OJ was Guilty: Let’s not Repeat the Mistakes that Set Him Free

Last updated on: February 5, 2016 at 10:19 pm by John Mark N. Reynolds

OJ was Guilty: Let’s not Repeat the Mistakes that Set Him Free 2016-02-05T22:19:28-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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OJ Simpson and his murders are back in the media.

I recently reviewed the worthwhile miniseries for World Magazine and as part of my preparation read The Run of His Life by Jeffery Toobin and How I Helped OJ Get Away with Murder by Mike Gilbert.

If read it, you will not acquit.

I was just starting work as a professor in Southern California when the crime, the car chase, and the trial dominated the news. My present students know nothing of OJ and the trial, but I had a weird angle on it.

First, I am just the right age to have seen OJ Simpson play football and I lived in Upstate New York while he played. The Juice was not just a football player in Upstate New York: he was the athlete. The number of 32 jerseys at school could not be counted. As a Packer fan, the Bills did not make me want to shout (much as I loved Jack Kemp’s politics), but OJ was everywhere.

As I got older, he got older, but he was still there: sunny, warm, and glib on movies, television, commercials, and sports commentary.
He was the Juice.

When I heard about the murders, I said: “Thank God, the Juice is in Chicago. He could not have done it.”

But he had done it and oddly I had just moved to LA while the court proved beyond a reasonable doubt that he had done it.
Not for the first time, I saw the difference race made in America. My African American students and friends felt sympathetic to OJ and with good reason dubious about the LAPD. If you think the police cannot be racist, sit and read any good history of the Los Angeles Police Department. They were Jack Webb and Dragnet probity to Anglos, but frequently corrupt thugs to African-Americans.
The Anglo community, the majority of my students by far, saw Johnny Cochran as a race hustler and he certainly lied to get OJ acquitted. On the other hand, my African American friends knew that Cochran was a hero when he pushed against real racism in the force.

Racism ruins everything and I learned that it was not irrational for people who grew up with police that were often racist thugs to distrust police evidence. OJ’s lawyers cynically played on this real fear. Black lives matter, America has forgotten it so often, that lawyers were able to convince an able jury that OJ was the victim of the same sort of lies they had seen so often.

I don’t defend the outcome: there was no justice for Nicole. I do say that if a person’s experiences with the police is mostly negative, that doing justice is hard. OJ is a narcissistic murderer who used charm and guile to beat his wife and get away with murder.
I have no sympathy for him.

There is one other lesson the trial taught me: Marcia Clark is not a feminist hero, I wish she was. She is a warning of the dangers of pride and a reliance on your “gut” against evidence. Clark had the irrational belief that African American women loved her. Research showed that they did not. Clark believed that a large number of women on the jury was a good thing, research showed that the experience of African American women made them more sympathetic to OJ.

Clark followed her experience and Clark lost the case.

She is not a hero, she is a cautionary tale. If you have never worked with this bizarre combination of incompetence with surety and swagger, you do not know how harmful it can be. I have and it is devastating.

Marcia Clark lost the case.

God help us. When do we trust our “gut” over the evidence? When do we “know” that the experts are wrong, because we know people love us? Marcia Clark played the fool in the Biblical sense of the term during the trial and so a murderer walked.

Most of us do similar things with less consequences. May we always follow the argument and the evidence where it leads. . . even if we do not like what it says.

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