An internet meme, which is how my kids found out about this piece of news linked to a time before they were born.
O.J. Simpson Excited For God To Tell Him Who Real Killer Was
So the murderous piece of shit is finally dead. And cancer was what got him, which is not how he should have ended.
I never had any doubt he murdered his ex-wife and her lover. Deep down, nobody did, including several members of the damned jury who acquitted him. But there were no witnesses and not much more than DNA evidence, for which it was early days and for which OJ’s superb team of defense lawyers were prepared, not arguing against the DNA conclusions but about how it was gathered and stored. The two lead detectives in the case were already known in the DA office as “Dumb and Dumber”.
But those DA prosecutors weren’t much chop either. On the matter of the gloves alone they violated the classic courtroom rule where you don’t ask a question unless you already know the answer. Hence the murderer’s gloves left to shrink in a forensic van in LA heat, then frozen and unfrozen and still entered as evidence and the famous line in summary argument by lawyer Johnny Cochran, with his knowing Black rapping patois that would appeal to some on the jury and would echo for years: ‘If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit’
In 1995 I was sitting in a diner in downtown Chicago with my boss when the decision was announced on the TV. Tens of millions of viewers had been riveted to the tube, with its single camera view of the courtroom, for weeks, so the verdict was going to get huge viewership across America. When OJ was found not guilty, every Black in the diner, without exception, cheered. It took a few years before that feeling faded in Black communities. But yes, at the core of it in that time there was definitely an attitude of poke-Whitey-in-the-eye and who cares if OJ is guilty.
I think in the barbershops today, Black people are saying, ‘he got away with it, but the police got away with killing a lot more of us.’ That’s the mentality... But Black people didn’t love O.J. like that. This wasn’t about O.J. the person… O.J. was just an extension of the general polarization between Black America and law enforcement… The sympathy for O.J. is not as deep as we think it is.
– politics professor James Lance Taylor
Also this comment from that law professor’s blog:
Marcia Clark [DA prosecutor] thought the women would sympathize with Nicole. She lost the trial at jury selection. What she didn’t understand was these women were sick of white trophy wives stealing some of the best men from the herd. They resented Nicole. White America didn’t understand that dynamic at the time.
The following is entirely appropriate, especially because the great comedian, Norm Macdonald is someone whose death I do regret, precisely because he was not afraid of the mobs.
The only international sport we ever got in New Zealand for many years was Pom soccer and Ocker bullrush, Seppo sports didn’t happen so I never knew about OJ until Flying High (II I think) in which he was part of the flight crew.
Then the Bullitt re-enactment car-chase hit our screens – far funnier than Flying High, and I enjoyed that series of movies.
The trial, shown here nightly as if we were in the USA and it mattered, was better than most Seppo soaps (but not “Soap”).
Since then, every time he farted made the headlines. I’m not sure why.
Now he plays in that golf-course in the sky. I hope he makes par.
I was in a restaurant in Los Angeles in 1997 when the verdict came in in the civil trial. The group I was with were definitely on the liberal left wing side, and yet when he was found guilty – sorry liable – the place erupted into cheers. He was definitely not well liked.
His original acquittal was insane, but was also the finest verdict that money could by.