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Rewind to 1995. I was working in a fancy-schmancy resort. It was the day of The Verdict. The day the jurors in the highly publicized O.J. Simpson murder trial promised—after much delay and mistrial antics and outrageous difficulty putting together an "impartial" jury—to return a verdict. In marched the jurors. In my office we all dropped what we were doing and gathered around the radio . . .
Not guilty.
Huh?
Not guilty.
Waitjustaminutefercryingoutloud! Everyone in the country probably saw that aerial chase scene in which the white Ford Bronco sped down the highway. Everyone, from the families of the murdered Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman, to the average Jane and Joe on the street KNEW intuitively that O.J. had done the double-murder. Evidence and logic and any other sort of reasoning (plenty of DNA evidence) backed up the intuitive sense. And why would an innocent person flee with such bravado, anyway?
So O.J. walked, maybe because the jurors just wanted to get the heck home. Later, a civil case was filed in which the verdict was guilty, but without criminal penalties to back it up and with O.J.'s supposed inability to repay, the families who were victimized by him haven't received much if anything by way of retribution.
“one day he is going to make another big mistake”
All that time, I thought, O.J. is so crazy and so ballsy that one day he is going to make another big mistake and find himself in jail for real this time. He's thinking of himself as above the law. He got away with murder, why couldn't he get away with, well, anything he pleased? (This manic-rampant-egotism worked for George W. Bush, too). When Simpson was arrested for armed robbery recently, I cheered. Maybe this time, this time justice might be done—sideways, but a punishment nonetheless.
Sure, he's now out on $125,000 bond, but he must appear in court for the trial (unless he dashes down some other freeway—he's gotten away with that before, and he's not smart enough to avoid repeating his successful tricks). Something in his brazen flaunting of law and blustering bumbling If I Did It tell-all book efforts made me think he wanted to be caught—actually sought out some Karmic-payback. Now he's close to getting it. I'm guessing that if he's put behind bars, his fellow inmates will mete out their version of justice and I, as a mother, knowing there is one less murdering mad-man on the streets, will be glad.
