ESPN personality and First Take host Stephen A. Smith declared that O.J. Simpson would have been under the jail if he had been on the jury of Simpson’s 1995 murder trial.
“He would have been under the jail. He wouldn’t have got off, not if I was on that jury. There’s no question about it,” Smith said on Fox News’s Hannity Thursday. “I mean, he was guilty as hell. The forensic evidence, the circumstantial evidence, and the manner in which the murders took place, it was clearly a crime of passion.”
“When you look at some of the things that they had articulated about his past, his relationship with Nicole Brown Simpson, some of the things that he had done to her, the Gloria Allreds and others obviously have spoken very eloquently about this over the years … it was clear that it was such a preponderance of evidence against him that he deserved to be in jail for the rest of his life at the very least.”
Despite the preponderance of evidence against the former NFL star, Smith was neither surprised when the verdict came down and when jurors started confessing their reasons years later, he said.
“In the aftermath of the Rodney King situation in Los Angeles, the history of brutality on the part of some police officers when it came to the LAPD against residents of LA that happened to be African Americans, you knew it was one of those situations where it wasn’t about O.J.’s innocence.”
People of the time wanted to indict the LAPD, and that is the ultimate reason why O.J. got off, according to Smith.
“He got off for two reasons,” he said. “Number one, to indict the LAPD, and, number two, because Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden, two people we don’t talk about enough, did an absolutely horrendous job.”
Nearly 30 years later, the failure of the prosecutors remains in the minds of many, Smith said.
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“You don’t ask this man months later to try on a glove,” he said. “He doesn’t take his medication, his hands and fingers swell, it wasn’t going to fit, they kinda knew it, and, ultimately, it was depicted in a series, if I remember correctly, where Johnnie Cochran had coaxed Christopher Darden to go against the wishes of Marcia Clark and convince him to force him to force O.J. to try and try on the glove.”
“Once folks saw that it wasn’t going to fit, it was exactly the nugget that he needed to ultimately say, ‘If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit,’ and, ultimately, get O.J. Simpson off of double murder … he’s a double murderer in the eyes of most people in this country.”
