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O.J. Simpson Can Go Free, Parole Board Rules O.J. Simpson Wins Parole, Claiming He Has Led a ‘Conflict-Free Life’
(about 5 hours later)
O. J. Simpson, the former football hero and actor whose good-guy image vanished when he was accused of murdering his ex-wife and her friend, will go free after serving nine years in a Nevada prison on charges stemming from an armed robbery, a state parole board ruled on Thursday. He has tumbled in the public eye from revered football hero and actor, to reviled wife abuser and murder defendant, to indebted and hapless convicted robber, but O. J. Simpson went before a Nevada parole board on Thursday flashing his usual self-assurance, telling the board that he was “a good guy” and asserting, implausibly, “I basically have spent a conflict-free life.”
Mr. Simpson, who turned 70 this month, went before the board as a man convicted of taking a group of accomplices, two of them armed with guns, to a cheap Las Vegas hotel room in 2007 to take hundreds of items from a sports memorabilia dealer. But it is the 1994 murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, for which he was acquitted after the most-watched trial in history, that have cast the longer, darker shadow over his life and reputation. Whether or not the four board members believed him, they voted unanimously to grant him parole when he first becomes eligible on Oct. 1, after nine years in state prison on charges stemming from a 2007 armed robbery in a Las Vegas hotel room. Appearing on a video link from Lovelock Correctional Center, Mr. Simpson spoke to the board in Carson City as, officially, just another inmate who looked like a good bet for release, a 70-year-old who has been a model prisoner and has no other criminal record.
After his conviction in 2008, a judge sentenced Mr. Simpson nine to 33 years in state prison, meaning that he becomes eligible for parole for the first time on Oct. 1. Based on his age and the fact that he has been a model prisoner, the Nevada Board of Parole Commissioners granted his release the first time it was considered, rather than denying parole and making him wait years for another chance. But of course, it is the 1994 knife murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman, for which he was acquitted after one of the most-watched trials in history, that have cast the longer, darker shadow over his life and reputation. No celebrity so big had been tried for a crime so severe, and a generation later, he stands as someone who unwittingly helped shape the modern news media and popular ideas about the law, police, race relations and Los Angeles, the city he once called home.
• Mr. Simpson, wearing a light blue denim shirt and looking considerably thinner than at a hearing in 2013, walked into the hearing just after 1 p.m. Eastern. As the chairwoman of the parole board, Connie Bisbee, read the charges he was convicted of, he heaved a sigh and grimaced. “Obviously, there was a 10,000-pound elephant in that room,” Mr. Simpson’s lawyer, Malcolm Lavergne, said after the parole hearing. “Mr. Simpson is obviously a very polarizing figure.”
When Ms. Bisbee slipped and said Mr. Simpson was 90 years old, not 70, he said, “I feel like it, though.” Visibly grayer and more halting in his movements than when he was convicted, Mr. Simpson, wearing a light blue denim shirt, dark jeans and white sneakers, seemed to have lost none of his confidence in himself or his ability to persuade. Giving an account of the hotel robbery that, as one parole commissioner noted, “differs a little from the official record,” he continued to insist that he did not know that some of his accomplices were armed with guns; that the items he took actually belonged to him; and that other people were to blame, but that “they got a get-out-of-jail-free card” for testifying against him.
• Under questioning by parole commissioners, Mr. Simpson stuck to a version of the robbery that, as the board member Tony Corda said, “differs a little from the official record.” Watching the parole hearing, streamed live on countless networks and websites, it is hard now to remember that in the mid-1990s, there was just one cable news channel and social media did not exist. The internet, reality television and the media ecosystem of wall-to-wall coverage of anything sensational were in their infancy.
He insisted that the items he took from the memorabilia dealer, Bruce Fromong, whom he knew well, were his property. And he said he was not aware at the time that two of the men he took to the hotel room, whom he referred to as “security guys,” brandished guns. Yet an entire nation stopped what it was doing in 1994 as Mr. Simpson led the police on a surreal pursuit down Southern California freeways in a white Ford Bronco. It was the most-watched television event of that year, and again the next year, when a jury pronounced him “not guilty.”
He said he had never brandished a weapon at anyone, and never would, adding, “I basically have spent a conflict-free life.” The case made household names of defense lawyers like Johnnie Cochran and Robert Kardashian — whose family would go on to greater notoriety after his death — and legal analysts like Jeffrey Toobin, the author and writer for The New Yorker; Greta Van Susteren, who became a longtime Fox News host; and Harvey Levin, who later created TMZ. For millions of Americans, the trial served as an introduction to DNA evidence, a concept so new that expert witnesses had to explain it.
• Mr. Simpson’s daughter Arnelle Simpson testified to the board on behalf of his family. “We just want him to come home,” she said. “I think a lot of the things we take for granted now in media started with this so-called Trial of the Century,” said Jere Hester, news director of the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism. “It planted the seed for reality TV, and not just the Kardashians, it planted the seed for TMZ.”
“My experience with him is that he’s like my best friend and my rock,” said Ms. Simpson, 48, who is the oldest of Mr. Simpson’s four children. “I know that he is remorseful, he is truly remorseful.” Mr. Simpson’s arrest and trial exposed a deep racial divide in views of the police and criminal justice. Many white people found his acquittal unthinkable, while many blacks rejoiced and hailed him as a hero. Today, in the era of Black Lives Matter and multiple videos of police officers using force against black people, that chasm is common knowledge, but in 1995, it was a revelation to many Americans.
Ms. Simpson and other members of his family live in California. Mr. Simpson lived most of his life in California, but in the years leading up to his conviction, he lived in Florida. Wayne Bennett, a black lawyer in Philadelphia who blogs about race on a site called “The Field Negro,” was a law student then, and said the predominant view among his peers was: “This is payback. I don’t even have a problem with them finding him not guilty. Even though looking at the facts, we knew he was guilty.”
When Mr. Simpson leaves prison, will he be able to have a beer? He may not — parolees usually face numerous restrictions that do not apply to most people. Typically, they are required to appear for regular check-ins, submit to drug and alcohol tests, and cooperate with their parole officer, who can send violators back behind bars. He said the trial did at least wake some white people up to the vastly different perceptions black people have about the justice system, but he expressed dismay that the issue seems no better today.
In Nevada, the standard conditions of parole require the parolee to get permission before moving, refrain from drinking alcohol or carrying a weapon of any kind, and seek and maintain a job. Parolees may not associate with anyone who has a criminal record. In a predominantly black neighborhood in South Los Angeles on Thursday, people continued to root for Mr. Simpson. Vickie Williford, 56, whooped and jumped for joy on hearing the decision.
A parole board official, David Smith, spoke at a news conference after the decision of release was announced. He cited Mr. Simpson’s positive record in prison, a minimal record of prior convictions, his participation in programs addressing the behavior that led to incarceration, and family support as factors in his release. “I really think he’s sincere about what he says,” she said. “I really think the man was going there to get his own stuff. He made stupid moves.”
Mr. Simpson’s felony convictions came 13 years to the day after a Los Angeles jury found him not guilty of murdering Ms. Simpson and Mr. Goldman after one of the longest and most-watched criminal cases in history. But in the Fairfax neighborhood of Los Angeles, Tammy Reinemann, a white bartender, saw something else in Thursday’s hearing. “There’s no contrition, nothing, he’s just trying to pass if off on other people,” she said.
In 1997, in a civil trial, another jury found that Mr. Simpson was responsible for their deaths, and awarded their families $33.5 million in damages; he has paid a tiny fraction of that amount. Before he was charged with murder, and it became public knowledge that Mr. Simpson had repeatedly beaten Ms. Simpson, he was an admired, charming fixture at clubs and golf courses in Los Angeles, and at restaurants in Brentwood, his affluent, mostly white neighborhood.
What makes Mr. Simpson’s case unique, of course, is that people watching it have a different case in mind, the 1994 double murder. But his arrest came at a time of huge mistrust in minority neighborhoods of the Los Angeles Police Department, which had a reputation, heightened by the videotaped beating of Rodney King in 1991, for racism and excessive force. Before a mostly black jury, Mr. Simpson’s defense team played to that mistrust, highlighting racist comments made by Mark Fuhrman, one of the detectives investigating the murders, to argue that Mr. Simpson had been framed.
It did not help matters that the 2007 robbery occurred on the same day as the release of “If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer,” a book based on interviews Mr. Simpson gave, describing — in theory, hypothetically — how he could have carried out the murders. The acquittal of four officers charged in the King beating led to riots in 1992 that left about 60 people dead, and three years later, officials feared that a conviction of Mr. Simpson would lead to another burst of violence.
One of his lawyers, Yale Galanter, has said that the charges filed against Mr. Simpson were excessive, and has suggested that the prosecutors and jurors were influenced by the earlier case. Though jurors were prohibited from considering any outside factors, “my biggest concern was whether or not the jury would be able to separate their very strong feelings about Mr. Simpson and judge him fairly and honestly,” Mr. Galanter said after the 2008 conviction. But Los Angeles has changed, in no small part because of the aftermath of the King case. Police abuses still occur and inflame tensions in minority communities, but by most accounts they are rarer, and in many of those cases, the officers are themselves minorities, reflecting the effort to change the complexion of what was historically an overwhelmingly white and male department.
The Clark County district attorney at the time, David J. Roger, and members of the jury have insisted that their actions were no more than a reflection of the crimes Mr. Simpson committed in that Las Vegas hotel. In 1997, in a civil trial, a jury found that Mr. Simpson was responsible for the deaths of Mr. Goldman and Ms. Simpson, and awarded their families $33.5 million in damages; he has paid a tiny fraction of that amount. Shunned by former friends and business associates, he moved to Florida, where — unlike in California — a “homestead exemption” law allows a person to shield significant assets, including a home, from creditors.
After years of slowly fading into obscurity, Mr. Simpson was shoved back into the spotlight last year by two high-profile television projects. ESPN’s “O. J.: Made in America,” a multipart, nearly eight-hour documentary that won an Academy Award, spanned his life story: poor child in San Francisco, sports star in college and the N.F.L., charming pitchman and actor, abusive husband, California defendant and, finally, Nevada convict. In 2007, while in Las Vegas to attend a wedding, he went with several people to a hotel room. He said he had been told that Bruce Fromong, a sports memorabilia dealer he knew, was there selling things that Mr. Simpson said had been stolen from him.
FX’s “The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story,” a mini-series dramatizing the murder investigation and trial, won several Emmy Awards. They took hundreds of items, Mr. Simpson was arrested, and suddenly he was back in the spotlight. It did not help his cause that the robbery occurred on the same day as the release of “If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer,” a book based on interviews Mr. Simpson gave, describing — in theory, strictly hypothetically — how he could have carried out the 1994 murders.
In 2008, 13 years to the day after his acquittal in the murder case, Mr. Simpson was convicted of multiple felony charges. He was later sentenced to 9 to 33 years in prison. One of his lawyers at the time, Yale Galanter, said that the charges were excessive, and suggested that the prosecutors and jurors were influenced by the earlier case, which they denied.
“A lot of people lost confidence in the criminal justice system when he was acquitted of the murders, and I think a lot of people saw the Nevada case as payback justice, kind of a rough justice,” said Laurie L. Levenson, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. “It has contributed to a cynicism about the law.”
After years of fading from view while he served his time, two high-profile television projects moved Mr. Simpson to center stage again last year. ESPN’s “O. J.: Made in America,” a multipart documentary that won an Academy Award, spanned his life story: poor child in San Francisco, sports star in college and the N.F.L., charming pitchman and actor, abusive husband, California defendant and, finally, Nevada convict. FX’s “The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story,” a mini-series dramatizing the murder investigation and trial, won several Emmy Awards.
But the Nevada Board of Parole Commissioners, while acknowledging the passions aroused by the murder case, insisted that it could not take them into account, and granted his release as soon as he becomes eligible. It could have denied him parole and made him wait years for another chance.
“We just want him to come home,” Arnelle Simpson, 48, the oldest of Mr. Simpson’s four children, told the board. “I know that he is remorseful, he truly is remorseful.”
Mr. Simpson has said he wants to return to Florida, and officials there and in Nevada said they are trying to negotiate an agreement for that move. If he violates the conditions of his parole — which are likely to bar him from having weapons or associating with criminals — he could return to prison to serve out his full sentence.
“I wouldn’t bet on him just sneaking into obscurity,” Ms. Levenson said. “He loves attention. It’s as if that Bronco chase never ended.”