Posted on 11/21/2006 9:29:15 PM PST by RWR8189
Rupert Murdoch has just canceled the O.J. Simpson book and TV special in which Simpson (presumably) describes how he would have half-decapitated Nicole Simpson and stabbed Ron Goldman had "the real killers" not done it first. The cancellation is certainly justified on grounds of decency, sensitivity and, given the universal public revulsion, commercial good sense. But I would have done differently. I would have let O.J. speak.
I thought the outrage was misdirected and misplaced. The attention and money Simpson (and Fox) would have garnered from the deal are not half as outrageous as the fact that every day he walks free. The real outrage is the trial that declared him not guilty: the judge, a fool and incompetent whose love of publicity turned the trial into a circus; the defense lawyers, not one of whom could have doubted the man's guilt yet who cynically played on the jury's ignorance and latent racism to win a disgraceful verdict; the prosecutors, total incompetents who bungled a gimmie, then shamelessly cashed in afterwards; the media that turned the brutal deaths of two innocents into TV's first reality-show soap opera.
Worst of all was the jury, whose perverse verdict was the most brazen and lawless act of nullification since the heyday of Strom Thurmond. Sworn to uphold law, they decided instead to hold a private referendum on racism in the L.A. Police Department.
The result was a grotesque miscarriage of justice. And there it rested, frozen and irreversible. I wanted to hear O.J. speak because that was the one way to, in effect, reopen the case, unfreeze the travesty and get us some way back to justice. Not tangible throw-the-thug-in-jail justice. But the psychological justice of establishing Simpson's guilt with perfect finality.
This is especially important because so many people believed — or perhaps more accurately, made themselves believe — in O.J.'s innocence. Everyone remembers gathering around the television at work to watch the verdict, and then the endless national self-searching over the shocking climax: not the verdict, but the visceral response to the verdict — the white employees gasping while the black employees burst into spontaneous applause.
Pollsters found that nearly 90% of African-Americans agreed with the verdict. Almost a third of whites did too. What better way to eliminate this lingering and widespread doubt about Simpson's guilt than to have the man himself admit it. But for that you need his confession. The fact that he prefaced his "I did it" with the word "if" is irrelevant. Simpson will always avoid unqualified admission if only to avoid further legal jeopardy for, say, perjury.
But has there ever been someone who responds to the murder of an ex-wife — a death he publicly mourned and pretended to be so aggrieved by that he would spend the rest of his days looking for "the real killers" — to engage in the exercise of telling how he would have cut her throat?
No survivor of a murdered spouse who is innocent could do anything so grotesque. Can you imagine Daniel Pearl's widow writing a book about how she would have conducted the beheading of her husband? Or Jehan Sadat going on television to describe how she would have engineered her husband's assassination? Such things are impossible. The mere act of engaging in so unimaginably repulsive an exercise is the ultimate proof of Simpson's guilt.
Who cares if O.J. profits financially? There is nothing in that injustice — and a further injustice it undeniably is — that compares to the supreme injustice of the verdict. And exposing the verdict's falsity — from the killer's mouth no less — is worth whatever price we as a society would have paid in the sordidness of the TV spectacle and the book.
After such an event, anyone persisting in maintaining Simpson's innocence would have been exposed as a fool or a knave. The interview and book would have been valuable public assets to rub in the face of those who carried out the original travesty — Simpson's lawyers, his defenders and, above all, the jury — and those who continue to believe it.
Here's the television I really will miss now: the cameras taken into the homes of every one of those twelve willful jurists who sprung O.J. free 12 years ago and made a mockery of the law by trying to turn a brutal murderer of two into a racial victim/hero. I wanted to see their faces as the man they declared innocent described to the world how he would have taken—nonsense: how he did take—the knife to Nicole's throat.
Full disclosure: Charles Krauthammer is a Fox News contributor, among other affiliations.
Yes, but granting juries the discretion to nullify the law where they see fit is a bedrock principle of our judicial system - and their right to do so has been upheld by the Supreme Court on at least three separate occasions. It's unfortunate that this group chose to carry out an agenda unrelated to the case, but given some of the outrageous examples of prosecutorial misconduct in the news lately, America would be a better place if juries nullified the law a lot more often...or even if they were simply informed that they had the right to.
However, entrenching these stories in a network and a regular show on Fox has meant that the producers actively seek out their next big story, and often trials are blown out of proportion to the evidence, resulting in media circuses (the Duke case) and perhaps innocent people suffering (Duke rape case).
Also, it hasn't escaped me that if Natalie Holloway had been a buck-toothed, acne suffering brunette it wouldn't have been much of a story. And if Lacy Peterson had been a chubby black gal from South Central, we wouldn't have heard a word about her.
While some people with intelligence and sensitivity may draw the conclusions from these shows that you suggested, I think more often they are simply entertainment for the public and revenue-producers for the networks.
OJ can speak all he wants, paying him large money to "speak" on Fox during sweeps week was a disgusting idea. The two are not mutually exclusive.
Well, you're certainly correct that on TV everything is about the visuals. That's why the world loved Princess Di and Linda Tripp was a villain. It is terribly unfair, but true.
Of course, crime stories are entertainment -- just gossip on a larger scale. That's why novelists like Isaac Bashevis Singer and Nabokov were major fans of tabloid crime.
Still, the results aren't always bad. Without so much press interest, I'm not sure that the lack of evidence in the Duke rape case would have come out.
The Regan woman said that it was arranged so that OJ would have access to the money and that the family cannot so I suppose it would go to some third party or foundation that would sign the checks
Why do you say the police were caught "red-handed" planting OJ's blood? I don't recall any such evidence. I do recall silly innuendo based on the fact that Vanatter had his blood in a vial.
Did they also plant Ron and Nicole's blood in OJ's car?
Small Texan, I'm ashamed that you claim to be a Texan. Shut up and sing.
It wouldn't make any difference to those jurors even today. He was a famous black man with a white woman and this was a "mostly" black and female jury and whether they ever admit it or not their decision had as much to do with anger that Nicole was who she was than OJ for doing such a heinous crime.
What many people don't know is the person who atually found most evidence, and still works for LAPD, was Fuhrman's partner who found and reported the evidence to the lead detectives; both of whom took credit for a lot of the finds. They were also the detectives who didn't make certain the area(s) were properly sealed..
and.... why didn't Fuhrman's partner get called to testify? more why was some of the evidence he found ignored? He even wrote a letter at one point to the DA in frustration with how the case was being presented and they returned it to him with orders to destroy (the letter)... maybe, when he finally retires and can speak out, we'll get the answers to some of the nagging questions.
Then you missed the testimony of Dr. Henry Lee who said that analysis of the blood that purported O.J. was at the crime scene, found on the gate, contained preservatives like what you find in blood that had been injected into a test tube.
The prosecution had no answer for this. The defense also got the detectives to concede that, after taking O.J.'s blood sample, they returned to the scene of the crime (against correct police procedures) before bringing the sample to the lab. The defense introduced, and were not refuted, that the police a) took the sample b) returned to the crime scene and that c) the blood later collected from the gate had preservatives in them.
Most people don't bleed preservatives. Therefore, it's tainted evidence much like CBS's forged ANG documents.
If I'm sitting on that jury, that's enough reasonable doubt for me. With no confession, no murder weapon, no eyewitnesses, no fingerprints. The blood was necessary to put O.J. at the scene and the LAPD had to fake it, which should make you ask "what else did they fake?". Blood on the socks? Blood in the Bronco?
Drops on the Rockingham driveway that lead to the front door, ignoring that, by their own theory, O.J. went from the Bronco, bleeding from his hand, went to the back alley to dispose the glove (though no blood drops were found back there) and then started bleeding again while entering the house. You just have drops following the driveway from the Bronco straight to the house!
I realize a lot of people are so emotional about this that they will not think it through but there was not sufficient credible evidence brought forward during the criminal trial to convict this man beyond a reasonable doubt. That is, unless you were convinced he was guilty and then worked backwards. Remember "innocent until proven guilty"? The prosecution failed to prove guilt and the lengths they went to plant evidence only made their entire case weaker than it already was.
I don't have to be a black person to look at it that way. As I said, I think he did it and the shoes were the key. But the shoes were not part of the criminal case, only the civil case.
A judge had thrown out Goldman's claim that any money paid to Simpson over the book or the tv show was money he could collect from the civil verdict.
That's why this whole thing was coming out now rather than last year when it was initially planned. Goldman wanted the money from the deal to go to him and sued. The book/tv deal didn't resurface until the judge told him "no".
Why do you think Simpson would do this at all, if not for the money? IIRC, most of what Simpson makes now is his annual pension from the NFL Players Association which the judge had also ruled Goldman was not entitled to.
Bull crap!!! The blood evidence was not tainted. I have little patience for the nonsense you just spewed, which is why I'm taking the trouble to type this out on my cell phone and using its data link to post. In spouting your nonsense, you have shown your immense ignorance of the facts of the case. The jury was bigoted against white people and decided to stick it to "the man." End of story. They didn't do the right thing at all, because to them being black was more important than being just.
The answer to this was in fact explained if you listened to the commentary. Unless you eat nothing but food you grow yourself, you have EDTA in your blood as you sit there and type this silliness on your computer.
It's very hard to eat a modern diet and not have EDTA in your blood because of its use in food processing.
IMO, the blood wasn't planted, but the defense sure knew how to take advantage of the jury's lack of scientific sophistication to plant doubts in their minds.
Oh, please. O.J.'s guilty as sin, and I won't recount the 1001 reasons why. (I seem to recall Esquire did an excellent piece entitled 1001 Reasons Why O.J. is Guilty, and all 1001 were pretty damn convincing.) Let's just say that not least among the evidence is that O.J. can account for his whereabouts that day except for the exact moments of the double murder, and he never explained the hand injury that occured at just the unaccounted-for time and O.J. expressed the desire to kill Nicole numerous times.
Exactly.
All the more reason to be angry with the prosecution, blowing a slam-dunk.
They mismanaged the case from Day One. OJ doesn't deserve to walk free, but the state deserved to lose the case, and that's the way our justice system works.
Well, most of them do vote for the party of the KKK, and that still has an ex-KKK leader in it. They still mostly vote against the party of Abraham Lincoln, abolition and Martin Luther King Jr.
I think you're onto something.
Oh, I assume there will be a publisher for the manuscript even if he has to publish it himself and when he does this is going to go all front burner again. Heck, the pub he's already gotten is probably at least as good as what he would have gotten from the interview -- every outlet has talked about it, sometimes for hours, as in the case of ol' Scarface.
The blood evidence was not planted. Tell me, genius, how did the cops get OJ's blood to mix in the Bronco with both Ron's and Nicole's blood while Simpson was not even in L.A. when that blood evidence was collected? He took a flight out of L.A. before the bodies were discovered, and only returned the next morning after the police located him and notified him of Nicole's death.
I will take the advice of your tagline. Good day, sir.
Of course you will. You spout off with complete certitude about something you either clearly know nothing about or do not understand, so it stands to reason that -- like the OJ jury -- you are the type who will brooke no intrusion by truth and facts. Oh, BTW, I'm not a sir. Shows you where incorrect assumptions based on zero facts will get you.
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