O.J. Acquitted: Race and Justice Divide America

One hundred and fifty million Americans stopped what they were doing. Office workers crowded around televisions. Students watched in school gymnasiums. At 10:07 a.m. Pacific time on October 3, 1995, the jury foreperson read the verdict: not guilty. Orenthal James Simpson was acquitted of the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman, and the camera captured two Americas reacting in real time — one cheering, the other stunned into silence. The trial had consumed 252 days of testimony, cost an estimated $20 million, and transformed the American legal system into a spectator sport. Simpson, a former NFL star and Hollywood personality, had been charged with the June 12, 1994, stabbing deaths at Nicole's Brentwood condominium. The prosecution's case was built on DNA evidence, a trail of blood from the crime scene to Simpson's estate, and a history of domestic violence documented by police reports and Nicole's own diary entries. The defense team — Robert Shapiro, Johnnie Cochran, F. Lee Bailey, Barry Scheck, and Robert Kardashian — executed a strategy that put the Los Angeles Police Department itself on trial. Detective Mark Fuhrman, a key witness, was caught on tape using racial slurs. Scheck systematically attacked the LAPD's evidence-handling procedures. And Cochran delivered the trial's defining moment when he urged Simpson to try on the bloody gloves recovered at the scene. "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit," he told the jury, after the gloves appeared too small on Simpson's hands. The racial dimension was impossible to ignore. The trial unfolded just three years after the Rodney King beating and the riots that followed the acquittal of the officers involved. For many Black Americans, the verdict represented a rare instance of the justice system's reasonable-doubt standard working in favor of a Black defendant. For many white Americans, it represented a guilty man escaping consequences through expensive lawyering and racial politics. The jury deliberated for fewer than four hours. Simpson walked free but was later found liable in a 1997 civil trial and ordered to pay $33.5 million in damages. The case permanently altered how Americans think about celebrity, race, media, and the justice system.