On the morning of October 3, 1995, a Los Angeles jury found O.J. Simpson not guilty of murdering his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman. The two had been stabbed to death outside her condominium on South Bundy Drive on June 12, 1994. Saturday marks 31 years since the verdict.
The trial ran from January 24 to October 3, 1995, before Judge Lance Ito, and it was televised for 134 days. According to the Wikipedia account of the case, the jury had reached its decision the afternoon before, after about four hours of deliberation, and held the announcement overnight.
A case built on blood, and a defense built on how it was collected
Prosecutors Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden had what looked like a strong scientific case. Simpson's defense team included Robert Shapiro, Johnnie Cochran, F. Lee Bailey, Alan Dershowitz, and the DNA lawyers Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld.
The defense did not argue that DNA science was wrong. It argued that the evidence had been handled badly. Dennis Fung and Andrea Mazzola, who gathered evidence for the police, admitted collection mistakes, including not always changing gloves and leaving evidence in an unrefrigerated van for up to seven hours. Scheck and Neufeld called the collection "sloppy."
Scheck later summed up the strategy in an interview cited by the Innocence Project, where he is co-director. "We did not challenge the underlying reliability of DNA testing methods," he said, adding that "we attacked the way that evidence was gathered and processed." His shorthand for the problem was "We had a 21st century technology and 19th century evidence collection methods."
The detective, the gloves and the jury
Two moments shaped how the jury saw the evidence. Detective Mark Fuhrman testified that he had not used a racial slur in the previous ten years, and the defense later played recordings of him using it. On September 6, 1995, Fuhrman invoked his Fifth Amendment right when asked whether he had planted or manufactured evidence.
The second came on June 15, 1995, when Darden asked Simpson to try on the gloves recovered in the case. Cochran said, "I don't think he could act the size of his hands." He later gave the defense its most famous line, "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit."
The final jury was ten women and two men. Ten seated jurors were dismissed over the course of the long trial. Once a key investigator's credibility was damaged, the defense could ask jurors to doubt everything that passed through his hands. That is a lesson trial lawyers on both sides still repeat.
What changed after the verdict
The trial pushed crime labs toward tighter standards. Kevin Lothridge of Florida International University's Global Forensic and Justice Center told FOX 13 in 2024 that "The O.J. trial brought to light there was a profession called forensic science." The station reported that the center was founded in 1995 in response to how DNA was handled in the Simpson case, with seed money from the American Society of Crime Lab Directors.
The story did not end with the acquittal. In 1997, a civil jury found Simpson liable for the deaths and ordered him to pay $33.5 million to the victims' families, the Associated Press reported. He was later convicted of armed robbery in Las Vegas, served nine years and was paroled in October 2017. Simpson died of cancer in Las Vegas on April 10, 2024, at 76.
For defense lawyers, the case is still the clearest example of a simple rule. Strong science is only as strong as the people who collect it, and the burden stays on the state to prove the chain from crime scene to courtroom. For another celebrity case that played out in front of cameras, read our look back at Michael Jackson's 2005 trial.
It is the kind of case defense attorney Daniel Rosenberg and his legal panel, Michael Dye and Lloyd Golburgh, take apart on the Two Taps and Friends show.
Two Taps News stories summarize reporting and the analysis discussed on Two Taps and Friends. They are not legal advice. Read our standards.
