nickel
10-04-2005, 06:08 AM
http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2005/10/03/oj3.jpg
OJ Simpson (centre) with his attorneys F Lee Bailey (left) and Johnnie Cochran (right) after being found not guilty of the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman on October 3 1995. Photograph: Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Daily News/AP
At around 1pm Eastern Standard Time on October 3 1995 America was united. In the middle of a work day almost 108 million people - 57% of all US adults - gathered around television sets to hear the news. President Clinton watched in a small room next to the Oval Office; Senator Joe Lieberman rescheduled a news conference on retirement accounts due to take place at the same time. "Not only would you not be here," Lieberman told reporters, "but I wouldn't be here, either."
Two and a half thousand miles away, 12 jurors trooped back into a Los Angeles courtroom. Anise Ascherbach, a 60-year-old white woman, smiled - something no one in court had seen her do in nine months. Defence lawyer Carl Douglas turned to his client and whispered, "We won."
Then Dierdre Robertson, the law clerk to Judge Lance Ito, read the verdict: Orenthal James Simpson - better known as former football star and wife-beater OJ Simpson - was "not guilty" of murdering his wife, Nicole Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman. Another juror, 44-year-old Lionel Cryer, gave Simpson a clenched-fist black power salute.
By 1.10pm, America was divided again. An ABC news poll showed that 83% of blacks agreed with the verdict, compared with just 37% of whites. At concourse A in Atlanta airport all but a couple of the mostly white passengers stood silent. Across town in the dormitories of the historically black Morehouse college - which boasts Martin Luther King among its alumni - 400 young men cheered.
"There was less consensus in the black community than was portrayed at the time," says Linda Burnham, head of the Black Women's Resource Centre in Oakland. "I didn't believe in his innocence. But, like most black people I knew, I wasn't interested in talking to white people about it unless they had sorted themselves out around the issues. This country just doesn't have the tools for black and white people to have those kind of conversations." Burnham recalls driving a white acquaintance to yoga and the woman asking her what she thought of the verdict. "If you think I'm going to talk to you about that, then you're crazy," Burnham told her.
The trial played into some of America's key obsessions. "It had celebrity, a brutal murder, race. Nicole was a blonde, there were racist cops - it had everything," says Salim Muwakkil, a senior editor for the Chicago-based magazine In These Times. "It was an extravaganza."
The implications of the verdict similarly went beyond the legal. Bob Herbert, an African-American columnist for the New York Times, appealed to the nation: "It is a time for men and women of courage to assert themselves, to try to find a way to bring together people whose ignorance of one another is profound, and whose hatreds are intensifying."
Clinton dealt with the verdict as though it were an affair of state, calling for respect for the jury's decision and sympathy for the victims' families. In a speech two weeks afterwards, on the day of the Million Man March, led through Washington by black separatist leader Louis Farrakhan, the president raised the spectre of civil war. "Abraham Lincoln reminded us that 'a house divided against itself cannot stand'," he told a crowd at the university of Texas in Austin. "Differences so great, so rooted in race, threaten to divide the house Mr Lincoln gave his life to save."
Ten years later, much has changed. The rape allegations against basketball star Kobe Bryant, and the trials of Michael Jackson for child molestation and Sean "Diddy" Combs following a shootout in a New York bar, produced nothing like the levels of racial animosity seen in Simpson's trial. But Hurricane Katrina has revealed how much has stayed the same. The nation was once again united before its TV screens. Once again, Americans saw the same thing; once again, they drew different conclusions, on largely racial lines.
About 71% of blacks said the disaster in New Orleans shows that racial inequality remains a major problem in America, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press; 56% of whites feel this was not a particularly important lesson. Two thirds of African-Americans thought the government's response would have been faster if most of the victims had been white; three quarters of whites disagreed.
This time a very different president appeared with a similar pledge of racial healing, admitting that black poverty "has roots in a history of racial discrimination". And Bob Herbert of the New York Times appeared to have all but given up hope that sufficient battalions of men and women of courage would be found. Referring to the New Orleans poor, he wrote. "Those were the residents who, for the most part, were left behind to suffer and die when the people of means began sprinting toward higher ground. They are the ones who are always left behind, out of sight and out of mind, and I'd be surprised - given the history of this country - if that were to change now."
For a man who had the nation's attention focused so firmly on him, Simpson managed to disappear from the public eye surprisingly easily. After five years in Los Angeles, he moved to Kendall, a sprawling suburb of Miami full of classy stucco homes and endless strip malls. It wasn't just the sun he was after. After his acquittal in criminal court, a civil court found him liable for the "wrongful death" of Nicole and Goldman, and ordered him to pay $33.5m to their families. Florida is one of a handful of states that protects homes, no matter how large, from creditors. If he went there he could buy a house and not worry about having to turn it over to settle his civil costs. He put his two children, Justin and Sydney, into the expensive Gulliver private school, bought a place for $625,000 and decided to scrape by on his $16,000-a-month pension from the National Football League.
Gulliver Academy is no stranger to high-profile pupils. On the school gates there is a notice forbidding photographers and media from entry. But some were concerned about this new addition to the PTA. On the children's first day at school, one parent described OJ to the Miami Herald as "morally bankrupt". But she also warned her children not to joke about his past. "Nothing about gloves," she said. "They realise the children have been through a horrible experience."
Simpson said he was seeking normality. If he wanted to hobnob with the stars, he could have gone to Miami Beach. Sightings of him around Kendall are frequent, if erratic. And whatever else he lavishes money on, it is not luxury restaurants. Rita in Roasters N' Toasters, where he would sometimes pop in for a coffee after dropping the kids off at school, hasn't seen him for a while. "Nobody gives him any trouble when he's in here," she says. The waitress at Jakes has a friend who has seen him but she can't remember where. "He's always around someplace," says Ronald.
'He's still getting into trouble'
Indeed, the only thing that seems to undermine OJ's desire for privacy is OJ himself. Just a few months after moving in, he called the police to say that his on-again, off-again girlfriend Christie Prody had run off on a drug binge with the former Los Angeles Dodgers star Pedro Guerrero. "She's loaded out of her mind and in her Mustang driving around town somewhere," he said. "She needs to be stopped." He has made local headlines with a scuffle with Prody, a road-rage incident and a row with his daughter. In July this year, police were called out after Prody started attacking him and his friend. A few days later, he was ordered to pay $25,000 in damages for pirating satellite TV signals from DirecTV.
"He's still getting into trouble," says Sue Thompson, of Splash news agency's Miami bureau. But he is no longer big news. "There's no OJ beat or anything," agrees one local reporter.
Last year, on the 10th anniversary of the murders, he told Fox News that he was about to re-enter public life with a TV show in which he would pull practical jokes on unsuspecting victims. On a scale of one to 10, "it's 7 or 8 that it's gonna happen," he said. It never happened.
In many respects Simpson seems an inadequate receptacle for all the emotional and political energy that was invested in him 10 years ago. As a running back for the Buffalo Bills and the San Francisco '49ers, he was an impressive footballer. But after his professional career ended in 1979 he was a B-list celebrity going south in the alphabet, despite film roles as a dim-witted assistant detective in the comedy The Naked Gun and a man framed for murder in The Klansman.
He also played a lot of golf, sometimes as an honorary guest at white-only country clubs. He had never shown much affinity with the black community. In a country where mixed-race marriages are rare, he left his black wife for a younger white woman. If he was going to find himself in a race row, the smart money would have expected him to be the object of black people's ire, not their support.
But there were bigger forces at play than Simpson's own character. In 1994, the year he was arrested for killing two white people, Republicans swept to power in Congress thanks to a new voting bloc - angry white males. Their anger focused on affirmative action - efforts to improve the employment or educational opportunities of racial minorities and women. "Why did 62% of white males vote Republican in 1994?" the Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole asked two years later. "I think it's because sometimes the best-qualified person does not get the job, because he or she may be one colour. I'm beginning to believe that may not be the way it should be in America."
An American nightmare
The entertainment value of the Simpson trial often overshadowed the grim circumstances that gave it life. Six days before the car chase, Nicole and Goldman had been stabbed to death outside their home in LA. Nicole's head was almost severed from her body. Goldman had struggled so hard it took 30 stabs to finish him off. OJ's DNA was found at the crime scene, while Nicole and Goldman's was found on his clothes and in his truck.
It seemed like a open-and-shut case, but OJ spent several million dollars on a dream team of lawyers. Johnnie Cochran and his colleagues went straight for a racist policeman involved with the case, Mark Fuhrman. One of his acquaintances, Kathleen Bell, said he told her that if he wanted to arrest an interracial couple, he would invent a charge if necessary. He was caught on tape saying "******" several times. Simpson's lawyers claimed the evidence had been planted. Thanks to sloppy collection work, they were also able to claim it could have been tampered with.
The thrust of the defence was not so much that OJ was innocent, but that he could not be proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt. And if OJ was on trial, so was the LAPD. "Fuhrman is a nightmare, but he's America's nightmare, not just black people's nightmare," Cochran told Time magazine before the verdict. "And everybody needs to understand that."
After 266 days and more than 1,100 pieces of evidence, it took the jury of nine blacks, two whites and one Hispanic less than four hours to reach a verdict. Afterwards they slammed the prosecution's evidence as "garbage" and claimed race had registered "barely a blip" in their considerations. There was a fear in some circles that if Simpson were found guilty there would be riots. Black radio host Tavis Smiley raised another concern: "The question ought not to be, will they riot, but rather, what if they don't riot? If the city doesn't burn, will we return to business as usual? Will rogue cops still police our streets? Will the coroners' office still go about its work so sloppily?"
In the film Barbershop, a comedy set in a salon on the South Side of Chicago, Eddie (played by Cedric the Entertainer) decides to slaughter some of black America's holy cows. Insisting that there are some truths African-Americans have to come to terms with, he calls Martin Luther King a "ho", claims Rosa Parks was just too tired to move to the back of the bus ("Ain't do nothin' but sit her black ass down") and says: "OJ did it." The first two remarks drew stiff criticism from both Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. The third went by without comment.
Ten years on, it is difficult to find many who would argue that Simpson was innocent. But there are plenty who believe he should not have been convicted because the prosecution did not make a strong enough case. "OJ Simpson is not Everybrother," African-American novelist and essayist Jill Nelson said during the trial. "Likewise, Nicole Simpson is not Everyvictim and Mark Fuhrman is not Everyracist ... Whatever the verdict, I don't think the OJ Simpson trial will have deep, profound or lasting resonance in American culture. It will not be transformative. It's a bad mini-series gone out of control."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1583442,00.html
http://www.storemypic.com/uploads/5beea9080d.jpg (http://www.storemypic.com)
OJ Simpson (centre) with his attorneys F Lee Bailey (left) and Johnnie Cochran (right) after being found not guilty of the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman on October 3 1995. Photograph: Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Daily News/AP
At around 1pm Eastern Standard Time on October 3 1995 America was united. In the middle of a work day almost 108 million people - 57% of all US adults - gathered around television sets to hear the news. President Clinton watched in a small room next to the Oval Office; Senator Joe Lieberman rescheduled a news conference on retirement accounts due to take place at the same time. "Not only would you not be here," Lieberman told reporters, "but I wouldn't be here, either."
Two and a half thousand miles away, 12 jurors trooped back into a Los Angeles courtroom. Anise Ascherbach, a 60-year-old white woman, smiled - something no one in court had seen her do in nine months. Defence lawyer Carl Douglas turned to his client and whispered, "We won."
Then Dierdre Robertson, the law clerk to Judge Lance Ito, read the verdict: Orenthal James Simpson - better known as former football star and wife-beater OJ Simpson - was "not guilty" of murdering his wife, Nicole Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman. Another juror, 44-year-old Lionel Cryer, gave Simpson a clenched-fist black power salute.
By 1.10pm, America was divided again. An ABC news poll showed that 83% of blacks agreed with the verdict, compared with just 37% of whites. At concourse A in Atlanta airport all but a couple of the mostly white passengers stood silent. Across town in the dormitories of the historically black Morehouse college - which boasts Martin Luther King among its alumni - 400 young men cheered.
"There was less consensus in the black community than was portrayed at the time," says Linda Burnham, head of the Black Women's Resource Centre in Oakland. "I didn't believe in his innocence. But, like most black people I knew, I wasn't interested in talking to white people about it unless they had sorted themselves out around the issues. This country just doesn't have the tools for black and white people to have those kind of conversations." Burnham recalls driving a white acquaintance to yoga and the woman asking her what she thought of the verdict. "If you think I'm going to talk to you about that, then you're crazy," Burnham told her.
The trial played into some of America's key obsessions. "It had celebrity, a brutal murder, race. Nicole was a blonde, there were racist cops - it had everything," says Salim Muwakkil, a senior editor for the Chicago-based magazine In These Times. "It was an extravaganza."
The implications of the verdict similarly went beyond the legal. Bob Herbert, an African-American columnist for the New York Times, appealed to the nation: "It is a time for men and women of courage to assert themselves, to try to find a way to bring together people whose ignorance of one another is profound, and whose hatreds are intensifying."
Clinton dealt with the verdict as though it were an affair of state, calling for respect for the jury's decision and sympathy for the victims' families. In a speech two weeks afterwards, on the day of the Million Man March, led through Washington by black separatist leader Louis Farrakhan, the president raised the spectre of civil war. "Abraham Lincoln reminded us that 'a house divided against itself cannot stand'," he told a crowd at the university of Texas in Austin. "Differences so great, so rooted in race, threaten to divide the house Mr Lincoln gave his life to save."
Ten years later, much has changed. The rape allegations against basketball star Kobe Bryant, and the trials of Michael Jackson for child molestation and Sean "Diddy" Combs following a shootout in a New York bar, produced nothing like the levels of racial animosity seen in Simpson's trial. But Hurricane Katrina has revealed how much has stayed the same. The nation was once again united before its TV screens. Once again, Americans saw the same thing; once again, they drew different conclusions, on largely racial lines.
About 71% of blacks said the disaster in New Orleans shows that racial inequality remains a major problem in America, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press; 56% of whites feel this was not a particularly important lesson. Two thirds of African-Americans thought the government's response would have been faster if most of the victims had been white; three quarters of whites disagreed.
This time a very different president appeared with a similar pledge of racial healing, admitting that black poverty "has roots in a history of racial discrimination". And Bob Herbert of the New York Times appeared to have all but given up hope that sufficient battalions of men and women of courage would be found. Referring to the New Orleans poor, he wrote. "Those were the residents who, for the most part, were left behind to suffer and die when the people of means began sprinting toward higher ground. They are the ones who are always left behind, out of sight and out of mind, and I'd be surprised - given the history of this country - if that were to change now."
For a man who had the nation's attention focused so firmly on him, Simpson managed to disappear from the public eye surprisingly easily. After five years in Los Angeles, he moved to Kendall, a sprawling suburb of Miami full of classy stucco homes and endless strip malls. It wasn't just the sun he was after. After his acquittal in criminal court, a civil court found him liable for the "wrongful death" of Nicole and Goldman, and ordered him to pay $33.5m to their families. Florida is one of a handful of states that protects homes, no matter how large, from creditors. If he went there he could buy a house and not worry about having to turn it over to settle his civil costs. He put his two children, Justin and Sydney, into the expensive Gulliver private school, bought a place for $625,000 and decided to scrape by on his $16,000-a-month pension from the National Football League.
Gulliver Academy is no stranger to high-profile pupils. On the school gates there is a notice forbidding photographers and media from entry. But some were concerned about this new addition to the PTA. On the children's first day at school, one parent described OJ to the Miami Herald as "morally bankrupt". But she also warned her children not to joke about his past. "Nothing about gloves," she said. "They realise the children have been through a horrible experience."
Simpson said he was seeking normality. If he wanted to hobnob with the stars, he could have gone to Miami Beach. Sightings of him around Kendall are frequent, if erratic. And whatever else he lavishes money on, it is not luxury restaurants. Rita in Roasters N' Toasters, where he would sometimes pop in for a coffee after dropping the kids off at school, hasn't seen him for a while. "Nobody gives him any trouble when he's in here," she says. The waitress at Jakes has a friend who has seen him but she can't remember where. "He's always around someplace," says Ronald.
'He's still getting into trouble'
Indeed, the only thing that seems to undermine OJ's desire for privacy is OJ himself. Just a few months after moving in, he called the police to say that his on-again, off-again girlfriend Christie Prody had run off on a drug binge with the former Los Angeles Dodgers star Pedro Guerrero. "She's loaded out of her mind and in her Mustang driving around town somewhere," he said. "She needs to be stopped." He has made local headlines with a scuffle with Prody, a road-rage incident and a row with his daughter. In July this year, police were called out after Prody started attacking him and his friend. A few days later, he was ordered to pay $25,000 in damages for pirating satellite TV signals from DirecTV.
"He's still getting into trouble," says Sue Thompson, of Splash news agency's Miami bureau. But he is no longer big news. "There's no OJ beat or anything," agrees one local reporter.
Last year, on the 10th anniversary of the murders, he told Fox News that he was about to re-enter public life with a TV show in which he would pull practical jokes on unsuspecting victims. On a scale of one to 10, "it's 7 or 8 that it's gonna happen," he said. It never happened.
In many respects Simpson seems an inadequate receptacle for all the emotional and political energy that was invested in him 10 years ago. As a running back for the Buffalo Bills and the San Francisco '49ers, he was an impressive footballer. But after his professional career ended in 1979 he was a B-list celebrity going south in the alphabet, despite film roles as a dim-witted assistant detective in the comedy The Naked Gun and a man framed for murder in The Klansman.
He also played a lot of golf, sometimes as an honorary guest at white-only country clubs. He had never shown much affinity with the black community. In a country where mixed-race marriages are rare, he left his black wife for a younger white woman. If he was going to find himself in a race row, the smart money would have expected him to be the object of black people's ire, not their support.
But there were bigger forces at play than Simpson's own character. In 1994, the year he was arrested for killing two white people, Republicans swept to power in Congress thanks to a new voting bloc - angry white males. Their anger focused on affirmative action - efforts to improve the employment or educational opportunities of racial minorities and women. "Why did 62% of white males vote Republican in 1994?" the Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole asked two years later. "I think it's because sometimes the best-qualified person does not get the job, because he or she may be one colour. I'm beginning to believe that may not be the way it should be in America."
An American nightmare
The entertainment value of the Simpson trial often overshadowed the grim circumstances that gave it life. Six days before the car chase, Nicole and Goldman had been stabbed to death outside their home in LA. Nicole's head was almost severed from her body. Goldman had struggled so hard it took 30 stabs to finish him off. OJ's DNA was found at the crime scene, while Nicole and Goldman's was found on his clothes and in his truck.
It seemed like a open-and-shut case, but OJ spent several million dollars on a dream team of lawyers. Johnnie Cochran and his colleagues went straight for a racist policeman involved with the case, Mark Fuhrman. One of his acquaintances, Kathleen Bell, said he told her that if he wanted to arrest an interracial couple, he would invent a charge if necessary. He was caught on tape saying "******" several times. Simpson's lawyers claimed the evidence had been planted. Thanks to sloppy collection work, they were also able to claim it could have been tampered with.
The thrust of the defence was not so much that OJ was innocent, but that he could not be proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt. And if OJ was on trial, so was the LAPD. "Fuhrman is a nightmare, but he's America's nightmare, not just black people's nightmare," Cochran told Time magazine before the verdict. "And everybody needs to understand that."
After 266 days and more than 1,100 pieces of evidence, it took the jury of nine blacks, two whites and one Hispanic less than four hours to reach a verdict. Afterwards they slammed the prosecution's evidence as "garbage" and claimed race had registered "barely a blip" in their considerations. There was a fear in some circles that if Simpson were found guilty there would be riots. Black radio host Tavis Smiley raised another concern: "The question ought not to be, will they riot, but rather, what if they don't riot? If the city doesn't burn, will we return to business as usual? Will rogue cops still police our streets? Will the coroners' office still go about its work so sloppily?"
In the film Barbershop, a comedy set in a salon on the South Side of Chicago, Eddie (played by Cedric the Entertainer) decides to slaughter some of black America's holy cows. Insisting that there are some truths African-Americans have to come to terms with, he calls Martin Luther King a "ho", claims Rosa Parks was just too tired to move to the back of the bus ("Ain't do nothin' but sit her black ass down") and says: "OJ did it." The first two remarks drew stiff criticism from both Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. The third went by without comment.
Ten years on, it is difficult to find many who would argue that Simpson was innocent. But there are plenty who believe he should not have been convicted because the prosecution did not make a strong enough case. "OJ Simpson is not Everybrother," African-American novelist and essayist Jill Nelson said during the trial. "Likewise, Nicole Simpson is not Everyvictim and Mark Fuhrman is not Everyracist ... Whatever the verdict, I don't think the OJ Simpson trial will have deep, profound or lasting resonance in American culture. It will not be transformative. It's a bad mini-series gone out of control."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1583442,00.html
http://www.storemypic.com/uploads/5beea9080d.jpg (http://www.storemypic.com)