Today in History: OJ Simpson acquitted of murder charges
He reportedly regularly abused his wife and in 1989 pleaded no contest to a charge of spousal battery. In 1992, she left him and filed for divorce.
At the end of a lengthy trial, former American football star OJ Simpson is acquitted of the brutal 1994 double murder of his estranged wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman on this day in 1995.
In the epic 252-day trial, Simpson’s “dream team” of lawyers employed creative and controversial methods to convince jurors that Simpson’s guilt had not been proved “beyond a reasonable doubt”, thus surmounting what the prosecution called a “mountain of evidence” implicating him as the murderer.
On the night of 12 June 1994, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were stabbed and slashed to death in the front yard of Mrs Simpson’s condominium in Brentwood, Los Angeles. By 17 June, police had gathered enough evidence to charge OJ Simpson with the murders.
A single leather glove found outside Simpson’s home matched a glove found at the crime scene. In preliminary DNA tests, blood found on the glove was shown to have come from Simpson and the two victims. After his arrest, further DNA tests would confirm this finding. Simpson had a wound on his hand, and his blood was a DNA match to drops found at the Brentwood crime scene. Nicole Brown Simpson’s blood was discovered on a pair of socks found at the Rockingham estate. Simpson had recently purchased a Stiletto knife of the type the coroner believed was used by the killer.
It was the longest trial ever held in the state of California, and courtroom television cameras captured the carnival-like atmosphere of the proceedings. The prosecution’s mountain of evidence was systemically called into doubt by Simpson’s team of expensive attorneys, who made the dramatic case that their client was framed by unscrupulous and racist police officers.
Citing the questionable character of detective Mark Fuhrman and alleged blunders in the police investigation, defence lawyers painted Simpson as yet another African American victim of the white judicial system. The jurors’ reasonable doubt grew when the defence spent weeks attacking the damning DNA evidence, arguing in overly technical terms that delays and other anomalies in the gathering of evidence called the findings into question.
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