mystere

I think the case I have seen covered most often by the true crime shows is Shari Smith's abduction and murder. No producer can resist the part where she was made to write out her last will and testament and then the killer started calling up her sister Dawn just to chat. It's a made-for-Hollywood story and they are ON IT...repeatedly.

To me, whether the jury verdict was reasonable and whether OJ actually did it are somewhat separate questions. From our vantage point twenty years later, having access to all the evidence and the benefit of hindsight, I don't think there's a way to have reasonable doubt that he was guilty. Whether the state proved their case or not, that's an area where reasonable minds can disagree. I actually share a lot of the horror at police corruption, brutality and overreach. I know that cops in LA and elsewhere have lied, manufactured evidence, and beaten suspects into false confessions. I absolutely think these injustices happen disproportionately to people of color, and it does make me angry. I think Mark Fuhrman is a racist POS. I think the tapes exemplify pervasive attitudes in law enforcement that persist to this day, and it's sickening. I think where officers exhibit serious misconduct, especially anything that infringes on guilt/innocence or civil rights...they should be fired and prosecuted. (For the record, I think this also pertains to the officers who refused to investigate Simpson's repeated domestic violence incidents. They don't look so good in this either.) My opinion, however, is that there is not enough evidence that the police tampered with evidence in the Simpson case, especially not in any way that would have substantially altered the question of OJ's guilt. They were sloppy and used improper procedure. (Spoiler alert: this happens in unfortunately most murder cases. Stuff gets missed in the first round. People make mistakes.) As I mentioned above, it's nigh on impossible for the cops to have manufactured or planted the shoe prints and the gloves. This is evidence they could not have made up. When cops invent evidence, it tends to be things like planting a gun or drugs on someone, or forcing a false confession. These are things they have easy access to and which are under their control. They did not have easy access to these rare gloves and rare expensive shoes. Again, for this to be a frame-up, someone else would have had to know that OJ had both of these incredibly rare items of attire, go out and find duplicates (not easy, given how rare they were), then either: 1. Hang around and hope someone murdered Nicole (and Ron, in this case) so that they could run over and plant the gloves and shoe prints at the scene 2. Murder Nicole and Ron themselves and then plant the evidence These are not, to me, scenarios that constitute reasonable doubt. They are UNreasonable. Ergo, Simpson is guilty. So then I don't care about what other mistakes the cops might have made in collecting the DNA evidence because I can discard it entirely and it does not change the verdict in my mind. It is irrelevant. I don't look at that as rewarding them for their mistakes. The trial is not about rewarding or punishing the investigating officers. It's about determining the guilt or innocence of the defendant. I think there was enough evidence to do that at the time, and I am sure there's enough evidence in hindsight.

No, I am not willing to convict, period. I am leaving the police entirely out of the equation for the purposes of this exercise. There is no doubt the gloves were found at the scene (I don't think they moved them at all, but even if they did, I don't think anyone disputes that the gloves were there to begin with.) The bloody shoe prints were there at the scene. The gloves and shoes are rare enough pieces of evidence that it is actually not possible for the police to have planted them. This isn't a matter of opinion. Combined, these two articles of clothing are astronomically rare, and both are linked to Simpson. Add in motive, and yes, he did it. The alternative would be for someone to establish before the murders that OJ owned both of these items and then hang around, hoping someone who was NOT OJ would murder two people so that this person, who had collected the rare items of clothing, could run over and plant them immediately at the scene. How on earth could this make sense? So no, I don't need the Bronco chase. I don't need DNA or fiber or witnesses or any of the massive amounts of evidence that all points at one person. The gloves and shoes by themselves are enough so there is simply no question in my mind that he did it.

Yes, I think it's enough to convict. It does not pass reasonable doubt for me. The odds of having both the gloves and the shoe prints at the scene of the crime are astronomical. It just does not pass the smell test to me to think that someone managed to get their hands on BOTH these really rare shoes and the really rare gloves and then used them to frame OJ. You would have to assume that the person who did all this homework is also the killer. So...the cops killed them? To me, this is getting into a land of conspiracy theory that does not make sense. I can't emphasize it enough: the numbers game on the gloves and shoes alone pins it down to one person. Three hundred pairs of anything spread across the three hundred MILLION people in the USA is 1 in 10000000000, and then you multiply that by ANOTHER 1 in 10000000000, and that's your odds. Or, put another way, to get another person who owns both these gloves and these shoes, you would need to search through all the population of earth multiple times. FWIW, I do not believe the cops tampered with the evidence in this case. I think they were sloppy, yes, but I don't believe they planted anything.

The thing is you don't need anything but the gloves and the shoe prints to arrive at the conclusion that OJ had to be guilty. The gloves (size large, which we know is the size that Nicole bought for OJ, I don't care what the courtroom dramatics showed) were very rare, about 300 pairs sold in all of the USA. The Bruno Magli shoes also only sold about 300 pair in all the USA. At the time there were about 300,000,000 people in the USA. The odds of one person owning both the shoes and the gloves...well, it's about 1 in a trillion. It's equivalent to a DNA match. Just those two pieces of evidence alone would have been enough to convict most people. I still am not sure how the cops were supposed to know to bring these incredibly rare gloves in OJ's size with them the night of the murder to ensure a frame-up. I also realize the jury didn't get confirmation that OJ owned the shoes, but we know now that he did. The fact that he owned both the shoes plus the gloves, and that both were linked to the murder scene the night of the killings, pretty much nails it right there. You can throw out all the other evidence if you want.

I don't for a second believe the police outright fabricated the DNA evidence, and the defense didn't believe it either. You can tell this by the fact that they argued for the right to run their own independent tests...and then didn't do any. They didn't do any because they knew the results would most probably come back to Simpson. It's one thing to poke holes in the prosecution's testing; it's another when your own analysis confirms it. They (rightfully, I think) didn't want to take the risk.

No, of course it's not ideal, and there have been steps to try to improve the testing so this doesn't happen. However, as has been pointed out many times in the threads on this board, all the sloppy lab work here would've made it LESS likely to have a match to Simpson, Nicole, or Ron's blood. DNA degrades. It doesn't get clearer or easier to have a match to the reference sample with more time, degradation or dilution. Trace amounts of EGTA don't have a bearing on the accuracy of the DNA match at all, and they do not actually point to planted evidence. (The police would've had to have had access to a lot more of Simpson's blood to dilute out the preserved sample so that the EGTA sample would have been diluted with it.) It remains amazing to me that most convictions for murder occur on about 1/1000th of the evidence collected in the Simpson trial. I understand (sort of) how the constellation of factors came together to yield the verdict. But this would've been a slam dunk in most cases without any DNA evidence at all.

The thing about the EDTA evidence is that it does not fit with the scenario that the blood was planted. Tiny trace amounts were found in the blood. If blood is preserved with EDTA, you would expect to find A LOT of it upon testing. Experts examining the case believe that the most probable answer is that the machine that was testing for the presence of EDTA was itself contaminated with EDTA from prior testing. This would explain why EDTA was detected in some of the crime scene blood in the Simpson case, and also why it was detected at such tiny levels. This has been rehashed recently given the discussion from the Steve Avery case: http://www.techinsider.io/making-murderer-edta-test-quality-2016-1