DONNER
This Thursday O.J. Simpson is up for parole and odds are better than even that he just might walk. If that doesn’t send a chill up your spine, nothing will.
So here we are – more than twenty years after the famed football star and Hertz rental car pitch man was found innocent of killing his wife Nicole and her friend Ron Goldman in a grisly, bloody double murder, Mr. Simpson is about to go free. Unless you weren’t alive in 1995 or hidden in the Hindu Kush mountains and speak Pashto, you know the story and all the gory details.
In what became a trial about race rather than guilt or innocence, The Juice walked after a jury had said he did not commit those heinous crimes. A civil suit against Simpson however awarded families of the victims $33.5 million in a wrongful death charge in 1997. Then in 2008, Mr. Simpson found a new home at the Lovelock Correctional Center in Nevada after he was convicted of robbery and kidnapping.
Such a nice man.
O.J. Simpson has now served nine years of his thirty-three-year prison sentence and by all accounts hasn’t gotten himself into any hot water in the lovely Lovelock lock-up. As well, no one is showing up to oppose his chance to gain freedom on Thursday. This means, my friends, that Mr. Simpson may be set free and found walking down your street in the not too distant future.
There’s another terrifying thought.
Countless Books, television programs, interviews and a massive amount of ink have been spilled on the O.J. Simpson trial. This is principally because many, many, many people believe it strains logic, common sense and credulity to believe that Mr. Simpson did not commit those two murders. And even if you believe he was innocent of the Brown-Goldman crimes, his actions since that time indicate there is something seriously wrong with the man.
And despite the fact that Simpson was found not-guilty, those two murders remain unsolved to this day. Wonder why?
It seems worthless to go back through that curious verdict and all of the twists and turns of the Simpson trial, but it is worth noting what has happened to many of the key players entangled in the case during the intervening years.
For instance:
Attorney Johnnie Cochran who uttered the famous phrase, “If the gloves don’t fit, you must acquit” died of a brain tumor in 2005.
Simpson’s buddy, Robert Kardashian told Barbara Walters in an ABC interview that he had doubts about his pal’s innocence, “The blood evidence is the biggest thorn in my side; that causes me the greatest problems." Mr. Kardashian must have gone to his grave with those doubts. He died of cancer in 2003.
Surfer-boy Kato Kaelin – whose name is actually Brian Jerard – has since said that O.J. tried to talk him into providing an alibi. And while he reportedly told someone, somewhere in 2014 that he thinks Simpson is guilty, the internet has been scrubbed fairly clean of that comment, so it remains unsubstantiated. Mr. Kaelin/Jerard has gone on to the illustrious career of pitching Slacker Wear – formerly known as “Kato’s Potato” because “Everyone with a couch is a couch potato sometimes. Each piece has a pocket with a zipper for the TV remote…There's also a pocket for Cheetos, Fritos, or Doritos.”
Lord help us.
And there’s more: Marcia Clark, Robert Shapiro, Al Cowlings, Denise Brown and Mark Furhman to name a few. To say the O.J. Simpson trial was a cast of characters no one would believe in a made for TV movie is putting it mildly. Oh wait, there already is a made for TV series. But one thing has remained. Two people are dead, and there seems to be no guilty party.
Or perhaps that person has been in front of our faces all along, and our justice system has refused to say so. Either way, if and when Mr. Simpson takes that long walk out of Lovelock Correctional Center he’ll certainly be carrying a lot more baggage than that Hertz briefcase he once sported while sprinting through an airport.
Indeed, to believe that O.J. Simpson is innocent or should walk among us again is a very heavy lift.
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