O. J. Simpson

Former Football Player

• Born: July 9, 1947
• Place of Birth: San Francisco, California
• Died: April 10, 2024
• Place of Death: Las Vegas, Nevada

A successful and popular athlete and actor, Simpson gained notoriety in the 1990s after being accused of the murders of his former wife, Nicole Brown, and one of her acquaintances, Ronald Goldman. Though ruled not guilty of murder in his criminal trial, he was determined to be liable for the wrongful deaths of Brown and Goldman. He lived the remainder of his life largely in the shadow of that case and, arrested and convicted for an unrelated crime in the late 2000s, he ultimately spent nine years in prison.

FORMER PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL PLAYER AND FILM ACTOR

Early Life

Orenthal James Simpson was born on July 9, 1947, in San Francisco to a family of modest means; his father abandoned them when Simpson was young, and his mother worked as a hospital orderly. As a child, Simpson developed rickets and was forced to wear leg braces; for much of his youth, he lived close to the streets. At age thirteen, he joined a gang, the Persian Warriors, and by age fifteen he had been arrested for fighting. In high school, he found success on a football field, and after graduation he attended San Francisco City College, where he set national junior college records as a running back.

Sports and Acting Career

In 1967, Simpson attended the University of Southern California, where he was twice named to the All-American football team and, in 1968, won the Heisman Trophy, an award given to college football’s top player. The following spring, the Buffalo Bills selected Simpson with the number-one pick in the National Football League (NFL) draft. In eleven seasons in the NFL—nine in Buffalo and two in San Francisco—Simpson ran for more than 11,000 yards, scored 76 touchdowns, and amassed 14,368 net yards. In 1973, he became the first player in league history to run for more than 2,000 yards in one season. He was selected Player of the Year in 1972, 1973, and 1975 and named All-Pro for five straight years, from 1972 through 1976.

Following his retirement from football in 1979, Simpson became a successful television and film actor, surprising many with his comic talents in The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988) and its sequels. He is perhaps best remembered onscreen as spokesperson for Hertz, a car rental company in whose commercials he would run through airports and leap over luggage. He also worked several seasons as a television football commentator.

The Brown-Goldman Murders

On June 12, 1994, Simpson’s former wife, Nicole Brown, was murdered outside her home, along with an acquaintance, Ronald Goldman, who was returning an item left that evening at the restaurant where he worked and where Brown had eaten dinner with friends. Brown and Simpson had divorced two years earlier after a difficult seven-year marriage, during which complaints of domestic violence had surfaced; however, the two maintained an amicable relationship and shared custody of their two children. Evidence discovered at the scene of the murders and at Simpson’s home implicated Simpson, and when a warrant was issued for his arrest five days later, he attempted to flee. Simpson was spotted in a white Ford Bronco automobile, driven by his friend Al Cowlings, who led police on a slow sixty-mile chase through Los Angeles; Simpson threatened suicide before returning home and surrendering to law enforcement officers.

Legal Action and Outcome

Simpson was charged with two counts of murder. For his defense, he assembled a team of eleven prominent lawyers, including Hollywood attorney Robert Shapiro; Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz; deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) expert Barry Scheck; F. Lee Bailey, at the time America’s most famous attorney; and Johnnie L. Cochran, whose charisma gave the trial some of its most memorable moments.

The O. J. Simpson trial began on January 23, 1995, and soon became an American obsession. Although the trial lasted more than nine months and included hundreds of hours of often tedious testimony, 91 percent of Americans watched some of the proceedings on television, including an estimated 150 million viewers on the day of the verdict. The prosecution offered an exhaustive body of evidence outlining the murders and Simpson’s involvement, but the defense sought to portray Simpson’s arrest as a police conspiracy and to impeach the reliability of the trace evidence. After a four-hour deliberation, the jury declared Simpson not guilty on both counts of murder. Less than one year later, Simpson was sued by Goldman’s family for Goldman’s wrongful death. After a four-month trial, a jury brought back a $33.5 million judgment against Simpson.

The lasting impact of the controversial and public trial was proven in the ensuing years as documentaries, made-for-television movies, and books continued to discuss and debate the proceedings. In early 2016, a highly publicized limited series chronicling the trial premiered on the FX network. Boasting an all-star cast that includes Cuba Gooding Jr., John Travolta, David Schwimmer, and Nathan Lane, the miniseries, titled The People v. O . J. Simpson: American Crime Story, replicates all of the events regarding the trial and garnered generally positive reviews.

2007 Arrest and Imprisonment

Though Simpson escaped a guilty verdict in the notorious murder trial of the 1990s, he continued to have run-ins with the law in the following years. In 2008, he returned to court and the media's attention once more for a crime unrelated to the infamous murders. The previous year, he had been arrested and accused of entering a Las Vegas casino hotel room and demanding the return of sports memorabilia that he claimed had belonged to him from two dealers; several witnesses reported that the confrontation had occurred with at least one of Simpson's accomplices brandishing a gun. While four of the men who had accompanied Simpson into the hotel room had accepted plea deals, Simpson and one of his other accomplices, Clarence Stewart, faced twelve charges, including armed robbery and kidnapping.

In October 2008, after several hours of deliberation and testimony from four of the accomplices in which two admitted to bringing guns into the hotel room at Simpson's behest, the jury found Simpson and Stewart guilty of all twelve charges, and Simpson was sentenced to nine years minimum of prison time; the maximum sentence was thirty-three years. It was then determined that he would serve out his sentence at Lovelock Correctional Center in Nevada. Though he tried to appeal the conviction in 2010 and was denied, he was eventually granted a parole on some of his convictions in 2013; however, he still faced further time for weapons charges. Two years later, his request for a new trial was once again denied, this time by a Nevada Supreme Court panel.

However, after meeting via video link with a Nevada parole board in July 2017, Simpson was ultimately granted parole through a unanimous vote for when he would become eligible in October of that year. During the session, Simpson continued to argue that he had not known that any of the men had carried guns to the scene and that others had been to blame for the crime. Additionally, he stressed that while serving his sentence, he had been a model prisoner and would remain in good behavior if released. Reminiscent of the sensational murder trial, partly due to the reignited interest in Simpson, the parole hearing attracted many viewers and was covered by all large media outlets. In October 2017 Simpson officially left prison after serving nine years, with his parole plan calling for him to remain living in Las Vegas. The parole board then released him early from all related restrictions in 2021.

Simpson died of prostate cancer in Las Vegas on April 10, 2024. He was seventy-six.

Impact

As the O. J. Simpson murder trial dissolved into a media frenzy and real-life soap opera, it raised serious questions regarding justice in the United States. The gavel-to-gavel television coverage, watched by millions nationwide, often seemed to affect both the proceedings and the participants. The trial made celebrities of many of the participants, including Judge Lance Ito, prosecutors Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden, much of the defense team, detective Mark Fuhrman, and even Brian "Kato" Kaelin, an aspiring actor who had lived in Simpson’s guesthouse and testified about the activity at the Simpson house on the night of the murders. Furthermore, Simpson’s extraordinary celebrity prompted accusations that he was, on one hand, receiving special treatment or, on the other, being subjected to overly aggressive prosecution.

The DNA evidence collected from blood found outside Simpson’s home, leading toward Simpson’s estate, in Simpson’s white Bronco, and in the front hall of his home pointed to Simpson. The defense, however, relentlessly attacked the police investigation and cast doubt on the evidence. Although it is now common knowledge that the DNA eliminated the likelihood of the murderer being anyone other than Simpson, in 1995 the strength of this evidence was not understood by most of the public, including the jurors.

Perhaps most important, the dramatic differences of opinion between White Americans and Black Americans over the outcome of the trial highlighted the complex relationship between race and justice in America. The fact that Simpson was Black and his victims White magnified the racial overtones of the trial, and coming just four years after the beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers and the subsequent riots when a jury declared the officers innocent, the Simpson trial could not escape its racial implications.

Bibliography

Dershowitz, Alan M. Reasonable Doubts: The Criminal Justice System and the O. J. Simpson Case. Touchstone, 1996.

Friess, Steve. "O. J. Simpson Convicted of Robbery and Kidnapping." The New York Times, 4 Oct. 2008, www.nytimes.com/2008/10/04/world/americas/04iht-simpson.1.16687098.html. Accessed 15 Apr. 2016.

Fuhrman, Mark. Murder in Brentwood. Zebra, 1997.

Hunt, Darnell M. O. J. Simpson, Facts and Fictions: News Rituals in the Construction of Reality. Cambridge UP, 1999.

McFadden, Robert D. "O.J. Simpson, Football Star Whose Trial Riveted the Nation, Dies at 76." The New York Times, 11 Apr. 2024, www.nytimes.com/2024/04/11/sports/oj-simpson-dead.html. Accessed 29 July 2024.

"OJ Simpson Granted Parole for Robbery Conviction." The Guardian, 31 July 2013, www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/31/oj-simpson-parole-las-vegas. Accessed 15 Apr. 2016.

Pérez-Peña, Richard. "O.J. Simpson Wins Parole, Claiming He Has Led a 'Conflict-Free Life.'" The New York Times, 20 July 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/07/20/us/oj-simpson-parole.html. Accessed 4 Aug. 2017.

Toobin, Jeffrey. The Run of His Life: The People Versus O. J. Simpson. Random, 1996.

Vercammen, Paul, and Faith Karimi. "O. J. Simpson Out of Nevada Prison after 9 Years, Plans to Stay in Vegas." CNN, 2 Oct. 2017, www.cnn.com/2017/10/01/us/oj-simpson-released-from-prison/index.html. Accessed 8 Nov. 2017.