef with each other and she was gonna be some kind of witness.
I dont remember for sure but i seem to recall something about that.

My question has been was the jury's reasonable doubt reasonable vs all the evidence?
If they weighed all the evidence and had reasonable doubt then i might agree with the decision.
I'm just not sure they did.
Its a tough decision to make.

[Syd Thrift]

In part because they didn't get all the evidence we got. I think it was Bugliosi who pointed out that there's a danger in overloading a jury and as it was the trial literally took months. It's just, an awful lot of what the jury saw was tainted, first by Fuhrman deciding to play games on the stand and then by the prosecution relying heavily on DNA evidence that turned out to be at the time not nearly as cut and dried as they'd made it out to be.

And even with the evidence they had I thought Bugliosi made a great case for addressing the Fuhrman deal explicitly in the closing argument instead of ignoring it, even though the defense had just gotten done hammering that point in their closing. I don't even think they addressed the mistake of allowing Simpson to try the glove after that whole meme the defense repeated ad nauseum.

They messed up, Ito messed up, and unlike most criminal cases the defense was competent and diligent enough to build all those mistakes into reasonable doubt.

[BaseballMan]

Originally Posted by Amazin69

You can give them all the credence you want, but in the absence of any contrary evidence (nobody said the opposite), they should be given some credence. None of the plane witnesses had a reason to lie. None of them were likely to have confused the dates, since they don't meet OJ Simpson every day.

What's more likely, Fuhrman and Vannatter doing what Fuhrman essentially confessed they had done before? (And what we later learned from Rafael Perez, the LAPD did consistently.) Or random passengers on a plane who had never met OJ deciding to risk prison time by lying under oath? I know which I find more likely.

Again how do you know they saw what they said they saw?
How do you know they weren't caught up with a celebrity to notice details?
Was it crowded around Simpson when they saw him or was he more accessible.
What makes you think they would be thinking of lying under oath vs just answering some questions?
Do you know what questions were asked?

[Brad K]

The question is whether law enforcement learned anything from cops blowing the OJ case. Probably not.

But at least the prosecution had good enough reason to bring it to trial, unlike the Casey Anthony case. There, its seems clear the mother, grandfather, grandmother, or some combination of them did the crime. However they had nothing so they threw it against the wall hoping the jury would convict the one of the three who appeared most whacky.

[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.

[thehef]

I don't think anyone has mentioned it here but I read where OJ's estate/family/whatever is adamant that his brain will NOT be donated for CTE study. I'm only guessing that this is because his family doesn't (and OJ himself didn't) want there to be a bunch of chatter to the effect of "Did OJ have CTE and does that explain why he murdered his ex-wife and Ron Goldman?" And I wouldn't be surprised if OJ & his family already knew that he had significant CTE...

[Amazin69]

Originally Posted by thehef

I don't think anyone has mentioned it here but I read where OJ's estate/family/whatever is adamant that his brain will NOT be donated for CTE study. I'm only guessing that this is because his family doesn't (and OJ himself didn't) want there to be a bunch of chatter to the effect of "Did OJ have CTE and does that explain why he murdered his ex-wife and Ron Goldman?" And I wouldn't be surprised if OJ & his family already knew that he had significant CTE...

Perhaps. But what you say about their not wanting the issue raised would hold true, regardless.

(OJ definitely had at least one concussion in his playing days. So people would be trying to parse "how much makes you a murderer, blah blah?" I can't think of any reason the family would want that in the conversation.)

[monkeyman576]

I'm surprised the Goldman and Brown families haven't sued the NFL really.

But yeah, I'm glad to live in a country that takes justice seriously, and if that means that sometimes guilty people go free, in leau of innocent people being falsely imprisoned or executed, then I am ok by that.

Obivously I wish there was no corruption and that criminal justice officers all did their job as they are expected to do, but we live in an imperfect world.

[dsvitak]

Originally Posted by Amazin69

While Fuhrman was planting other blood "evidence", he grabbed some Bruno Maglis out of OJ's closet and left the footprints. DUH.

Btw, I see you're so busy calling me names (how mature!) that you ignored all the evidence against the outright lies ("bloody clothes in the airport trash bins", FFS!) I caught you spewing in the last post. Whatever gets you through the night, I guess.

That's absurd. If Furman left the footprints in blood, then he would have made sure that the shoes were found, and entered into evidence. Shoes were never found, and almost certainly taken away from the scene by OJ. He was wearing them, after all. BLOODY size 12 Bruno Magli shoeprints were found IN the Bronco. Furman never had access to the Bronco. Your logic is completely useless.

As far as the clothes, OJ was seen throwing a bag into a garbage can outside the airport, as he went in. OF COURSE no one grabbed the bag out of the can.

https://www.deseret.com/1995/3/30/19...es-at-airport/ ... Limo driver says four bags at airport drop off, dude inside the terminal says three made the plane.

The severe cut on his hand? Cut it while drinking a glass of water in a hotel? How often have YOU badly sliced your hand while drinking water? None for me.

OJ denied that he EVER purchased the Bruno Magli shoes, and a year later, was caught when a picture of him wearing them was released.

I also note, with no little amusement, that the lawyer for OJ's estate made a comment that the families weren't getting ANYTHING. NOTHING. Today, he walked that back, HARD.

Someone finally told the LAWYER that "secured debt", in the form of a judgement, gets paid first. Goldman's are gonna get almost everything from the state, all the monies that OJ had shielded from them.

Here is a link to an analysis from a LAW SCHOOL. Take a look, and learn. Not that it will do any good. You clearly do NOT allow facts to get in the way of a good story:

http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/project.../Evidence.html

[Amazin69]

Originally Posted by BaseballMan

Again how do you know they saw what they said they saw?
How do you know they weren't caught up with a celebrity to notice details?
Was it crowded around Simpson when they saw him or was he more accessible.
What makes you think they would be thinking of lying under oath vs just answering some questions?
Do you know what questions were asked?

It would be odd if they all decided to commit perjury and nobody contradicted them, out of nothing but celebrity infatuation, especially as how O.J. had been greatly vilified by at least 65% of the country by the time they were called to testify.

(I believe that O.J. flew first-class. Are first-class airline passengers likely to be "yeah, stick it to the man, my black brotha!" types? I'd be surprised.)

Certainly they knew that testifying falsely would be perjury, as they had all sworn "to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth."

I don't know the specific questions off-hand, but they would be in the trial transcript. Let me see if it's an easy search…

Okay, I won't quote all of it, but here is the relevant part of the testimony of Wayne Stanfield, Captain of the United Airlines flight. (OJ was indeed in First Class, seat 2D.)

MR. BAILEY: Could you compare the demeanor you observed that night in your conversation with Mr. Simpson, the way he acted, the way he reacted to you to the way you've seen him in other circumstances?

MR. STANFIELD: It was the same.

MR. BAILEY: All right. Did he appear to be relaxed?

MR. STANFIELD: Yes, he did.

MR. BAILEY: Did he appear to respond to your questions in an alert fashion?

MR. STANFIELD: Yes, he did.

MR. BAILEY: Did you see anything at all unusual about him that night?

MR. STANFIELD: No, sir.

MR. BAILEY: When you went back to the cockpit, without going into anything that was said, did you have a conversation with Mr. Simpson--about Mr. Simpson with your co-pilot or a remark?

MR. STANFIELD: Yes, sir.

(Discussion between the Defense attorneys and the Defendant was had.)

MR. BAILEY: Okay. When you were seated next to Mr. Simpson that night, Captain, and he was writing in your book, did you see both of his hands?

MR. STANFIELD: Yes.

MR. BAILEY: Did you see any bandages or injuries that caught your attention?

MR. STANFIELD: No, sir. I didn't register on that at all.

MR. BAILEY: Was there anything about the hands you saw that night or Mr. Simpson's appearance otherwise?

MR. STANFIELD: My only observation is that he has a much larger hand than I would have expected, but nothing as far as cuts or anything

Captain Stanfield's complete testimony and that of Michael Norris and Michael Gladden (who saw OJ arrive at LAX and got his autograph) took place on July 12th, 1995. Here is the full transcript of that day.

This is the transcript of July 13th, which includes testimony from fellow passengers Howard Bingham and Stephen Valerie.

Enjoy!