Reaction to the verdict in the O. J. Simpson criminal trial

His arrest and conviction in 2008 for armed robbery brought him back into the public spotlight, especially after he received a disproportionately higher prison sentence than his co-conspirators, which generated controversy even from his detractors,[12][13][14][15] but the response from African Americans was relatively muted,[16] and pundits opined this demonstrated how much the conscience of Black America has evolved since the time the verdict was announced.

[23] The enduring blowback also likely contributed to the passing of California Proposition 209 in 1996 that ended affirmative action in the state, due to the decline in empathy towards issues of racial discrimination and civil rights among White Americans.

[37] In 2016, Carrie Bess's statement regarding Nicole continuing her marriage to Simpson despite the abuse was consistent with victim blaming: "I lose respect for any woman who takes an ass-whoopin' when she don't have to.

[46] Bill Hodgman concluded that the black jurors were not able to connect the domestic abuse with the murder, while Clark claimed that they understood it fully but simply did not care about Nicole.

[50] The strong public reaction to Brown's letters and statements that were later ruled inadmissible as hearsay[37] spurred passage of the Violence Against Women Act in 1994, which Clark and Douglas referred to as the "O.J.

Police found a trail of bloody footprints in Browns blood made by the killer leading from the crime scene to the alleyway where cars are usually parked and a faint one inside Simpson's Bronco.

[58] Juror Yolanda Crawford, however, denied Bess's claim, and said that the verdict was due to the prosecution's mistakes, such as presenting Fuhrman as a witness and having Simpson don the gloves, while also voicing her displeasure at what she perceived as Cochran's attempts to sway the jury with racial hints such as wearing an African-style tie.

However, the sole black juror in the civil case that was dismissed stated afterwards that she would have hung the jury had she stayed because she thought all 31 photos of Simpson wearing those shoes were forgeries.

with just his underwear just two days after, and he had no bruises or anything on his body.”[61] In an interview with CNN following Simpson’s death, juror Yolanda Adams said she was still comfortable with her decision to render a not guilty verdict and denied the verdict was based on payback for Rodney King, citing the reasonable doubt in the case presented by the defense and the actions of the police officers involved in the case like Mark Fuhrman pleading the fifth when he was asked if he planted or manufactured any evidence against Simpson.

[75] As of 2023, Carrie Bess remains the only author of Madame Foreman who has not apologized to either the Browns or Goldmans for the verdict, the book or her comments about Nicole, and who continues to assert that acquitting Simpson as payback for Rodney King was not an incorrect decision.

[77][78] According to Goldberg, Hodgman, Darden and Marcia Clark, the principal mistake made in the case was during the preliminary phase when Thano Peratis incorrectly estimated how much blood he drew from Simpson.

Clark claimed she dropped it because she felt the DNA evidence in the case was insurmountable, but the media speculated it was due to the comments by dismissed juror Jeanette Harris, and Darden confirmed that to be true.

Fuhrman himself claimed that to believe that he planted the second glove would be as absurd as believing that he planted Kato Kaelin, Simpson's friend who was sleeping at Simpson's guesthouse on the night of the murders and who testified that he heard three loud thumps like an earthquake coming from the same area where Fuhrman found the second glove, and pointed out that while Johnnie Cochran and F. Lee Bailey were accusing him of planting the glove by placing it in a plastic bag and stuffing it in his sock so it would not be seen, they did not once subpoena his clothes from the night of the murders to look for any actual physical proof of their allegations, which proved that both Cochran and Bailey knew that Fuhrman was innocent of any crimes but were deliberately lying to the predominantly-black jury to play on their emotions and get a racially-motivated jury nullification.

Both Bugliosi and Fuhrman asserted Section 128 of the California Penal Code that states that planting evidence in a capital offense warrants the death penalty, but in a televised debate between Bugliosi and Dershowitz on a June 11, 1996 edition of Larry King Live, Dershowitz dismissed Section 128 as a lie and continued to assert that Fuhrman and Vannatter had planted evidence and lied on the witness stand.

Writer Dominick Dunne was quoted as saying it seemed as if using racial epithets had briefly become a worse crime than murder, and criticized Johnnie Cochran for repeatedly describing his defense as a "search for truth" while he himself was knowingly lying and manipulating the jury based on facts irrelevant to the case itself.

[95] In Outrage, Bugliosi pointed out that instead of defending Simpson or attacking the physical evidence that implicated him for the murders, Cochran and Scheck dedicated their entire closing summations to attacking the LAPD, in stark contrast to normal criminal trial procedures, accusing Lange, Vannatter, Fuhrman and the LAPD crime labs of conspiring to frame Simpson for the two murders and lying in court without providing any evidence.

[96] Vincent Bugliosi,[57] Darnel M. Hunt,[11] Daniel M. Petrocelli,[10] and defense witness Henry Lee all wrote that Scheck made many misleading claims in trying to convince the jury there was reasonable doubt about the physical evidence.

[100] Darden wrote in In Contempt that nearly all of Scheck's blood planting claims were originally made by Stephen Singular in his book proposal for Legacy of Deception: An Investigation of Mark Fuhrman and Racism in the L.A.P.D.

"[11][36][49][114] Walker's colleagues were appalled by her decision to defend Simpson and accused her of betraying her advocacy for a $250,000 retainer by knowingly giving testimony that contradicted her own research as her report demonstrated.

[123][124] Daniel M. Petrocelli wrote in Triumph of Justice: Closing the Book on the Simpson Saga that Baden's claims were nonsensical and he tried to avoid making them again at the civil trial.

[33] Christopher Darden opined in In Contempt that prosecutor Brian Kelberg irritated Baden when he implied that he was being "rented out" by Simpson and he responded by making those absurd claims to get back at him.

[37] In Blood Evidence: How DNA is revolutionizing the way we solve crimes, Lee writes that Fredric Rieders was initially approached by the prosecution to interpret the results from the EDTA testing, but he chose to represent Simpson instead.

[57] Furthermore, Bugliosi wrote that Lee was aware that Scheck was arguing that Dennis Fung had tampered with the swatches and seriously doubted that the Chinese-born scientist really believed that the Chinese-American criminalist would participate in a racially-motivated conspiracy to frame Simpson.

[57] In Triumph of Justice, Petrocelli wrote that Henry Lee clarified his statements and said "I never meant to imply there was scientific fact to show that any LA police officer planted or did anything, cheating, with any evidence when I said "somethings wrong".

[33] Pundits were skeptical of Gerdes claims too because he was not the defense's first choice: renowned forensic DNA expert, Edward Blake, was supposed to be making the case for contamination but was dropped from the witness list after rejecting it.

[148] Judge Lance Ito was criticized by Marcia Clark,[149] Christopher Darden,[37] Vincent Bugliosi,[57] Daniel Petrocelli,[150] Darnel Hunt,[11] and Jeffrey Toobin[39] for his alleged poor stewardship of the trial.

In 1998, Christopher Darden published his book, In Contempt, in which he criticized Ito as a "starstruck" judge who allowed the trial to turn into a media circus and the defense to control the court room while he collected hourglasses from fans and invited celebrities into his chambers.

[174] Bugliosi also criticized the media for sympathizing with Simpson throughout the entire trial, specifically for referring to his lawyers as the "Dream Team" or "the best defense money can buy" and for ridiculing Marcia Clark for her private life and appearance to the point that the National Enquirer printed nude pictures of her provided by her first husband's mother,[175] and referring to Chris Darden as an "Uncle Tom" following an interview with Johnnie Cochran for helping to prosecute an African-American celebrity, which Bugliosi claims increased the defense's credibility in the jury's eyes while pointing out that Robert Shapiro was actually famous as a plea bargain lawyer who had never once tried a murder case, Johnnie Cochran as a civil rights lawyer who also had never tried a murder case (although the Cochran firm claimed that they had tried and won many criminal cases, Playboy magazine contacted them to name one such case, but never received an answer), Alan Dershowitz as an appeal lawyer (most notably enabling Claus von Bülow to have a second trial following his conviction for attempting to murder his wife, Sunny), and that though F. Lee Bailey was in fact a notable criminal trial lawyer, he himself was a convicted felon of DUI and had actually lost his most recent major criminal case, the Patty Hearst bank robbery, which was almost twenty years before the Simpson trial.

Many middle class professionals who have always supported integration, maintained office and social friendships with African Americans, and resisted the backlash against affirmative action, were appalled by what black novelist Dennis Williams called the "end zone dance" over the Simpson acquittal.

which featured footage from the interview, as well as analysis and discussion by host Soledad O'Brien, Regan, Darden, Nicole's friend Eve Shakti Chen, anti-domestic violence advocate Rita Smith, and retired FBI profiler Jim Clemente.