ttorneys in the city, Robert Shapiro and Johnnie Cochran, and they in turn hired an array of other lawyers and expert witnesses. The defense made it known from the outset that they planned to put the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) on trial. The defense alleged that a racist detective had framed Simpson and that the department had so bungled the evidence as to implicate Simpson (Excerpts, A27).
By the time the case went to trial in January of 1995, the public had already been inundated with nonstop media coverage and gavel-to-gavel television broadcasts of every legal proceeding involving the case. Finding a jury that had heard nothing about the case was impossible. Moreover, money for book rights and exclusive interviews likely awaited the members of the Simpson jury at trial's end, compounding the difficulty of seating a panel.
A jury was finally impaneled (then sequestered) and the trial began, but it moved at a snail's pace. The participants, including the judge, constantly played to the television cameras. Defense attorneys cross-examined police witnesses down to minutiae such as the kind of berries found in the victim's garden. Every day during the trial breathless television announcers reported from in front of the courthouse, even if they had nothing to report.
Finally, the case went to the jury, and they only spent a matter of hours "deliberating" before they acquitted Simpson. The majority of Americans greeted the verdict with outrage, prompting calls for dramatic reforms of the criminal justice system (fortunately, those calls went largely unheeded). Seemingly everyone connected with the case gave an interview or wrote a book. Soon Simpson fatigue set in among the public.
That fatigue set in too late to prevent damage. For the vast majority of Americans, the Simpson case was their only exposure to the criminal justice system, and they did not like what they saw. Most criminal cases involve a judge...