The O. J. Simpson Police Investigation

This paper will analyze the police investigation in the O. J. Simpson case. The discussion will center on whether the investigation was properly conducted and whether the evidence against this defendant was properly obtained by the police and other law enforcement agencies. The paper will also detail the types of evidence which were recovered at the crime scene, as well as how this evidence was documented and preserved. The analysis will show what was done with the evidence in the O. J. Simpson case and show how the evidence was properly obtained and therefore, how the investigation was, for the most part, properly conducted.

Officially, the case was known as People of the State of California v. Orenthal James Simpson, a.k.a. O. J. Simpson, Los Angeles County Superior Court Case BA#097211 (Bugliosi, 1996, p. 110). Some of the most important evidence which the police investigators collected from the crime scene was the blood evidence. O J. Simpson's defense lawyers started to attack the methods which the police use to recover the blood evidence from the scene during the early phases of their client's trial. On August 22, 1997, Simpson's defense team had a chance to cross-examine the prosecution's witnesses about how they inventoried the blood evidence. The defense attorneys learned that the Los Angeles Police Department had no standard method of record keeping for their evidence collection. Apparently police criminalists Fung

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the defense team, and particularly attorney Barry Scheck and expert witness Dr. Lee, tried to insinuate that the samples had been switched in the lab. However, there "were significant problems" with the argument that the sample had been intentionally switched ("even beyond the audacity" of the alleged conduct) (Abramson, 1996, p. 107). The biggest problem with the defense's argument was that the "DNA found in the blood samples was heavily degraded, and there was no reason why swatches dipped in O. J. Simpson's pristine blood sample with a preservative in it would have been degraded" (Abramson, 1996, p. 107). Moreover, had the samples which were taken from the driveway and the walkway been contaminated with Simpson's preservative-tinged blood then those samples should have shown a mixture of Simpson's blood and some other person's unidentifiable blood type (that of some other killer, whose blood could not be identified). "But there was only one DNA profile:" O. J. Simpson's. The biggest problem with the defense team's hypothetical theory then is that it does not explain why, if O. J. did not kill the two victims, then why was there no hair, blood, or other evidence from an unidentified person present in all the various typ
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2826
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)

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