This just in: date rape "isn't possible." ~ OJ Simpson

[shereads]

I have to admit that when I was a kid playing street ball (that's full contact football in the middle of the street) I use to pretend that I was O.J., and when I score I use to yell "can't stop the juice"

Seeing him in the Bronco...I didn't think it was funny at all. What a stupid idoit.

and to think that he actually walked. I don't think it was because he was a famous football icon. It was because of the circus surrounding the trail.

Jeepers, people are in prison in cases where there is no body and no witnesses.

I think he walked because the dream team hired the best jury-selection specialists. That's the biggest thing that people of wealth have going for them in the criminal justice system - and the fact that such a profession as jury selection specialist even exists, is proof that justice is not blind. I read an interview with one of the specialists who chose jurers for the O.J. trial. He said they did focus group research before jury selection (interviews with a cross-section of people of different racial/ethnic backgrounds, income groups, professions, etc.) and they learned that African-American women of lower to middle income levels, and of a certain age, expressed a tendency to resent white women who were in relationships with African-American men. So when they chose jurers, they focused on getting as many women who fit a certain income and age group as they could. The prosecution, on the other hand, had made the error of thinking that a jury of mostly women would be more likely to side with Nicole and to be horrified when they heard the evidence of the physical abuse during the marriage.

The jury system scares the daylights out of me, because I've been on four juries and in every case there were people who either didn't understand the evidence, or who had made up their minds in advance, and didn't say so - they wanted to be on a jury, thinking it would be exciting, or would get them out of the office for a few days. It's incredibly discouraging to be on a murder jury, in particular, and to see how little attention is paid to the evidence when you get back into the jury room. You hear everything from, "nobody but God has a right to judge people," to "maybe the police made it all up," to "Let's just vote so we can go home; I'll vote with the majority."

 

[KarenAM]

"Hey, he's still the Juice," one said.

The only juice he's got is piss, and he isn't worth that.

What bugs me especially is that apart from the murders, there's no question but that he was a wife-beater. They have 911 tapes actually recording him abusing Nicole, and plenty of testimony about it too. And yet people still praise the guy because he was an athlete.

Makes me sick thinking about it.

 

[shereads]

A trial like OJ's where most of the evidence is based on forensics, makes it evident that the technology and science have come too far to continue to rely on ordinary people as jurors. I'd like to see a "professional jurors" system - a cross-section of retired forensics experts, judges, others who've passed some kind of basic intelligence test. The fact that some DNA evidence may have been tainted by bad handling in the lab need not have negated the evidence itself, if the jurors had been able to understand the overwhelming odds against an error in ALL of the evidence. A group who were predisposed to look for reasonable doubt could simply tune out the hours and hours of scientific explanations of how DNA evidence is obtained and analyzed - How many people really understood all of it? A few forensics experts on a jury would have understood exactly how the lab handling might have effected some results and not others. Juries of our peers are outmoded; our peers are idiots. As witness Bill Maher's statement, It's not that people are getting stupider; it's that fewer stupid people are being eaten by bears.

Maybe OJ will be eaten by a bear.