Simpson, who became the focus of the “trial of the century,” died of cancer on Wednesday, his family announced on social media Thursday.
Simpson avoided prison after being acquitted in the 1994 deaths of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman in Los Angeles.
But he later served nine years in a Nevada prison after his 2008 conviction on 12 counts of armed robbery and kidnapping for his role in an incident at a Las Vegas hotel where he held two sports memorabilia dealers at gunpoint.
Nicknamed “The Juice,” Simpson was one of the best and most popular athletes of the late 1960s and 1970s. He overcame a childhood handicap to become an electrifying running back at the University of Southern California and won the Heisman Trophy as college football’s best player. After a record-breaking NFL career with the Buffalo Bills and San Francisco 49ers, he was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Simpson parlayed his football stardom into a career as a sports commentator, advertising executive and Hollywood actor in films including the Naked Gun series.
That all changed after Nicole Brown Simpson and Goldman were found fatally stabbed in a bloody scene outside her Los Angeles home on June 12, 1994.
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Simpson quickly emerged as a suspect. He was ordered to hand himself in to police, but five days after the murders he fled in his white Ford Bronco with a former team-mate – carrying his passport and wearing a mask. A low-speed chase through the Los Angeles area ended at Simpson’s mansion, and he was later charged with the murders.
One of America’s most famous trials of the 20th century and a media circus ensued. It had it all: a rich defendant with a celebrity; a black man accused of murdering his white ex-wife out of jealousy; a woman killed after divorcing a man who had been her; a “dream team” of expensive and charismatic lawyers; and a huge blunder by the prosecutors.
Simpson, who pleaded “absolutely 100 percent innocent” at the start of the trial, waved to jurors and mouthed the words “thank you” after the mostly black panel of 10 women and two men acquitted him on Oct. 3, 1995.
Prosecutors argued that Simpson killed Nicole in a jealous rage and presented extensive blood, hair and fiber tests linking Simpson to the murders. The defense countered that the accused celebrity was framed by racist white police officers.
The trial shocked America. At the White House, President Bill Clinton left the Oval Office and watched the verdict on his secretary’s television. Many black Americans celebrated his acquittal, seeing Simpson as a victim of bigoted police. Many white Americans were horrified by his acquittal.
Simpson’s legal team includes prominent criminal defense attorneys Johnnie Cochran, Alan Dershowitz and F. Lee Bailey, who often beat the prosecution. Prosecutors committed a memorable blunder when they ordered Simpson to try on a pair of bloody gloves found at the scene of the murder, confident they would fit perfectly and show he was the killer.
In a highly theatrical display, Simpson struggled to put on the gloves and pointed out to the jury that they did not fit.
Delivering the most famous words of the trial, Cochran referred to the gloves in closing arguments to the jury with the rhyme: “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” Dershowitz later called the prosecution’s decision to ask Simpson to try on the gloves “the biggest legal blunder of the 20th century.”
“What this verdict tells you is how fame and money can buy the best defense, can take a case with a tremendous amount of incriminating physical evidence and turn it into a case filled with reasonable doubt,” said Peter Arenella, a professor in law at UCLA, before New York Hours after the verdict.
“A predominantly African-American jury was more susceptible to allegations of police incompetence and corruption and more inclined to impose a greater burden of proof than is normally required to prove beyond a reasonable doubt,” Arenella said.
After his acquittal, Simpson said that “I will pursue as my primary goal in life the killer or killers who killed Nicole and Mr. Goldman. . . . They are out there somewhere. . . . I would not, could not, and did not kill anyone.”
The Goldman and Brown families subsequently filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against Simpson in civil court. In 1997, a predominantly white jury in Santa Monica, California, found Simpson responsible for both deaths and ordered him to pay $33.5 million in damages.
“We finally have justice for Ron and Nicole,” Fred Goldman, Ron Goldman’s father, said after the verdict.
Simpson’s “dream team” did not represent him in the civil trial, where the burden of proof was lower than in the criminal trial — “preponderance of the evidence,” not “beyond a reasonable doubt.” New evidence also hurt Simpson, including photos of him wearing shoes that left bloody footprints at the murder scene.
After the civil case, some of Simpson’s belongings, including memorabilia from his football days, were taken and auctioned off to help pay off the damages he owed.
On October 3, 2008, exactly 13 years after his acquittal in the murder trial, he was convicted by a Las Vegas jury of charges including kidnapping and armed robbery. They stem from a 2007 incident at a casino hotel in which Simpson and five men, at least two with guns, stole thousands of dollars worth of sports memorabilia from two dealers.
Simpson said he was just trying to get his own property back, but was sentenced to up to 33 years in prison.
“I didn’t mean to hurt anybody,” Simpson said at his sentencing, wearing a blue prison jumpsuit with leg and wrist shackles. “I didn’t know I was doing something wrong.”
Simpson was paroled in 2017 and moved to a gated complex in Las Vegas. He was granted early parole in 2021 due to good behavior at the age of 74.
His life saga was told in the 2016 Oscar-winning documentary OJ: Made in America, as well as in various television dramatizations.
Orenthal James Simpson was born in San Francisco on July 9, 1947. He contracted rickets at the age of 2 and was forced to wear leg braces until the age of 5, but recovered so well that he became one of the the famous football players of all time.
During nine seasons with the Buffalo Bills and two with the San Francisco 49ers, Simpson became one of the greatest ball carriers in NFL history. In 1973, he became the first NFL player to rush for more than 2,000 yards in a season. He retired in 1979.
Simpson also became an advertising agent, best known for years of TV commercials for Hertz rental cars. As an actor, he appeared in films including “The Towering Inferno” (1974), “Capricorn One” (1977) and the 1988, 1991 and 1994 cop films “The Naked Gun”, playing a mad police detective.
Simpson married his first wife Marguerite in 1967 and they had three children, including one who drowned in the family pool at the age of 2 in 1979, the year the couple divorced.
Simpson met future wife Nicole Brown when she was a 17-year-old waitress and he was still married to Marguerite. Simpson and Brown married in 1985 and have two children. She later called the police after incidents in which he hit her. Simpson pleaded no contest to spousal abuse charges in 1989.
(With information from Reuters)
