Justice, too, has a Sense of Humor - The Rolling OJ Simpson Legal Thread

LAPD's institutional racism and general ineptitude undermining an open-and-shut case should come as a surprise to no one (or at least no Americans)

― Οὖτις, 6. juli 2016 22:50 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, this is the main thing I took from it. It's presented as if this was kinda just the first time a black defendant had the money to really do a background check on the LAPD officers who was on the case, and - surprise! - there was a Mark Fuhrman. But there would always have been a Mark Fuhrman, because this is the LAPD. The institution was so racist, so rotten, that it could never have won the case cleanly.

the florida years are so weird.

the las vegas thing, too, seemed like a subconscious attempt to face justice, like raskolnikov returning over and over to the scene of the crime or whatever. although if he was a true sociopath i guess he wouldn't feel that sort of guilt.

like all lawyers described as "high-powered," cochran was an egotist - he wanted the glory (and probably the intellectual challenge) of winning a high-profile case, and incidentally didn't mind the money, either. i don't know why we have to assume his "race card" defense was sincere (or why it would matter). btw by the mid-1990s cochran had long since displaced much of his civil-rights work for celebrity clients.

Finally finished the doc just now. an amazing piece of work and i tink ryan above puts his finger on it with larger socio-cultural forces become caught in the black hole of his orbit and then get explosively expressed through the whole sordid mess., and what Veg said about it feeling like a college course. the director's ability to field all these themes, and then explore them in depth via digressions throughout the documentary, was impressive, as well as his ability to tie all these threads together.

so many thoroughly sleazy and unlikable characters throughout the story. OJ's the key demon, but really: Furhman and his self-pity; Peter Hyams, who knew OJ did it but couldn't comprehend and hated african-americans' joy at the verdict; the defence team, who were only doing their job but seemed proud of how adeptly they did it; nearly everyone involved in the Florida and Vegas era...

this is marvelous

the other amazing moment in part 3 is watching oj watch johnny cochrane roast darden in the sidebar abt the nword -- i think bailey or someone tries to whisper something to oj and he just is so intently focused on johnny & u can practically see his expression of like omg theres no way im getting found guilty

― johnny crunch

One of the year's best moments.

In a sign of unity Trump should pardon OJ and hire him for his cabinet. Inner city physical fitness outreach?

xp of this year or 1995

never 4get

https://cdn0.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/JR-HGfMcwLbhqxnx17cwJpbt8qY=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/3638570/bushcampaignevent.0.jpg

BBC showing the full thing uncensored
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p04st1yv/oj-made-in-america-part-1

tore through the first 3 hours last night, god damn this is amazing. sheer disbelief that there are people who are prepared to go on tv in 2017 and be equivocal about
the whole Rodney King thing.

i see it's up for an Oscar for Best Doc too.

It's amazing.

By weird coincidence I've just started watching the drama starring Ross From Friends now its on Netflix, and it's very jarring, having devoured all of that fantastic, very sober, very dark and very depressing documentary, to see the same story retold with very little nuance or subtlety and with constant, distracting "No really look its the Kardashians! Off TV!" digressions. Not not annoying it - it's trashy but good at being trashy - but it leaves a funny taste in the mouth after that magnificent, epic documentary.

binged this via t0rr3ntz on a couple of long flights last summer and was totally blown away - will def watch again on iplayer, it's just masterfully put together.

i kinda think it's better to watch the Murphy tv drama then follow up with the doc- it's like going from paint by numbers to an impressionist painting

i told a friend the doc is like taking an undergrad course in OJ

the doc is v v good

and agreed on the uncanny valley chasm between the doc and american crime story. my pop crit radar is completely off, though - i thought the show starring john travolta's forehead was r r bad, like R bad, like every time the camera would spin around the room 360 degrees and land back on that forehead i was more and more convinced that there was something subversively good going on, but the badness was unintentional. then it got all these award show nominations and people were taking it seriously and writing episode recaps and all that shit.

i have not read this thread so apologies if a bunch of people here liked the show and i'm being a dick. judging by the general acclaim for the ross/travolta-forehead show, there's probably quite a few fans here too

i enjoyed it but there's a weird disconnect between the actors who are intentionally camping it up and those who are unintentionally camping it up and those who are trying to be good and succeeding and those who are trying to be good and failing and those who aren't trying at all

also the bizarreness of cuba gooding jr as the main character, yet barely appearing at all and barely saying anything (for good reason), compared to the fascinating portrait of oj you get from the doc.

cuba's the weakest & most baffling part of the tv show to me. like, he's nowhere close to capturing oj physically or his charm or aggression ... it's just cuba pretending to be oj & it's dumb

i mean Sterling K Brown or Courtney Vance hit it out of the park & Cuba's playing fkn wiffle ball idgi

i told a friend the doc is like taking an undergrad course in OJ

Yes! And also American race relations in the 60s-90s, and the sins of the LAPD, and corruption at the higher echelons of American society, and how celebrity seduces so thoroughly it can help those who possess it literally get away with murder.

And tbf American Crime Story is R R BAD, esp any scene involving the younger Kardashians, but Ross From Friends is not camping it up even slightly and is actually really affecting in his role as the guy who believes in the Juice and really wants to save him but often seems really critically inept.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=726Ujz_KOHE

Cuba's nothing performance actually makes People v OJ fit alongside the doc a bit better. The show is about the lawyers and the people surrounding the case, while the doc takes a deep deep dive into OJ himself. They complement each other.

good point

Fuhrman stuff; pretty mindblowing. had no knowledge of him before.

Cataclysmic, as I remember the Fuhrman tapes; split the trial into before and after.

not surprising that he's still a racist shithead, saying the lapd should have just choked rodney king

Halfway through a rewatch. Not something that most viewers will care about, but I wish they spent a bit more time on his two years with the 49ers--at the very least, some details as to how he ended up there. The film has him retiring before you even know he's playing for San Francisco.

Not too many people in this who come across worse than Roy Firestone.

http://media.cleveland.com/sports_impact/photo/african-american-athletes-at-news-conference-af400c2cb31b07a9.jpg

This is the "Ali Summit" that part 1 delves into. (Simpson declined.) I felt dumb because I didn't know any of the athletes in the second row, but turns out they're all NFL players, and I'm not football fan. Nobody else besides Russell from the NBA, nobody at all from MLB. (Flood or Gibson would have been my best bet.)

Watched the first 3 hrs of Made in America last night. It's pretty good, generally, but I thought it was odd that while there was room for speculating that OJ's dad being gay was a key to his psychology (plausible but hardly proven), there was no real bg on Nicole Brown's family and youth (perhaps later?).

The vomitorious Roy Firestone interview is the ideal of all toadying entertainment 'journalism.'

Nobody else besides Russell from the NBA

uh isn't that Kareem at lower right

it is, then called Lew Alcindor

was he at UCLA/not in the NBA at that point?

yes, didn't graduate and enter NBA til '69

ah my bad. I can't even keep the details straight on the only athlete I know anything about lol

I knew Kareem, Οὖτις--the photo was in '67, pre-NBA. He's the only guy in the photo not focused on whatever everyone else is looking at just out of frame to the left.

on part 4 of Made in America. this is an excellent documentary.

gonna entertaining this was the moment the news decided, "fuck it, let's just run w sensationalism from now on forever"

I know the trial is THE major part of any story on OJ Simpson, but from a purely dramatic viewpoint, it's really not the climax

Fred B wrong as usual

As someone who don't remember anything about the case, which really didn't make sense as a kid in Denmark

i was in high school. we watched his getaway footage while in class. we stopped class to watch the final verdict.

it's impossible to understate how much coverage this trial got. maybe it doesn't seem all that special in an era of 24/7 news, but i feel like this was the first real taste of that, where "informative" news and reality tv intersect.

i think i talked abt this upthread or on the tv show thread maybe

it got a lot of coverage in Australia but I had no context for who OJ was except vaguely knowing he was the actor from Naked Gun

so at the time of the chase it seemed weird that Americans were covering the Bronco "chase" so intensely & then the verdict was all over the news all the time (no 24/7 courtroom coverage but regular updates). I understood that I was *supposed* to be fascinated because of the hype. My friends at college would talk about a lot & I'd nod along but silently I'd be like "ok but I still don't get who this guy is or why it's such a big deal"

it was because there was a big social discussion around police violence esp in LA. one of the best things about this doc is that it places it in the proper historical context. this was a charged and hightened atmosphere. the Rodney King beating was a big deal, there was mass outrage. there were the cries to censor "Cop Killer". it was a US cross cultural event that dealt w race and justice in real time and this doc has plenty of tragic examples. i saw the Rodney King beating video at 11 on the local news and it was very upsetting and the social issues were brought up in school and discussed in social studies classes and the like. even in the south teachers felt it was important to witness a social discussion and conversations around real civil rights being played out in real time. the OJ trial was a nexus of US political, racial, social life in the early 90s. imo the defense used the shitty state and legitimate public grievances towards the LAPD (again, at the time, in historical context, where the trial was strategically held). its fascinating all the angles that both sides throw at each other. also ground-breaking in that multi-media coverage of this type had not really been done aside from the (first) Iraq War and embedded journalism of CNN. the personal and identity politics nature of it was also ground breaking, much to the chagrin of Marcia Clark, who has a good point that it was more about the circus and gossip than the facts. the more things change eh?

most insane part so far was when the one guy breaks down talking bout the LA riots and how the cops were told to not go into the riot area at all and they all stood a block away and watched as a truck driver got killed in the middle of the road in front of them. fucking insane. LA in the 90s was a very charged place.

I'm either the only person watching, or the only person who'll admit to it.

It's bizarre, because they have to confine themselves to this case, and not mention the other one. (One woman on the parole board, pointing to letters for and against release, made brief mention of the murder case.) So when O.J. says he's led a largely "conflict-free" life--or when they ask him about a victim-empathy course he took--your head explodes a bit.

I don't know how long this will go on, so I'll have to duck out. My guess is he's granted parole.

I hope so. God only knows what the real killer has been up to while OJ's been prevented from seeking justice.

i was talking to a coworker at his cubicle this morning and noticed he had OJ's wikipedia page open, now the mystery has been revealed

Paroled. Trump will call.

most of the immed post-verdict reaxtion ftage shd be in the smithsonian, particularly the old woman screaming THE JUICE IS LOOSE HES LOOOOSE

― johnny crunch, Sunday, June 19, 2016 12:55 PM (one year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

im sure this gif exists, someone pls post it

He went to jail because they couldn't send him in '95, right?

I used to see him at a couple of Coral Gables bars in the early '00s. He had pull with the bartenders, nobody talked to him, kinda pathetic: old dude drinking Bud at a Hillstone's.

Could Trump wipe his slate clean, thus allowing him to run for Congress or president?

he's out. gonna start the stabbing and head chopping again shortly.

Xp to Alfred, he was fairly clearly guilty of the incredibly stupid crime that put him in jail, but there's been plenty of speculation (including from Alan Dershowitz) that he got extra years on his sentence because he got away with it in 95