On a preponderance of the evidence but not beyond reasonable doubt....

This week I have been mostly watching Storyville OJ: Made In America on BBC Iplayer.  It’s in five parts and it took me a long time to get through. 

The first part about his sporting career is quite hard going …particularly if you don’t understand American football and find sport in general about as interesting as watching paint dry.  This is interspersed with sections about the civil rights movement in America and OJ’s involvement in it which was, the documentary claims, as minimal as possible.  The repeated accusation from other sports people and civil rights people interviewed can be summarised simply as “Uncle Tom”.

The next part follows his rise as a celebrity and actor as his sports career waned and his trading in of his first wife Marguerite for Nicole Simpson.  It also charts his relationship with advertising industry and the commercialisation of the persona.  But the thing that makes the documentary so absorbing is they really have interviewed everyone he ever knew with no exceptions.  His coaches, his team mates, his neighbours, the police …his cat… no one and nothing is left out.  It has to be the most exhausting documentary about a living person that I have ever seen. So much so that it’s only by part 3 (and some episodes are 90 minutes long) that we start to get the murder, the chase and the trial. 

Simpson had a long history of beating his estranged wife Nicole who was found (with Ron Goldman) brutally murdered in her condo in Brentwood, Los Angeles.  The crime scene photos are shown and they’re pretty grim with Nicole’s head almost hacked off. 

However, OJ had a lot of money so hired the best legal team in town led by the flamboyant defence lawyer Johnnie Cochran - along with Robert Shapiro, F. Lee Bailey, Alan Dershowitz, Shawn Holley, Carl E. Douglas,  Gerald Uelmen and Robert (Kim’s dad) Kardashian.  Having advised OJ not to take the witness stand they then threw as much doubt on all the evidence and witnesses as possible.  Unable to disprove the forensic evidence they fell back on the only defence possible – it was planted.  Fortunately the Detective Mark Fuhrman had given hours and hours of off the record interviews to a TV drama team for an unrelated TV drama project and when they came to light they were liberally peppered with the N word and various unpleasant opinions and there were hours and hours of it.  They now had a motive for the police to plant evidence and all they had to show was that it was plausible that it might have happened…

At various points members of the prosecution team are asked if they think any of this was true and they give the response that it isn’t their job to assess the truth just put forward the best case for their client – it’s the Jury’s job to assess truth.  Being the USA all the jurors can be interviewed as well and many say outright that a factor in not finding OJ guilty was the recent murder of Rodney King and the acquittal of the arresting officers in that case.  However, it is easy to blame the jury when the larger truth may be that the defence really didn’t properly make their case.  Things became more complicated when the prosecution fell out with each other over whether they’d acted ethically.  And more complicated still when OJ was found responsible for the murderers in a civil court where he was forced to take the witness stand and be cross examined …meaning he did the murder on the preponderance of the evidence but not beyond reasonable doubt.

OJ’s life after getting off the murder charge became a pitiful affair.  After all, even if you accept he didn't do it he still comes out of the trial looking like a nasty wifebeater.

With no sports career and now being regarded as Hollywood box office poison and being pursued by Ron Goldman's family to cough up $33million Simpson’s life consisted of living off his pension, playing golf and generating revenue through signing memorabilia.  His associates stashed this memorabilia across the country for him and also stole chunks of it while Simpson tried to keep his assets in forms that were hard for the Goldmans to aquire.  This resulted in an argument in a hotel over a van of memorabilia that ended up with Simpson and his mates pulling guns which turned into an armed robbery charge that turned into 33 years in prison…

…after 12 years he’s now out on parole and can be found wandering round golf courses on twitter talking about black lives matter … but anyway what’s really amazing about this documentary is not whether or not Simpson did it ...but simply the love, fantastic hard work and detail that has gone into making the documentary…

Did he do it?

On a preponderance of the evidence yes but not beyond reasonable doubt...