O. J. Simpson Case

Sensational Crimes

The communications media play a major role in the reporting of crimes; television news, print media, and Internet sources all have made it possible for the general public to gain knowledge about certain crimes and to localize the intensity of the offense committed.

Despite the public's dependence on the media for “truth,” media sources may have their own agendas when selecting what to report. This same observation is made with respect to the intensity of media coverage. Since one of the primary goals of the media is to sell the story, events are often sensationalized. Put differently, the media may not report the whole story. One such sensational case that has gained worldwide notoriety and engendered much public discourse is the O. J. Simpson case.

One of the main issues of sensationalized crimes is how they influence people's perception in terms of what the typical and most common type of crime in America looks like. Even more complicated, in the O. J. Simpson case, is the offender-victim racial composition: a Black male offender and a White female victim. In that sense, the media produces a more distorted image of crime in America. Ostensibly, the media feeds into the public's appetite for issues specific to race and criminality, especially if the victim is White and the offender is Black.

Facts of the Case

On June 12,1994, O. J. Simpson's ex-wife, Nicole Brown, and her friend Ronald Goldman were found stabbed to death outside Brown's condominium, located in the Brentwood district of Los Angeles. Simpson and Brown's two children, Sydney and Justin, who were 8 and 5 years old, respectively, at the time of the crime, were asleep in an upstairs bedroom. Evidence collected at the crime scene led police to suspect O. J. Simpson as the murderer.

On the day of his arraignment, June 21, Simpson pleaded not guilty, and a grand jury was convened to determine whether or not to indict Simpson. [Page 600]Because of the extraordinarily high level of media coverage of the case, it was believed that no potential jurors would not have been exposed to any of the intense press coverage and could not be impartial, and the grand jury was dismissed. After the dismissal of the grand jury, the case moved through the criminal justice process and was scheduled for trial.

Simpson's defense team, led by the late Johnnie Cochran and F. Lee Bailey, demonstrated that the police had mishandled the case and tainted the evidence. Among jurors there arose a reasonable doubt that O. J. Simpson was the murderer, which eventually led to Simpson's acquittal. Even in the presence of evidence proving guilt, a jury has the right to exercise what is often referred to as “jury nullification.” This concept, which has been adopted from English common law, proposes that regardless of evidence against a defendant, a jury may still choose to acquit. Jurors may acquit on the basis of a belief that the defendant has suffered enough and should not be punished further by the law, or that the law is discriminatory and unjust toward people of color. In the O. J. Simpson case, the jury did not believe that the state had sufficient evidence beyond a reasonable doubt to convict Simpson. In the state of California, a double homicide is a capital crime. Therefore, had O. J. Simpson been found guilty, he would have been charged with a double murder, with no bail and possibly a death penalty verdict.

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