“I’VE HAD A CONFLICT-FREE LIFE”: O.J Simpson Granted Parole, Gets Off 24 Years Early

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O.J. Simpson will soon be a free man. Again. A four-member parole board in Carson City, Nev., voted unanimously this afternoon to curtail his 33-year prison sentence for kidnapping and armed robbery, stemming from a confrontation over sports memorabilia in Las Vegas in 2007.

The football legend and abusive husband, now 70 years old, could be released as soon as October 1 into a world that’s still fascinated by his plummet from grace.

As the proceedings got underway around 10 a.m., Nevada time, a smiling Simpson entered the hearing room at the Lovelock Correctional Center dressed in a light blue shirt with billowy sleeves, his hair splotched white, his voice gravelly. Seated at a desk with his attorney, Simpson was by turns affable and testy, humbled and defiant.

“I always thought I’ve been pretty good with people,” Simpson told the board by video link, “and have basically spent a conflict-free life.”

Simpson’s eldest daughter, Arnelle Simpson, and one of Simpson’s victims from the Vegas case testified in support of his release. “I’ve known O.J. for a long time,” said Bruce Fromong, a memorabilia dealer. “I don’t feel that he’s a threat to anyone out there. He’s a good man. . . Nine-and-a-half to 33 years is way too long. I feel that it’s time to give him a second chance.”

The networks and cable-news stations carried this latest chapter live for more than an hour, programming their day with key players from Simpson’s trial for murder in 1994 and 1995.

“The circus is back in town,” declared Mark Fuhrman, the former Los Angeles detective whose racist remarks were weaponized by Simpson’s defense, in an essay for FoxNews.com Tuesday. “O.J. Simpson is getting exactly what he loves — attention.”

On the “Today” show Thursday morning, Simpson prosecutor Christopher Darden revealed what he would ask Simpson if he was on the parole board.

“Well, ‘Did you kill Ron and Nicole?’” Darden said, referring to Simpson’s ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman, for whose murders Simpson was acquitted in 1995.

“But of course that’s not legally relevant” to the Vegas case, said NBC host Savannah Guthrie.

“Well that’s the one question I’d like to ask,” Darden said. “I think that’s the one question everybody would like to ask.”

It probably is. O.J. Simpson is perhaps the only story that could force cable news to cut away from merry-go-round coverage of President Trump, Russia and the health care meltdown in Congress.

“It is one whale of a good story,” ABC’s Ted Koppel said at the time. The murder trial, broadcast by courtroom cameras and covered gavel-to-gavel by CNN, would come to represent a coarsening of public debate and an acceleration of the 24-hour news cycle.

“When a tabloid tornado begins to spin. . . even the best among us tend to get caught up in it,” CBS anchor Dan Rather told the Los Angeles Times after the verdict, which polarized blacks and whites anew after the 1992 L.A. riots. “Before you know it. . . your standards have just broken open and you’re not applying the same rules that you do to other stories.”

People born between Simpson’s arrest and acquittal are old enough to drink legally, and the ’90s are now far enough gone to trigger waves of nostalgia. American culture was due for a reminder and a reckoning, and television provided two major rehashings of the saga just last year.

Simpson, meanwhile, was where many people thought he should’ve been in the first place: prison. Public perception of Simpson’s guilt has increased over time. A majority of both black and white people now agree that he was at least “probably guilty” for the murders, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll conducted last year.

He participated in today’s hearing by video conference from the medium-security Lovelock Correctional Center, a cropping of white buildings in the vast beigeness of northwestern Nevada. He’s lived there as inmate 1027820 since he was convicted and sentenced in 2008, after he and five men, some armed with handguns, confronted and detained dealers of sports memorabilia in the Palace Station hotel in Vegas. The families of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman drew a direct connection between their 1994 murders and the Vegas incident.

“Allowing wealth, power and control to consume himself, he made a horrific choice on June 12, 1994, which has spiraled into where he is today,” Nicole’s sister Denise Brown said in a statement after the conviction, which came 13 years to the day Simpson was acquitted for the murders. The Goldmans had already won a $33.5-million wrongful-death lawsuit against Simpson, which they believed drove him to attempt to reclaim valuable memorabilia.

During the past nine years in Lovelock, Simpson mopped floors, disinfected gym equipment, coached inmate sports teams and led Bible study. In a sad echo of athletic competitiveness, he told the warden that he would try to be “the best prisoner they’ve ever had.” He missed his children’s college graduations. He missed his sister’s funeral. He was waitlisted for a prison course called “Commitment to Change.” Other younger inmates came to him for advice, Simpson claimed, and he has defused conflicts.

“I am sorry that things turned out the way they did,” Simpson said during the hearing, as the parole board weighed Simpson’s risk to the public. “I had no intent to commit a crime. . . I’ve done my time. I’d just like to get back to my family and friends — and believe it or not I do have some real friends.”

“I thought his statements were self-justifying, self-pitying, showing no remorse, no understanding, no sense of reality about his own life,” said CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin during the station’s breathless coverage. Simpson “is a deeply delusional and self-obsessed narcissist, and good luck to America once he’s out.”

Simpson was paroled on one set of charges in 2013, after apologizing to the board for the Vegas incident; the other set required an additional four-year term, at minimum, which ends this year.

Simpson, who would move to Florida, could be golfing by the autumn. Darden published a best-selling memoir last summer called “In Contempt.” Defense attorneys Johnnie Cochran and Robert Kardashian are dead. F. Lee Bailey, who famously cross-examined Fuhrman, is disbarred, mostly broke, and living upstairs from a hair salon in Maine. In September the maligned lead prosecutor Marcia Clark was at the Emmy Awards in support of “The People vs. O.J. Simpson.”

And at the root of it all, still, is a double murder. On “Good Morning America” today, the family of Ron Goldman vowed to continue going after Simpson’s assets, as a form of perpetual punishment.

“What’s troubling to me is [that] the whole system gives second chances to violent felons,” said Fred Goldman, Ron’s father. “Ron doesn’t get a second chance.”

(c) The Washington Post

{Matzav.com}


8 COMMENTS

  1. Disgusting heart wrenching news.
    After the murder rape theft etc etc etc he gets off early. The judicial system is anything but justified.

    However, a sweet man who did mountain full of chesed sits in jail for a conspiracy. Sholom Rubashkin suffers every day every night. When a Shaigetz a M’nuval walks free. How pathetic is the law.

  2. At least now, OJ can concentrate on finding the real killer of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown. It’s a shame the real killer is still on the loose living a happy free life. Why hasn’t the FBI made any arrests or revealed any leads in the murder case?! If OJ was found innocent by the court system, isn’t it the obligation of Law Enforcement to continue their investigation?! They just recently “found” the alleged murderer of Etan Patz! That was even a longer time frame! Why haven’t Law enforcement made any arrests yet in the murder of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown??????????????

  3. to “Don’t laws in this Country mean anything?” – The reason why the authorities are not looking for the real killer is because they know that O.J. did it. He was even found “liable” for their deaths in a civil trial. The criminal trial was an absolute fiasco. Unfortunately, there is nothing they can do at this point. It would be a tremendous waste of taxpayer money to investigate this any further.

    • Let them match the DNA on the knife with the DNA of OJ’s son who was a chef who specialized on Benihana type cooking with knives.

      • The problem is, they never found the knife. The police and the investigators were incompetent, lazy, and negligent.

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