What the OJ Simpson trial revealed about modern America

This first half of the 1990s was a period of heightened racial tension in the US. Was that a factor in this story?

It’s vital to understand the city that formed the backdrop to these events: Los Angeles. In the mid-1990s, its African-American and white communities lived largely separately. This was partly a result of race, but also class and wealth: African-American people tended to have lower incomes, and tended to be unable to buy in white areas. The city really experienced segregation, even though it wasn’t legally codified.

The LA police department was renowned for its racism and brutality, too. In 1991, for instance, its officers had been caught on camera viciously beating an African-American man named Rodney King, but were acquitted. That verdict had sparked severe outbreaks of violence around the city, and serve as a vivid illustration of the extent to which LA was a tinderbox during the 1990s. In some ways, it reflected wider trends in the US, but in a particularly heightened way.

Do you think Nicole Brown’s story gets overlooked?

Yes, I do. We have a tendency to focus on the celebrity angle, rather than the fact Brown had suffered domestic abuse across a long period, and had confided to friends several times that she feared her husband was going to kill her. In many respects, the case exemplifies the long history of wealth and fame protecting men from the consequences of their actions, particularly when they commit violence against women.

How new a phenomenon was the rolling-news coverage of the pursuit?

It was a new type of coverage, particularly at this kind of scale [it’s estimated that more than 95 million people tuned in]. The story was perfect for live rolling-news coverage, because the chase went on so long [approximately two hours] and happened so slowly. That meant that word of mouth about the coverage spread, and it was even rumoured that President Clinton was watching. In a way, the chase is a precursor of the kind of memeable moments that we now see so often on social media: you can imagine TikTok or Facebook blowing up with people watching this kind of thing. So, in a sense, it prefigures today’s media-saturated cultural landscape.

And it’s worth saying that the coverage itself is extraordinary, showing people lining the street and cheering from bridges. Simpson’s celebrity meant that people were invested in his story and keen to find out what would happen next – and, of course, some people thought that Simpson had been accused of a crime he hadn’t committed.

Did levels of support for Simpson vary between white and black communities?

Polling from the time suggests that the majority of white observers believed Simpson to be guilty, while the majority of African-American observers believed him not to be guilty. But I think part of the reason for the latter of those two trends is that black communities had an instinctive understanding that the police department in Los Angeles – and, indeed, other police departments in the US – was brutally racist.

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There was a sense, in some communities, that Simpson was a victim in the same way many other African-American people had been. I think that belief, and that distrust of the police, is where the division actually lay, although it was presented at the time as being simply a racial division. I also think there was a lot more subtlety and variation within African-American responses to the case than has sometimes been suggested.

How important a figure was Cochran?

Cochran had made his name in cases taking the LAPD to task, including one in which a member of [black power group] the Black Panther Party had been framed for a murder he didn’t commit – and, indeed, couldn’t have done, because he wasn’t even in Los Angeles at the time.

Cochran became a celebrity lawyer around this time, in part because of the Simpson case, but to reduce him to merely a ‘celebrity’ undercuts the fact that he was very skilful defence attorney. He knew the case inside out, and knew how to win people over and persuade juries. In some respects, he became something of a lightning rod for media coverage during the course ofthe Simpson trial.

A key point of contention in the trial was the extent to which the evidence could be trusted. Why was that so important?

One of the case’s most important strands focused on a pair of bloodstained leather gloves that Simpson was alleged to have been wearing at the time of the murders.

The trial hinged on the moment that a prosecuting attorney was goaded by the defence to get Simpson to try on one of these gloves. By that point in proceedings, they had been frozen and defrosted twice to preserve them as evidence – and, of course, the leather had shrunk during that process. In any case, Simpson couldn’t get the glove to fit, which led to Cochran’s famous quip to the jury: “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” And, despite the wealth of other evidence that was presented throughout the case, it was those gloves that stuck in jurors’ minds.

But there’s another dimension to this, too. One of the key prosecution witnesses was Mark Fuhrman, a detective with the LAPD. During the trial, it became clear that Fuhrman had very often used racial epithets, and had boasted of tampering with evidence in previous cases. Even though there was no evidence that he had done so in this case, the fact that he was on the stand having to admit to using racist language, and that he’d had to take the Fifth Amendment [protecting him from having to testify if that testimony might be self-incriminating] on a couple of occasions, meant that he was seen as being a fundamentally untrustworthy witness.

What was the response to the verdict?

There was joy within the African-American population, because the verdict seemed to prove that a black man could achieve the kind of justice that it was felt had long been the sole preserve of white people. It seemed to some commentators that, because of his wealth and fame, Simpson had been able to subvert a legal system that had historically been geared towards white communities. Some people also felt that the result proved that Los Angeles’ police department was fundamentally untrustworthy.

There was also a real fear among white communities that, had Simpson been found guilty, there would have been a recurrence of the kind of violence and scale of unrest that had occurred in the wake of the Rodney King verdict back in 1992.

Did the outcome undermine people’s confidence in the US legal system?

For some people, the fact that Simpson had been acquitted based on arguably problematic evidence such as whether the gloves fitted, when plenty of the other evidence was more scientific in nature, was cause for concern. But, of course, it’s possible to argue that the jurors reacted to evidence that they could respond to emotionally.

For other people, meanwhile, the verdict only served to highlight the fact that experiences of the nation’s legal system were strongly dictated by an individual’s power, wealth and status, and that only African-American people with Simpson’s level of wealth would be able to access justice.

How did two juries reach two such different verdicts?

Whereas in a criminal trial the prosecution has to prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt – making the burden of proof very high – in a civil trial, jurors are instructed to make their decision based on the balance of probabilities. What Simpson’s lawyers did very well in his criminal trial was to suggest that there were reasonable suspicions that the LAPD had tampered with evidence. That meant it had been very difficult for the jury to convict in a way that wasn’t the case with the civil trial.

What do you think the longer-term cultural afterlife of this case has been?

One of its few positive outcomes was that the issue of domestic violence became part of America’s national conversation to an extent it hadn’t been previously. In September 1994, for instance, US Congress passed the Violence Against Women Act, arguably as a consequence of the horror expressed about Brown’s murder – although it was constantly attacked by political opponents in the years afterwards. And the obvious sadness is that it took such a horrific incident for any of this to happen in the first place.

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I alluded to this earlier, but a key lesson from this whole episode is the importance of listening to, believing, and telling the stories of victims of domestic violence. Nicole Brown needed to be listened to in the years prior to her death. Had that happened, she may well be alive now, and it’s vitally important that we take that into account.

Joe Street is an associate professor in American history at Northumbria University and author of books including the forthcoming Black Revolutionaries: A History of the Black Panther Party (University of Georgia Press)

This article was published in the June 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine