IF IT DOESN’T FIT, YOU MUST ACQUIT

The late Johnnie Cochran is accused of tampering with crucial evidence in the O. J. Simpson trial

Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden were two of the most inept prosecutors to ever come out of law school. These two stumblebums and the racial makeup of the jury, not the dream team of defense attorneys led by Johnnie Cochran, were responsible for the acquittal of O. J. Simpson in 1995 for the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman.

A leather glove found by LAPD investigators at the crime scene had been traced to Simpson. Between its discovery and the trial, the glove which had been soaked in blood from Simpson, Brown and Goldman, was frozen and unfrozen several times. Anyone with half a brain would have surmised that those factors were likely to have affected the size of the leather glove. But when Cochran goaded Darden into asking Simpson to put on the glove, the stupid shit bit the bait. The rest is history: ‘If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit!’ And the predominantly black jury did exactly that.

Now, 17 years later, Darden is trying to clean up his stupidity by accusing Cochran of tampering with the glove by tearing its lining so that Simpson's fingers would get stuck.

During a September 6 panel discussion about the trial at New York's Pace University Law School, Darden said: “What I think happened is that the defense manipulated that glove so that it did not appear to look as if it fit. I think Johnnie tore the lining. There were some additional tears in the lining so that O.J.'s fingers couldn't go all the way up into the glove.”

Alan Dershowitz, who was a member of the dream team, says Darden is a liar. Dershowitz claims that the defense never had possession of the glove until after Simpson tried to put it on during the trial.

While I wouldn’t put it past any defense lawyer to tamper with evidence given the chance, I do not believe Cochran messed with the O. J. Simpson glove. What Dershowitz said makes sense.

If Darden had only stuck to the prosecution’s original plan not to let Simpson try on the glove, this critical turn of events in the trial would never have occurred. Darden’s stupidity gave the nearly all black jury the excuse to quickly acquit the murderer of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.