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O.J. Simpson: guilty on all counts

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Back in 1995, I was one of the people who parked a television in the office and followed every step of the Orenthal James Simpson trial. From the opening arguments on a cloudy February morning to about 10:18AM PST on the morning of October 3rd, I had the trial on, playing it like background music.

Any thinking person who followed that trial without perverted bias found the verdict — which was reached in a suspiciously brief period of a couple hours — to be pathetic, disheartening, and otherwise completely laughable if it weren’t for the very real horror of what happened to Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman on June 12th, 1994. The nauseating icing on the cake for me was the rejoicing by people who were hoping for a Not Guilty verdict. I’ll never forget the stomach-turning display of pleasure we saw from OJ supporters. It was clearly rooted in an agenda that had nothing to do with facts, and had everything to do with racism and a misdirected desire for payback after the Rodney King trial a few years prior. Just sick.

That day, October 3rd, 1995, was a big day for me. I’ll never forget it. A warm, early Fall day at Warner Bros. in Burbank. I lost a lot of faith in our justice system that day, almost put my foot through the television screen, and became deeply cynical in several areas. Not only with the system, but with the human race. I concluded that common sense was overrated, and that our system of “trial by a jury of peers”, while admittedly a theoretically better system than any other, is fundamentally flawed simply because it overestimates human intelligence and turns the corrupt manipulation of impressionable minds into a monetizable sport. I don’t think I ever viewed the world quite the same again after that morning. I also took myself off the grid when it came to sensationalized media coverage of current events.

But here we are, thirteen years later, and, well, justice works in mysterious ways.

October 3rd, 1995: ACQUITTED
October 3rd, 2008: CONVICTED

Ain’t karma a bitch?

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