| OJ Simpson, the American football star and actor who was acquitted in a sensational 1995 trial of murdering his former wife but was found responsible for her death in a civil lawsuit and was laterSimpson, cleared by a Los Angeles jury in what the US media called “the trial of the century,” had died on Wednesday after a battle with cancer, his family posted on social media on Thursday.
Simpson parlayed his football stardom into a career as a sportscaster, advertising pitchman and Hollywood actor in films including theAll that changed after Nicole Brown Simpson and Goldman were found fatally slashed in a bloody scene outside her Los Angeles home on June 12, 1994. Prosecutors argued that Simpson killed Nicole in a jealous fury, and they presented extensive blood, hair and fibre tests linking Simpson to the murders. The defence countered that the celebrity defendant was framed by racist white police.The trial transfixed America. In the White House, then president Bill Clinton left the Oval Office and watched the verdict on his secretary’s TV. Many black Americans celebrated his acquittal, seeing Simpson as the victim of bigoted police.
“What this verdict tells you is how fame and money can buy the best defence, can take a case of overwhelming incriminating physical evidence and transform it into a case riddled with reasonable doubt,” Peter Arenella, a UCLA law professor, told“A predominantly African-American jury was more susceptible to claims of police incompetence and corruption and more willing to impose a higher burden of proof than normally required for proof beyond a reasonable doubt,” Arenella said.
Simpson’s “dream team” did not represent him in the civil trial in which the burden of proof was lower than in a criminal trial - a “preponderance of the evidence” rather than “beyond a reasonable doubt.” New evidence also hurt Simpson, including photographs of him wearing the type of shoes that had left bloody footprints at the murder scene.
“I didn’t want to hurt anybody,” Simpson, donning a blue prison jumpsuit with shackles on his legs and wrists, said at his sentencing. “I didn’t know I was doing anything wrong.”
Source: Law Daily Report (lawdailyreport.net)
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