Your feeling on the OJ Simpson murder case verdict?

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

72. He was guilty - but the police made tons of mistakes

like detective Vanatter bringing the blood sample from the scene of the murder at Bundy to OJ's mansion on the way to the criminologist and actually walking all over the grounds with the blood sample in his pocket. And Vanatter was overhead saying OJ was guilty in the presence of witnesses, showing prejudging and bias in the investigation. And Vanatter committed the worst mistake of all. Fuhrman found a fingerprint in blood at the murder scene and wrote it down in his notes. That finding could have been fatal to OJ's case. But Vanatter never read Fuhrman's notes and didn't collect it. This was not just about Fuhrman's racism. It was about mistake after mistake after mistake that raised reasonable doubt.

And Furhman's credibility was severely undermined when he told OJ's lawyer F. Lee Bailey that he'd never used the "N" word. After that, he was confronted with example after example of using it in a series of tape recordings. Fuhrman was later found guilty of perjury, a felony. And when Fuhrman suddenly decided to clam up and take the 5th amendment after testifying at length when asked if he'd ever falsified evidence in a police investigation, what did the prosecution expect the jury to think? Fuhrman's alleged falsification of evidence was the central issue in the case. Fuhrman lost the case right there. While I thought OJ was guilty, I would have had no choice but to find reasonable doubt, the prosecution and the cops fucked up so totally and irretrievably.

And then there was the utter outrage I felt over Fuhrman's police personnel file. OJ's lawyers brought a motion to obtain it to see if Fuhrman's file revealed an ongoing series of common acts of police abuse against minorities. We know that an orthodox rabbi filed a complaint alleging that Fuhrman had beaten him up while he was waiting in line at a movie theater, right in front of his wife. Judge Ito upheld the privilege of confidentiality of such files and the defense wasn't allowed to examine it. Once the prosecution received this ruling, the police called former police chief Darrel Gates to police headquarters. Gates while he was chief of police famously promoted use of the chokehold despite several deaths of black suspects taken into custody. He explained the deaths of black people through use of the choke hold as follows: "blacks might be more likely to die from chokeholds because their arteries do not open as fast as they do on 'normal people.' " Gates was given Fuhrman's entire personnel file to review (the one the defense wasn't allowed to see) despite then being,a retired civilian. At the height of the defense's efforts to impeach Fuhrman, Gates went on radio station KFI to gleefully pronounce that he found no evidence of any abusive or racist actions on Fuhrnan's part. This was a case of one known racist clearing another. I would have made a motion then and there that by allowing a civilian to review and publicly comment on the personnel file constituted a waiver of the privilege of confidentiality. The LAPD was basically saying “fuck you” to the people and the justice system, “we can do whatever we want.”