Murder trial of O. J. Simpson

• 1. Introduction

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  Around 95 million Americans watched the prelude to the murder trial of O. J. Simpson live, on the 17th of June 1994. Television stations had interrupted game 5 of the NBA Finals to show a slow police pursuit of a white Ford Bronco. Inside rode Simpson, a former NFL player and actor, with his friend Al Cowlings. Simpson had just been charged with murdering his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ron Goldman. He had failed to turn himself in at the agreed time. The chase ended when he surrendered at his Brentwood estate.

  The case that followed, The People of the State of California v. Orenthal James Simpson, opened in Los Angeles County Superior Court on the 24th of January 1995. It lasted eight months. Prosecutors told the jury that a large body of forensic evidence tied Simpson to the stabbings. On the 3rd of October 1995, he was acquitted of both murders. The media had already named it "the trial of the century."

  Why did twelve jurors look at that evidence and decide the case was not proven? Why did Americans of different backgrounds watch the same trial and reach opposite conclusions? And how did a single courtroom in Los Angeles hold so much of the country's attention?

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• 2. A Marriage on Trial

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  Nicole Brown was 18 and working as a waitress when she met Simpson in 1977. They married on the 2nd of February 1985 and had two children. Brown later wrote that Simpson had beaten her on multiple occasions, and the marriage was described as violent. On the 1st of January 1989, she called 911 and said she feared he would hurt her. Simpson can be heard yelling in the background of the recording.

  Detective John Edwards, who answered that call, testified that a badly beaten Brown ran out of the bushes toward him. She was screaming, "He's going to kill me, he's going to kill me." Simpson pleaded no contest to one count of domestic violence and received a year of probation.

  On the 12th of June 1994, Brown and Goldman were stabbed to death outside her condominium at 875 South Bundy Drive. The prosecution built its motive on the hours before. That evening Simpson attended a dance recital for his daughter. He was reportedly angry that Brown wore a black dress he called "tight." His girlfriend Paula Barbieri had wanted to come, but he did not invite her. Afterward he found a voicemail from Barbieri ending their relationship.

  Prosecutors said he then drove to Brown's home to win her back. When she refused, they argued, he snapped in what they called a "final act of control." Goldman, they said, arrived in the middle of it and was killed so that he could not tell anyone.

  Prosecutors planned to present 62 incidents of abuse, including three that surfaced only in letters Brown had left in a bank safety deposit box. Judge Lance Ito allowed only accounts that someone had witnessed. He excluded Brown's own statements to friends and family as hearsay. Even so, the prosecution lined up witnesses for 44 incidents.

  Among them was Ron Shipp, a police officer and friend of both. He said Simpson had told him he did not want a polygraph test because "I've had a lot of dreams about killing her." Defense attorney Carl E. Douglas called Shipp an alcoholic who was courting an acting career, and the jury dismissed his account.

  The defense hired Lenore E. Walker, a well-known advocate for abused women, on a $250,000 retainer. Her own colleagues accused her of betraying her cause. Her report put the share of murdered, previously abused spouses killed by their husbands or ex-husbands at 80.3 percent. The defense then dropped her from its witness list. The prosecution would drop the whole subject of abuse on the 20th of June 1995.

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• 3. Twelve Jurors

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  In October 1994, Judge Ito began interviewing 304 prospective jurors, and each had to complete a 75-page questionnaire. On the 3rd of November, twelve jurors were seated along with twelve alternates. Ten of them were dismissed along the way for assorted reasons. Only four of the original twelve sat on the final panel.

  The location mattered as much as the people. District Attorney Gil Garcetti filed the charges downtown rather than in Santa Monica, where the killings happened. The court then kept the trial downtown, citing safety problems at the Santa Monica courthouse after the 1994 Northridge earthquake. The result was a jury pool that was mainly African American. Jury consultant Richard Gabriel noted that African Americans at the time were more receptive than other groups to claims of racially motivated police fraud. They were also less familiar with DNA evidence, and so less likely to accept it.

  The original pool was 40 percent white, 28 percent Black, 17 percent Hispanic and 15 percent Asian. The final jury had ten women and two men. Nine jurors were Black, two were white and one was Hispanic. According to media reports, prosecutor Marcia Clark expected women of any race to sympathize with Brown over the abuse. The defense's research pointed the other way. It suggested that Black women would not warm to Brown, who was white, because of tensions over interracial marriage.

  In early April 1995, juror Jeanette Harris was dismissed after Ito learned she had not disclosed an incident of domestic abuse in her own life. Harris then gave an interview accusing the sheriff's deputies of racism and claiming the jurors were splitting along racial lines. The other jurors denied it. Ito dismissed three deputies anyway, which angered the jurors who had not complained, since it seemed to support her claims.

  On the 21st of April, thirteen of the eighteen jurors refused to come to court until they could speak with Ito. When ordered in, they wore all black and would not enter the jury box. The press called it a "Jury Revolt" and compared the scene to a "funeral procession."

  Harris also told her interviewer that evidence of Simpson's abuse "doesn't mean he is guilty of murder." Hearing that from a woman who had suffered abuse herself persuaded the prosecution that the jury would not respond to the argument. Clark stated that the team believed the DNA evidence was insurmountable, but prosecutor Christopher Darden later confirmed that Harris was the real reason. After the verdict, jurors called the abuse portion of the case a "waste of time." Defense lawyers Robert Shapiro, Alan Dershowitz and Gerald Uelmen all later admitted they believed race played a part in how the jury brushed aside Brown's abuse.

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• 4. The Blood Trail

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  The prosecution presented 108 exhibits of DNA evidence, including 61 drops of blood. No one had seen the killings, and DNA was the only physical evidence tying Simpson to the scene. Clark promised jurors in her opening statement a "trail of blood from the Bundy Crime scene through Simpson's Ford Bronco to his bedroom at Rockingham." Prosecutors put numbers on the matches. Blood drops beside the bloody footprints at Bundy carried Simpson's DNA, with a stated chance of error of 1-in-9.7 billion. Blood on the Bronco's door and interior combined Simpson, Goldman and Brown, at 1-in-21 billion. Blood on socks in Simpson's bedroom matched Simpson and Brown, at 1-in-6.8 billion. A bloody glove behind his home held DNA from all three.

  At 9:36 pm on the night of the killings, witness Kato Kaelin last saw Simpson. The county's chief medical examiner, Lakshmanan Sathyavagiswaran, put Brown's death between 10:00 and 10:30 pm. A call was placed from Simpson's Bronco to Paula Barbieri at 10:02 pm. Then no one saw Simpson until 10:54 pm, when he answered the intercom for limousine driver Allan Park. That left roughly one hour and 18 minutes unaccounted for.

  Park arrived at Rockingham at 10:25 pm, and the Bronco was not parked there. At 10:40 he rang the intercom at the Ashford entrance three times and got no answer. Then he saw a figure cross toward the front door, the lights came on and Simpson responded. Prosecutors argued that this figure was Simpson, who had spotted Park, abandoned the front door and circled along the south walkway. That path led to the spot where the glove was later found. Park could not identify the figure. He also never noticed cuts on Simpson's left hand, adding, "I shook his right hand, not his left."

  The defense moved the clock. It argued the murders took place around 11:00 pm, when Simpson had an alibi. Dr. Robert Huizenga testified in July 1995 that arthritis and old football injuries left Simpson unable to commit the crime. Prosecutors then played an exercise video Simpson had made weeks before the killings, called O.J. Simpson Minimum Maintenance: Fitness for Men. It showed a man who was far from frail, and Huizenga conceded that an adrenaline rush could change things. Pathologist Michael Baden testified that Goldman fought on for ten minutes. After the trial, Baden admitted that claim was inaccurate and that testifying had been a mistake.

  Fibers and hair added more. Susan Brockbank, an LAPD criminalist, and FBI agent Doug Deedrick testified in late June 1995. Hair consistent with Simpson's was embedded in the seams of the knit cap the killer wore, suggesting it had been worn repeatedly. Fibers found only in the 1993-1994 model year of Ford Bronco, the model Simpson owned, turned up on both victims, the cap and both gloves. Dark blue cotton fibers on the victims matched the color of the shirt Simpson wore at the recital. Kaelin said Simpson still had it on after a McDonald's run but not when the limousine arrived. Police never found the shirt.

  The shoeprints came next. FBI expert William J. Bodziak testified that the bloody prints at the scene and in the Bronco came from rare Bruno Magli shoes in size 12, Simpson's size. Only 299 pairs of that size had been sold in the United States. Simpson denied ever owning a pair, and the store had no record of selling him any, though employee Samuel Poser remembered showing him those shoes. F. Lee Bailey suggested the killer had worn the wrong size on purpose, which Bodziak called "ridiculous." Barry Scheck offered another theory. He suggested that a police officer named Fuhrman had left the Bronco print himself, and he showed a photo of Fuhrman walking through a puddle of blood.

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• 5. Reasonable Doubt

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  Robert Shapiro, a civil lawyer known for settling cases, led Simpson's defense at first. Johnnie Cochran, known for police brutality and civil rights cases, took over as the leader. Around them gathered F. Lee Bailey, Robert Kardashian, Harvard appeals lawyer Alan Dershowitz, his student Robert Blasier, and Gerald Uelmen, dean of Santa Clara University School of Law. Carl E. Douglas and Shawn Holley assisted Cochran. Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, who ran the Innocence Project and specialized in DNA, completed the roster the media named the Dream Team. Estimates put the defense bill at US$3-6 million. Taxpayers paid over US$9 million for the prosecution.

  In opening statements, the defense summed up its argument in three words: the evidence was "contaminated, compromised, and ultimately corrupted." Criminalists Dennis Fung and Andrea Mazzola had mishandled samples at the scene, it said. Then Collin Yamauchi had contaminated them at the LAPD lab, spreading Simpson's reference-vial DNA onto all but three exhibits. Those three, the defense said, were planted by police. Fung and Mazzola did admit errors. They had not always changed gloves between items. They had packed evidence in plastic rather than paper. They had also left it in an unrefrigerated van for up to seven hours.

  Prosecutors replied that every sample was still testable, which was the opposite of what total degradation would predict. Most testing had also happened at two consulting labs, not at the LAPD. Contamination at the LAPD would have produced mixtures of Simpson's DNA with that of the "real killer(s)," yet only Simpson's DNA appeared. The defense had never tested the evidence itself. Clark called the claims a "smoke-screen." Howard Coleman, president of the forensic lab GeneLex, said Scheck's eight-day cross-examination of Fung, widely praised in the press, was "smoke and mirrors." In his view, contamination yields an inconclusive result and not a false positive.

  The contamination case rested on microbiologist John Gerdes. In August 1995 he testified that the LAPD lab had a "chronic" and "substantial contamination problem." He trusted only three of the DNA matches. Those were the same three the defense said were planted. On cross-examination, Gerdes admitted he had no evidence that cross-contamination had actually occurred. He was describing, he said, "what might occur and not what actually did occur." Clark pointed out that he had never worked in forensics and had only testified for criminal defendants. Even defense expert Henry Lee called Gerdes's claim "highly improbable."

  Then came EDTA, a preservative found in the purple-topped tubes police used for reference blood. The defense said two of the 108 samples contained it. Those were the blood on the Bundy back gate and the blood on the socks. Toxicologist Fredric Rieders testified in July 1995 that the levels exceeded normal blood. Under cross-examination, Clark had him read aloud the article he cited, and it showed he had misread the normal levels. He called it a "typo," and prosecutors produced the original. They also got him to concede that EDTA appears in food, including the Big Mac and fries Simpson ate that night.

  The defense called FBI agent Roger Martz to confirm the EDTA. Instead he said he had not identified it in the blood. The presumptive test was positive but the confirming test was inconclusive. When he tested his own unpreserved blood, he got the same result. He concluded that "those bloodstains did not come from preserved blood." Asked about shifting answers, Martz replied: "I cannot be entirely truthful by only giving 'yes' and 'no' answers." With its chemical proof gone, the defense turned to a broader charge. It alleged that police had conspired to frame Simpson.

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• 6. Framed or Found

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  In closing arguments, Cochran gave two police officers a nickname, "twins of deception." He called Vannatter "the man who carried the blood" and Fuhrman "the man who found the glove." The accusation had grown. The defense began by claiming three exhibits were planted. It ended by arguing that nearly all the blood evidence came from a conspiracy. Named in it were Vannatter, Fuhrman, Fung, Mazzola, Yamauchi and prison nurse Thano Peratis.

  The back gate at Bundy was the first target. Its blood was collected on the 3rd of July 1994, not the 13th of June. It also held far more DNA than other samples from the scene. The defense conceded lab contamination could not explain that volume. It asked why blood left in the open for weeks would be richer in DNA. Vannatter testified in March 1995 that he told Fung to collect the gate blood on the 13th of June, and Fung admitted he had not. Shown an enlarged photo from that night, Fung could not see the blood. Prosecutors answered with another photograph showing it was there before any blood was drawn from Simpson's arm. Officer Robert Riske had pointed it out to Fuhrman, who wrote it in his notes that night.

  The Bronco and the socks followed. Scheck alleged police had twice planted the victims' blood in the Bronco. He accused Vannatter of doing it when he returned to Simpson's home that evening. Prosecutors said the Bronco had already been impounded and was not at Rockingham. The socks were collected on the 13th of June, but Brown's blood on them was not identified until the 4th of August. Vannatter had carried the victims' reference vials that day and later delivered Simpson's to Fung. Fung had seen no blood on the socks, and prosecutors showed the stains were visible only under a microscope. Video showed the socks were already in the evidence van before Vannatter arrived.

  The glove had no such physical trail, and here the defense relied on accusation. Months before the trial, The New Yorker reported a defense-team source saying the plan was to accuse Fuhrman of planting it out of racism. Shapiro later admitted he was that source. Bailey proposed that Fuhrman picked the glove up with a stick, bagged it and hid it in his sock. Prosecutors noted that officers had combed the scene for nearly two hours without spotting a second glove. Lange testified that 14 other officers were present when Fuhrman arrived, and Lt. Frank Spangler said he stayed with Fuhrman the entire time.

  Then the defense produced audiotapes. Under Bailey's cross-examination, Fuhrman had denied using a racial slur for Black people in the previous ten years. The tapes, handed over by screenwriter Laura Hart McKinny, caught him repeating it eight years before the murders. Clark called them "the biggest red herring" ever. The public reaction was explosive, and was compared to the reaction to the video of the Rodney King beating. Fuhrman later said he was not a racist and had been play-acting for a screenplay, asked to be as dramatic as possible.

  On the 6th of September 1995, Fuhrman was recalled while the jury was out of the room. Facing possible perjury charges, he followed his lawyer's instructions and invoked the Fifth Amendment on two questions. Uelmen then asked, "Did you plant or manufacture any evidence in this case?" Fuhrman invoked the Fifth again. Cochran asked Ito to suppress everything Fuhrman had found, but Ito refused, saying that pleading the Fifth does not imply guilt. The jury never heard the exchange, though television viewers did.

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• 7. If It Doesn't Fit

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  On the 15th of June 1995, Darden surprised Clark by asking Simpson to try on the gloves from the crime scene and his home. The prosecution had earlier chosen not to do this. The gloves had been soaked in the blood of all three people and frozen and thawed several times. A witness had instead testified that Brown bought a pair in the same size in 1990. That witness also produced a receipt and a photo of Simpson wearing that style. Now Simpson struggled, with latex gloves underneath, and the leather looked too tight. Clark said he was acting. Cochran replied, "I don't think he could act the size of his hands."

  Darden raised a worry that arthritis medication Simpson skipped had swollen his hands. Cochran told Ito the next day that the jail doctor and medical records showed Simpson took his medication daily.

  Uelmen wrote the line that would define the defense in a memo to Cochran on the 28th of June 1995. It read: "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit." He explained that he was drawing on the jury instruction on circumstantial evidence, and that the phrase worked for more than the glove. It asked whether the whole prosecution story fit the evidence. Cochran used the line in his closing argument.

  The prosecution held that the gloves had shrunk. Richard Rubin, a former vice president of Aris Isotoner, which made them, testified on the 12th of September 1995. Leather like this, he said, can shrink up to 15 percent after getting wet and never recover. He was "100 certain" they were the rare Aris Light model. Darden then had Simpson try a new pair, which fit. After the trial, Cochran revealed that Bailey had goaded Darden into the demonstration. Shapiro, he said, had told Simpson in advance that the gloves would not fit.

  In closing, Darden mocked the idea that police wanted to frame Simpson. Officers had gone to the house eight times between 1986 and 1988 on domestic violence calls and made no arrest, he said. During that closing, Cochran and Scheck objected seventy-one times, and Ito overruled sixty-nine. Cochran's own summation likened Fuhrman to Adolf Hitler and called him "the personification of evil." He urged jurors to "stop this cover-up" and "acquit Simpson and send the police a message." Many heard that as an appeal for jury nullification.

  Death threats followed, and Cochran hired bodyguards from Louis Farrakhan. Fred Goldman called Cochran a racist and a "sick man" for the Hitler comparison while associating with Farrakhan. Shapiro said he was offended by the Holocaust comparison. Years later, Vannatter said he was so angry at Cochran's claims that he wanted to strangle him in the courtroom.

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• 8. A Nation Stops

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  Before the verdict came, Los Angeles braced for riots like those of 1992. All Los Angeles police officers were placed on 12-hour shifts. More than 100 officers on horseback ringed the courthouse on the day of the announcement. President Bill Clinton was briefed on security plans in case unrest spread nationwide.

  The jury reached its decision by 3:00 pm on the 2nd of October 1995, after four hours of deliberation. The announcement waited until the next morning. Jurors reviewed only one piece of testimony, that of limousine driver Park. At 10:07 a.m. on the 3rd of October, the court read two not-guilty verdicts. Juror number nine, 44-year-old Lionel Cryer, raised a Black Power fist at Simpson. The New York Times reported that Cryer had been a Black Panther Party member whom prosecutors had "inexplicably left on the panel."

  An estimated 100 million people worldwide watched or listened. Long-distance calls fell by 58 percent, and trading on the New York Stock Exchange dropped 41 percent. Water usage fell as people stayed put. One estimate put lost production at $480 million. The US Supreme Court received a note about the verdict during oral arguments, and the justices quietly passed it along. Members of Congress canceled press conferences. Joe Lieberman told reporters, "Not only would you not be here, but I wouldn't be here, either."

  That attention had been building for months. A producer at NBC's Today called the case "the biggest story I have ever seen." The Los Angeles Times kept it on the front page for more than 300 days. Nightly news on the three big networks gave it more air time than the Bosnian War and the Oklahoma City bombing combined. One company estimated that workers following the case instead of working cost $40 billion. Judge Ito allowed live cameras, and Court TV broadcast the trial for 134 days with a single remotely operated camera. Jay Leno's show featured the "Dancing Itos," dancers dressed as the judge. When Boris Yeltsin met Clinton in 1995, his first question was, "Do you think O.J. did it?"

  Opinion split along racial lines, which the media called the "racial gap." Right after the verdict, 75 percent of white Americans thought Simpson was guilty, while 70 percent of Black Americans thought he was innocent. By 2004, an NBC poll found 87 percent of white respondents believed he was guilty, compared with 27 percent of Black respondents. In the 2010s the gap narrowed, with 83 percent of white and 57 percent of Black Americans calling him guilty. In 2017, three jurors said they would still acquit, while one said he would now convict.

  The jurors explained themselves in a book. Madame Foreman, published in 1995, concluded that Simpson probably was guilty. But the prosecution, they wrote, had failed to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. Cochran's 1996 book, Journey to Justice, denied he had played the "race card." Clark's 1998 book, Without a Doubt, argued that the acquittal showed the legal system was still compromised by race and celebrity.

  Scholars generally agree that the trial damaged race relations in America. Stanford law professor Richard Thompson Ford argued that the verdict became a wedge among liberals, dividing white and Black ones. Opponents of affirmative action, led by Ward Connerly, seized on that division. In 1996, California voters passed Proposition 209, which ended affirmative action programs in the state. A drop in diversity at the University of California followed. Separately, Brown's letters and statements about her abuse helped spur the Violence Against Women Act in 1994, which Clark and Douglas called the "O.J. rule." Researchers later reported more reporting and arrests, and harsher sentences, for domestic violence.

  Goldman's father filed a civil suit, and in 1997 a jury unanimously found Simpson responsible for the deaths of Goldman and Brown. The Goldman family was awarded $34 million but, as of 2024, had received only a small portion. The LAPD has declined to reexamine the evidence with modern methods, because the Fifth Amendment bars a second trial. Simpson's own Bronco was destroyed by the LAPD shortly after the trial. The one from the chase was bought in 1994 by his former agent Mike Gilbert and two other men. As of 2017, it was on loan to the Alcatraz East Crime Museum.

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