If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit. – Johnnie Cochrane
OJ Simpson was always the prize in our ubiquitous 70’s Start-O-Matic football leagues. On occasion, someone would draft Batavia’s Ken Anderson first, but having OJ in your backfield virtually guaranteed your team a modicum of success simply because it opened up the passing game.
So, even though I can’t for the life of me remember where I was at the time, you better believe I was glued to the 1994 TV set as a fleet of California’s finest pursued that white Bronco along I-405 in a bizarre chase never exceeding 35 miles per hour.
Short of a confession, it was the clearest indication of public guilt I’ve ever seen.
To this day, the OJ Simpson trial is the only court proceeding I’ve watched from the opening statements to the final verdict. And it was nine months of gruelingly blatant incompetence, too. Short of sitting naked in the courtroom, the prosecution couldn’t have done much worse and Judge Lance Ito shouldn’t have been allowed to moderate a county fair pickle contest, much less preside over court cases.
LA DA Gil Garcetti’s plan was not to have one, a fact apparent from day one through the endlessly pointless pre-trial machinations. It was as if the prosecution knew they were overmatched by Simpson’s “Dream Team,” but they couldn’t admit it to themselves and refused to adjust accordingly. Instead, they opted for the too-typical egotistical attorney tactic of arguing every minor point ad nauseum.
And all that did was highlight everything the defense wanted highlighted.
Cochrane and his team knew that sound bites and spectacle win high-profile trials, particularly when you’re dealing with twelve lunkheads who can’t figure out how to get out of jury duty. Meanwhile, Marcia Clark’s and Christopher Darden’s “grand sweeping gestures” and ceaseless bickering with the defense and judge are what you resort to when you don’t have a case.
The irony, of course, is they actually did have a case.
But instead of getting racist LA cop Mark Furman in and out of the courtroom as quickly as possible and minimizing his role to the jury, they kept him on the witness stand for eight straight days and the defense completely eviscerated him.
If that stupidity didn’t do them in, then the outcome was assured when Darden made the unforgivably basic blunder of asking the quintessential question to which he did not know the answer. Making OJ try on the leather gloves months after they’d been worn had to be the single worst trial decision in the history of American jurisprudence.
Darden was already handicapped by having absolutely no courtroom presence and his “baby justice” closing statement was almost as bad as the glove fiasco. It was laughably puerile and utterly ineffective.
But if Clark and Darden were overmatched by Cochrane and his team, then Judge Lance Ito was roadkill. Just as it is with refereeing the NBA finals, he needed to take control of the trial early on by setting some serious boundaries and sticking to them. But he inexplicably wasn’t capable of doing that. So, like the prosecution, he fell right into every one of the defense’s traps virtually assuring the outcome.
When the defense persisted in interrupting the prosecution’s closing argument with specious objections, had I been the judge, I would’ve ordered the bailiffs to tape their mouths shut with duct tape.
To add insult to injury, after nine excruciating months of testimony, the jury, long since fed up with the judge and prosecution, deliberated for all of four hours before acquitting Simpson. It was the perfect ending to an unmitigated farce that didn’t begin to approximate any form of justice.
If pure evil does exist, the best evidence was Simpson glowering at the Brown and Goldman families after the not-guilty verdict.
As previously stipulated before, jail may not be the worst post-trial outcome and that theory certainly played out here. Simpson became a pariah, and after he lost the civil case, he was forced to sell every last asset, including his Heisman Trophy. The only thing they couldn’t touch was his NFL pension and Florida property.
Then he was flippin’ stupid enough to wind up in jail anyway.
While all of that was to be expected, what made me want to hurl is, despite her abject failure, was Marcia Clark’s disgusting and despicable shift to pundit and media darling, right down to that insipid post-trial haircut. At least Darden had the good sense to reasonably disappear.
As for me, though I generally had it on in the background, the day after the trial was over I was forced to consider why I wasted so much time watching it. It certainly was the proverbial train wreck from which you can’t avert your eyes. I suppose the silver lining there is it taught me quite a bit about our legal system and it forever cured me of the desire to watch another TV trial.
The singular lesson I took away from that experience was this. Prior to the OJ trial, I was dead set on cameras being deployed in courtrooms. Public proceedings should be made public, right?
But after watching the festivities, I was adamantly opposed to that proposition because it was clear that 95 percent of judges have neither the fortitude nor the minimal sense of self required to cope with that kind of publicity prospect.
My fondest wish? It’s that Simpson’s death will finally bring the Brown and Goldman families the closure the legal system wasn’t able to provide. Their tormentor certainly won’t be missed.
