Two mangled bodies and one main suspect sparked the most famous law trial in American history. The story outlining the O.J. Simpson murder case is most popularly known for its involvement of some of the most famous people in law and sports at the time, drawing an eager eye to the case. After 135 strenuous days of trial, Simpson was found ‘not guilty’, and rightfully so. The famous football player accused of murder spent millions to be defended by the “dream team” of lawyers who proved that he was not guilty due to police fraud, and no proof of witnesses or a murder weapon, was declared innocent on October 3rd, 1995.
O.J. Simpson was so determined to proving his innocence that he spent 3 – 6 million dollars on a high profile team of lawyers. Some may ask where all of this money came from, while Simpson was in jail at this point. Simpson came up with a money-making scheme through memorabilia in order to generate income, while sitting in his prison cell. Individual single numbers from a jersey would be brought in for O.J. to sign, as well as quarter panels of pig skin, which would each be stitched onto the jerseys and footballs, in order to create these collectibles which O.J. Simpson had technically signed. Other items such as cards and even pictures of him in trial would be signed by him and sold to generate money. All of these sales went directly towards the funding of his team of lawyers, known as “The Dream Team”. This high profile group included F. Lee Bailey, Robert Kardashian, Robert Shapiro, Alan Dershowitz, Johnnie Cochran, Gerald Uelmen, Carl E. Douglas, and Shawn Holley. Simpson had a good ally in the fact that, “Robert and O.J. met on a tennis court in 1969 and stayed friends for decades, sharing business interests as well as a love of the jet-set lifestyle and the University of Southern California, where the former earned his bachelor’s degree and the later earned his Heisman Trophy”. Kardashian even was seen holding Simpson’s notorious Louis vuitton bag, speculated to have contained bloody clothes or a murder weapon (“Robert Kardashian: Keeping up with the man who stood by O.J. Simpson). As well as two attorneys specializing in DNA evidence, Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, who argued that Simpson was “the victim of police fraud” and what they termed as “sloppy internal procedures that contaminated the DNA evidence” (Wikipedia).
Simpson’s defense attorney obliterated the prosecution’s case by unmasking problems with the LAPD’s handling of evidence. One problem was the crime lab did not routinely document it’s handling of the evidence. Another issue during the OJ murder investigation, nobody noticed any blood DNA on a pair of socks that were found in Simpson’s bedroom until two months had passed when the socks were looked at in the crime lab. Defense experts claimed that blood was put on the socks while they were laying flat and empty, rather than when someone was wearing them. A third problem with the LAPD that the defense claimed was that evidence was planted because one police detective who took a blood sample from Simpson was immediately seen after with that same vial of blood in his pocket, back at the crime scene. During the trial, the defense claimed that the blood was brought back to the scene in order to plant the evidence. Nowadays, police are no longer allowed to enter crime scenes with evidence in their possession, it is to be entered on the spot in order for it to be secured. These sloppy procedures led to the exploitations of the defense which in time led to the acquittment of O.J. Simpson.
Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were both brutally stabbed to death on June 12th, 1994. It seems the one missing piece, that determined whether O.J. Simpson was innocent or guilty, was the lack of a fitting murder weapon. A knife was found near Simpson’s home, but was proven not to be the murder weapon because it appeared to be too small to be the knife that killed these two women.
That being proven, O.J. was determined ‘not guilty’ and returned to his Brentwood mansion to celebrate the verdict. Eventually, he was tried for other crimes and eventually imprisoned, eligible for parole in 2017.