The long break
Apologies to all for the long-ish break. Stuff happened.
There’s a lot to report on the Paul Garcia front, and we’ll get to that in coming days. Here are the previous entries on the case if you want to catch up before the next installment. Connections, American Nightmare, Midnight Rider, The Missing Woman,
This post will be on another topic: O.J. Simpson.
Before you decide that you’ve read all you want to know about Simpson, who died this week in Las Vegas at age 76, consider a couple of things I might be able to offer to this discussion.
As a reporter in Los Angeles working for the Thomson Newspaper Group, I wrote about the murder of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown when it happened in June 1994. I was at the crime scene when their blood still coated the walkway outside the South Bundy Drive condo where Nicole Brown lived. I spent all of the third week of June 1994 outside Simpson’s house on Rockingham Drive in Brentwood with hundreds of media people, some of whom I’d never see again and co-bylined several other stories that week.
And I was there for the infamous press conference where police said O.J. had eluded arrest and was on the run.
I covered several days of his murder trial in 1995, including the day writer Laura McKinney presented her tapes of LAPD Detective Mark Fuhrman spouting off crazy racism and wild, brutal, stories of life as a beat cop in LA in the ‘80s and ‘90s. From June 94 until October 1995 and even a little after that, any chance I had, I talked to cops, coroners investigators, witnesses, attorneys and other reporters who had knowledge of the case.
When the verdict came in, I was asked to write the lede story for an extra on the case, and file that story as soon as the verdict was read. Believing no jury on earth would find Simpson innocent, I began my story like this:
“A Los Angeles Superior Court jury today found Orenthal James Simpson guilty of murdering his wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ronald Goldman.”
Whoops.
The jury came back with a resounding “not guilty” setting off a wave of derision for the decision by some and a whole lot of “told you so” from others.
I won’t be the first person to write this, but maybe the last to get it. The verdict had nothing to do with O.J. and Nicole and Ron. It had everything to do with Los Angeles and cops like Mark Fuhrman, who had been lying on defendants in court for years. We’ll never know if cops planted evidence, juked scientific reports or otherwise lied to make a good case even better. Fuhrman is to blame for that.
So, in spite of the overwhelming evidence against Simpson, the jury couldn’t have reached any other conclusion than Not Guilty.
If I’m not convincing you. There’s plenty of research and factual evidence to support the long term situation in LA pitting cops and the community. For starters read the McCone Commission Report, put together in the wake of the 1965 Watts Riots.
If that’s not enough for you, read about Leonard Deadwyler or read up on Eula Love. Those were ancient history, but not forgotten by members of that jury. Also of note are the incidents that were more contemporary in 1994 like Rodney King, the LAPD shooting death of Sonji Taylor or the murder of Latasha Harlins.
Interestingly enough Sonji’s family was represented by Johnnie Cochran’s law firm inthe months between her death and O.J. arrest. A report written for the D.A.’s office by Christopher Darden (part of the Simpson prosecution team) found officers who shot Taylor in the back bore no fault for their actions.
Yes. There was a reason Simpson was found not guilty. It had nothing to do with whether or not he did it.
I said a lot of this yesterday on the True Crime Uncensored podcast with Burl Barer, my sometimes co-writer in the true crime genre. You can listen there when it’s available later this week.