O.J. Simpson Won’t Dodge Prison

The story did not repeat itself on Friday for O.J. Simpson. The former American football player who had been acquitted, 13 years ago, in the murder case of his ex-wife and her partner, was condemned on Friday to two joint penalties of 15 years firm emprisonment for kidnapping and armed robbery. In 2007, the sportsman had rushed with five accomplices into a casino-hotel in Las Vegas to steal sports souvenirs from secondhand dealers, threatening them with weapons. The footballer kept saying that the artifacts he had tried to get back were his and had been filched from him beforehand. Moreover, he assured that he did not realize that his accomplices were armed.

The penalty O.J. Simpson is receiving is less than the 18 years the Attorney General has demanded. Thanks to eventual penalty recessions, the sportsman will spend at least nine months in jail, he will stay for the most 33 years under lock and key since he had received several other minor sentences. Two months earlier, he had thus been found guilty of the 12 counts of indictment brought against him (such as “kidnapping and armed robbery”) O.J. Simpson remained calm when the verdict was stated. The ex-sportsman, who appeared before the court in his blue prisoner uniform, had let his emotions show a few moments earlier while apologizing profusely. “I never wanted to hurt anybody, I didn’t want to steal anything from anyone. What I did was so stupid,” he had pleaded in a broken voice and with wet eyes, whereas he had, previously, not said a word since the beginning of his trial.

“This Verdict Is No Revenge” From Justice

Despite this poignant confession, the judge did not bend and refused to release 61 year-olded ex-sportsman to be released on bail before his appeal was examined. During the reading of the verdict, the judge repeated several times that this case of “sports souvenirs theft” was in no way related to the double murder of 1994 and that the verdict was no revenge from justice for the controversed acquittal the sportsman benefited from in 1995. The recollection of 1994’s double murder never stopped threatening the debates.

O.J. Simpson divorced Nicole Brown in 1992 and her murder and her partner’s murder have fascinated America. In the summer 1994, Nicole Brown was found dead, lying in a pool of blood, almost beheaded, next to her partner’s, Ronald Goldman’s, body. After a car pursuit of several hours on the freeways of Los Angeles, followed by a host of TV helicopters, the footballer was caught. Some blood tests later showed that he was on the crime scene, but O.J. protested his innocence and was acquitted one year later, which divided people’s opinions between Blacks and Whites, three years after the bloody racial riots in Los Angeles.

This didn’t prevent Simpson from being recognized during a civil trial in 1997 as responsible for the death of the two victims and from being condemned to pay damages up to 33 million dollars to their families, which he never did. In 2006, he had again triggered indignant reactions by publishing a book entitled If I Did It (Si je l’avais fait, French title) in which he explained, in the conditional tense, a theory on how he could have committed the double murder. The publisher eventually cancelled the release of this book.