On Tuesday, October 3, 1995, the verdict in the murder trial of O. J. Simpson was announced and Simpson was acquitted on both counts of murder. Although the nation observed the same evidence presented at trial, a division along racial lines emerged in observers' opinion of the verdict, which the media dubbed the "racial gap". Immediately following the trial, polling showed that most African Americans believed Simpson was innocent and justice had been served, while most White Americans felt he was guilty and the verdict was a racially motivated jury nullification by a mostly African-American jury. Current polling shows the gap has narrowed since the trial, with the majority of black respondents in 2016 stating they believed Simpson was guilty.
The narrowing racial gap is primarily attributed to several factors: Daniel Petrocelli disproving all of the blood planting claims at the wrongful death civil trial, defense witness Henry Lee publishing a peer review study in 1996 that effectively refuted the contamination claim that disputed the validity of the state's DNA evidence, and the fading of Simpson's celebrity status since the trial.
Simpson's celebrity status faded among African Americans after he relocated to Florida and disappeared from the public eye. His arrest and conviction in 2008 for armed robbery brought him back into the public spotlight, especially after he received a disproportionately higher prison sentence than his co-conspirators, which generated controversy even from his detractors, but the response from African Americans was relatively muted, and pundits opined this demonstrated how much the conscience of Black America has evolved since the time the verdict was announced.
The trial and verdict had an historic impact on American culture, credited with transforming public opinion about domestic abuse from being considered a private familial matter to a serious crime as well as raising awareness about the stigma that interracial couples still face from both white and African Americans. The enduring blowback also likely contributed to the passing of California Proposition 209 in 1996 that ended affirmative action in the state, due to the decline in empathy towards issues of racial discrimination and civil rights among White Americans.
Criticism of the jury Jurors Armanda Cooley, Carrie Bess and Marsha Rubin-Jackson published Madam Foreman: A Rush to Judgement? in January1996. They describe why they felt there was reasonable doubt despite personally believing Simpson might be guilty. Because it was published only a few months after the verdict and before the other attorneys and detectives published their books, it is considered an accurate picture of what the jury believed when they acquitted Simpson. Critics panned the book, and it became a source of embarrassment for the authors as critics claim it proves many of their claims about the jury.
Misunderstanding of DNA evidence
Jeffrey Toobin, M. L. Rantala, and Vincent Bugliosi all claim the jurors misunderstood the DNA evidence in the case. Rantala based this on the claims they made in Madam Foreman. Bess wrote she thought the blood at the crime scene belonged to Simpson's children while Cooley wrote she thought the blood actually belonged to criminalist Andrea Mazzola. In Outrage, Bugliosi opined they misunderstood the defense's argument because "contamination cannot change someone's DNA into someone else's" which is what the jurors apparently believed. Toobin wrote they misunderstood the facts of the case regarding the DNA evidence. Jackson wrote she thought Simpson's blood at the crime scene was there before the murders happened. Bess also admitted to not knowing that Simpson's blood was on the glove found at his home that Fuhrman allegedly planted. Cooley admitted to discarding blood evidence without any justification at all. Juror Beatrice Wilson admitted that "I didn't understand the DNA stuff at all. To me, it was a waste of time. It was way out there and carried absolutely no weight with me."
The jurors stopped claiming there was reasonable doubt about the DNA evidence after learning that both of the forensic DNA experts for the defense, Henry Lee and Edward Blake, had rejected the contamination claim that Scheck and Neufeld argued. Blake also admitted that was the reason why he was dropped from the witness list. Cochran mentioned Blake in opening statements but never produced him as a witness, and in closing arguments, Clark had mentioned Blake's absence as proof the results were reliable.
Dismissal of domestic violence being racially motivated Clark wrote that she believed the jury dismissed Simpson's abuse of Nicole for racial reasons. She wrote that "race trumped gender" and that they identified with the abuser rather than the victim due to race. Shapiro, Dershowitz, and Uelman also agreed with Clark. Dershowitz stated: "[the jurors] were black first, women second". Uelman stated their research suggested that black women typically are opposed to interracial marriage and would be hostile to Brown. Detective Mark Fuhrman was also accused of opposing interracial couples, but he was labeled a racist for this and many other reasons, while the African-American jurors who felt the same way were not.
The jurors called the domestic violence argument a "waste of time," and juror Brenda Moran said "this is a murder trial, not a domestic violence trial". They claim they discarded it because there were no new incidents of abuse by Simpson against Brown since January 1989 but an audio recording of a 911 call made by Brown of an incident with Simpson eight months before her death was presented at trial and again during summation. The jurors also claimed that they did not believe Brown thought her life was seriously in danger, but one of the documents they saw at trial was a will stating her wishes in the event of her death. In 2016, Carrie Bess's statement regarding Nicole continuing her marriage to Simpson despite the abuse was consistent with victim blaming: "I lose respect for any woman who takes an ass-whoopin' when she don't have to. Don't stay under the water if it's over your head, you'll drown". Writing for Bustle, Caitlin Gallagher criticized Bess and labelled her comment as "unsettling" and "wholly intolerable".
Bill Hodgman concluded that the black jurors were not able to connect the domestic abuse with the murder, while Clark claimed that they understood it fully but simply did not care about Nicole Brown. In O.J.: Made in America, African-American journalist Sylvester Monroe addressed the racial issues involved in the trial and claimed that his mother had said that had Simpson been accused of beating and murdering his first wife, Marguerite L. Whitley, who was African-American, "this would not have been the trial of the century, and his black ass would be in jail".
Shapiro wrote that the jury consultants stated that "black women often will be defensive and even protective of black men who are accused of such behavior by white women." Dismissed juror Jeanette Harris was cited as an example of this. She concealed her own domestic abuse by her former husband so she could be on the jury, but then denied it so she could stay on the jury and then minimized it after being dismissed in order to protect Simpson, even after his domestic abuse against Brown had been proven.
Darnel Hunt opines that the worst part of the prosecution's case was the indifference by contemporary African Americans to the domestic violence. The revelation of the abuse against Brown had turned public opinion against Simpson, but his support among African Americans remained relatively unchanged. The tension over interracial marriage in the United States stems from it once being criminalized. These laws were created by the white majority and were indisputably motivated by racism. All of the jurors were raised at a time when those laws were still in place in some parts of the country before finally being ruled unconstitutional in Loving v. Virginia in 1967. The son of the first interracial couple married in Virginia after that ruling was Ezra Edelman, the director of O.J.: Made in America.
The jurors stopped claiming the abuse was irrelevant after Lenore E. Walker revealed that she was dropped from the witness list by the defense because her research concluded that over 80% of murdered spouses who are victims of abuse are killed by their abusers. Rubin-Jackson later apologized to Denise Brown, who became an advocate for survivors of domestic violence, for calling it a waste of time.
The strong public reaction to Brown's letters and statements that were later ruled inadmissible as hearsay spurred passage of the Violence Against Women Act in 1994, which Clark and Douglas referred to as the "O.J. rule". The act was a direct response to the Simpson case and included provisions that required mandatory arrests in domestic violence situations, allowed prosecution of abusers even if the victim doesn't testify, and provided hearsay exceptions in domestic violence situations so statements made by the victim are admissible even if they are unavailable for cross-examination. After the trial, researchers reported increased reporting, arrests, and harsher sentences for those convicted of domestic violence.
Bias against the prosecution Bugliosi wrote that "there can be little question - though no one could expect any of the Simpson jurors to admit it - that most members of the jury were biased against the prosecution and in favor of Simpson", and that "Other than when a killer is apprehended in the act, I have never seen a more obvious case of guilt. All of the evidence - not some or most of it - points irresistibly to Simpson's guilt and his guilt alone" and claims the jury was biased against the prosecution and the police and made absurd arguments for discarding evidence and specifically cites the bloody footprint in Simpson's Bronco as proof of this. Police found a trail of bloody footprints in Brown's blood made by the killer leading from the crime scene to the alleyway where cars are usually parked and a faint one inside Simpson's Bronco. Bugliosi said they could have convicted Simpson based solely on that but they discarded it and claimed absurdly that Fuhrman could have planted it there.
Alan Dershowitz stated the jury "wanted to let Simpson go" and cited their dismissal of Allan Park's testimony for "trivial" reasons as evidence of this. Park testified that Simpson's Bronco was not there when he arrived that night at Rockingham and no one answered the intercom for several minutes or appeared to be home. Park then presumably saw Simpson arrive that night at his house, but Bess said she dismissed Park's testimony because he also admitted that didn't know how many cars were parked in Simpson's driveway at that time, which had nothing to do with his testimony. Bess also said she discarded the evidence of Simpson's blood at the crime scene because she believed Vannatter could have planted it there when he returned to Simpson's home that evening even though the crime scene wasn't even there. Shelia Woods discarded all of the DNA evidence at the crime because she incorrectly thought all of it was found on the back gate, and she found that suspicious. Cooley admitted to discarding the blood evidence without any justification at all.