Posts Tagged ‘On This Day In Photos: OJ Simpson Is Cleared Of Murder’
On This Day In Photos: OJ Simpson Is Cleared Of Murder
ON This Day In Photos – October 3 1995: Orenthal James Simpson is found not guilty of the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman in a savage knife attack.
Add to this the backstory of OJ Simpson, the US football star and Hollywood actor and you have sensation. And what a show. On the day of his arrest, OJ Simpson had tried to evade the police in a white Ford Bronco. It was the most famous ride in American history since Paul Revere warned of the British. As estimated 95 million viewers in America tuned in to watch OJ Simpson drive on the Los Angeles freeway. When police arrested him in his driveway, they found in the car: $8,750 in cash, a false beard and moustache, a loaded gun, and a passport.
Odd indeed that with the news media running overtime for Amanda Knox – the blonde who was convicted of murdering Meredith Kercher in Italy – on the same day in 1995 a black man awaited the verdict for the murders of two whites.
Race is always a factor in how and why the media goes large on one case and ignores another. Simpson’s lawyer Johnnie Cochran rubbed the open sore of racial prejudice. He played with the idea of his client as the victim of an institutionally racist justice system:
“Maybe you are the right people at the right time in the right place to say: ‘No more.'”
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