13 YEARS TO THE DAY

Last week, 13 was an unlucky number for O. J. Simpson. 13 years to the day after a jury in Los Angeles acquitted O.J. of murdering his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman, a jury in Las Vegas deliberated 13 hours after a 13-day trial before convicting him of 12 felonies stemming from the September 13, 2007 armed robbery and kidnapping of two sports memorabilia dealers.

What a difference 13 years can make. Simpson's murder trial was presided over by an inept "Judge Judy" wannabe playing it up for the television cameras. O.J. was represented by a dream team led by the late Johnny Cochran. The prosecution, by contrast a nightmarish team, was led by Marcia Clark, preening herself for television and asleep at the wheel. And most of all, the jury was predominently black.

The Simpson murder case set a new criminal justice standard - jury nullification. Simpson benefitted from a clever defense strategy of playing the race card. In the face of concrete evidence that Simpson murdered Nicole and Goldman, the predominantly black jury nullified the evidence and had already reached its decision before the presentation of closing arguments. When the jurors retired to deliberate, they just "schmoozed" around long enough to make it look like they had been weighing the evidence before returning with their "not guilty" verdict.

The murder trial was a gross miscarriage of justice. Simpson was morally guilty of a double murder, but legally innocent. Following his acquittal, he moved to Florida where he continued to enjoy the life-style of the rich and famous, golfing daily with his white buddies and screwing around with readily available white-chick groupies.

This time, the trial (in Las Vegas) was presided over by a competent no-nonsense judge. Simpson did not have a dream team to defend him. The prosecution was far better than that bunch of bozos in Los Angeles. And the defense could not play the race card because the jury was all white.

Simpson will be sentenced on December 5th. He faces a prison term of 15 years to life. Most likely, his attorneys will appeal the verdict on grounds that he was denied a fair trial because there were no blacks on the jury and because several of the jurors stated on their questionnaires that they believed he had murdered his ex-wife and Ron Goldman. In post-trial interviews, the jurors insisted that the double murder never entered into their deliberations and that their verdict was based primarily on the hotel surveillance tapes and on the audio tape of Simpson giving orders during the robbery.

Let's hope the appeals do not succeed and that O.J. will be sentenced to life in prison, in which case, at long last, justice will have been served.