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

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

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

Absolutely, or at least why he got such a severe sentence--nine years, whereas Toobin and everyone else said you'd normally get one or two--one of the many reasons today was so bizarre. There was close to (but not) unanimous agreement on CNN that you had to parole him: excessive sentence, model prisoner, low-level risk. But all of that was mitigated by the fact that there was equally near-unanimous agreement that he was a murderer, and even if you were to overlook that, which the acquittal required the board to do, there was still the domestic abuse that took place before the murders, and how the board curiously didn't mention that (even though they could have--maybe it came up in deliberation).

Weird for me watching CNN, as someone who was glued to the first trial. Toobin was there, of course--he's a mainstay on CNN. They brought back Mark Geragos, who was a regular in '95. No Greta Van Sustren--no explanation necessary. No Gerry Spence--still alive, I see. No Judge Tenner--died in 2008. No Milton Grimes, no Dick Thornburgh, no Roger Cossack, no Robert Philibosian, no Leslie Abramson (all alive--most were on Larry King, the last two on Nightline). I got more of these people in '95 than Trump's CNN entourage last year.

I read that Mark Fuhrman is supposed to be covering it for Fox, too

Yeah--I'm interested in reading a transcript of that, although I don't know that I would have wanted to watch him. I think I hold the pretty standard view of simultaneously believing O.J. guilty and viewing Fuhrman as a creep who may very well have tried to embellish the case. (I did find his brazen please-hate-me interviews in the documentary compelling.)

Fred Goldman has been extremely visible the past 20 years, so I took it for granted he would comment; Christopher Darden has been anything but, so hearing from him is a big surprise.

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2722773-fred-goldman-christopher-darden-comment-ahead-of-oj-simpsons-parole-hearing

Does OJ still owe money per the civil verdict, or is that paid off/out? Regardless, once he's free he can finally resume his search for the real killer(s).

Interesting what he plans to do to em, given he's out on what you'd imagine are pretty strict conditions.

Does OJ still owe money per the civil verdict

That's why he lives in Florida (and will continue to)--most of his money is protected there, and his NFL pension ($300,000/year) is protected everywhere. I think he still owes almost all of the civil penalty.

Something surreal you would have missed if you didn't watch today: just before the decision was delivered, they had O.J. on an open mic talking with his lawyer. He was deriding some guy--forget the name, and I couldn't tell if it was a writer or another inmate--for spreading lies about him while he was in prison. At one point, he said the guy had accused him of cutting into line in the cafeteria. (Paraphrase) "Cutting into line? This is prison--even Mike Tyson doesn't cut into line."

from a few years ago:

http://www.theonion.com/article/sight-of-oj-simpson-actually-kind-of-comforting-32434

Is it just coincidence that his parole follows two high profile onscreen retellings of his story?

I think they might more likely have been opportune (or inevitable) productions tbf

That's why he lives in Florida (and will continue to)--most of his money is protected there, and his NFL pension ($300,000/year) is protected everywhere. I think he still owes almost all of the civil penalty.

fuckin' florida, the only place on earth which will be improved by disappearing beneath the waves in the coming decades

Is it just coincidence that his parole follows two high profile onscreen retellings of his story?

Good question. You would think that having seen one or both of these (the documentary, especially, which went into the robbery in great detail) would inevitably color one's attitude towards O.J. Maybe the parole board people, knowing the hearing was coming up within a year, either skipped them voluntarily or were advised not to watch them. On a related note, Jeffrey Toobin was on CNN non-stop last night, and multiple times he made disbelieving mention of the parole board guy who was wearing a Kansas City Chiefs tie yesterday.

ESPN had that elfin weasel from the defense team who got a lot of talking-head time in their miniseries (i really wouldn't be inconsolable if he was flattened by a tractor trailer)

fuckin' florida, the only place on earth which will be improved by disappearing beneath the waves in the coming decades

― he tasted like mouth (bizarro gazzara),

hi!

as in so many thing, alfred, you are the exception which proves the rule

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