This weekend marks 20 years since OJ Simpson was acquitted of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. And new polling shows more people than ever believe he did it.
When the case was active, you may recall, opinions were split along racial lines. Whites tended to think he did it and blacks tended to think he was innocent. When the not guilty verdict was delivered, a Washington Post survey found 30% of blacks asked said he was probably guilty compared to 82% of whites.
A similar poll just conducted found 57% of blacks said he probably did it; 83% of whites think so.
When the trial was on, I was working with a guy who was obsessed with it. Thanks to him, I got to follow along, bit by bit, with each snippet of witness testimony and evidence submitted. Marcia Clark was a terrible prosecutor and she screwed the case up. There’s no doubt in my mind that OJ Simpson killed Nicole and Ron. Nicole was scared of him with good reason. He had beaten her black and blue on several occasions and she told friends for years that she was afraid he would kill her. He wrote a book called If I Did It, for goodness sake. And he was found “responsible” for the deaths in a civil court action.
This was about more than a small glove. Allegations of evidence tampering came up because the lead investigator happened to be a racist jerk. It’s not unrealistic to think Simpson was sentenced so heavily for the armed robbery and kidnapping case in 2007, as a bit of payback. He had tried to intimidate and frighten some Las Vegas sports memorabilia dealers who had stolen from him and got a 9-33 year sentence. He could get parole in 2019 but every one of his attempts to get a new trial has been quashed. He is a bad man. And now, more people than ever believe that.