Tom Rants

Richard Nixon managed to die a few months before Ronald Goldman and Nicole Brown-Simpson and so didn't have the opportunity to actually comment on the Original Simpson Trial, but here's what he might have said:

...tainted evidence, even though a person is totally guilty, is a reason to get him off.

The person he actually did say that about, Ethel Rosenberg, was «totally guilty» of a crime that put the lives and liberty of all Americans in danger. It's hard to conceive a crime more heinous than double murder, but Rosenberg's treason certainly was. Still, Nixon, law and order conservative, Republican, white man, believed that it would have been more appropriate to let her go free than to convict her with tainted evidence.

The much maligned Los Angeles jury from the Original Orenthal Trial held the same position. Oh, sure there was much amusement about the gloves not fitting, plenty of other holes in the prosecutions case that at least hinted at reasonable doubt, but in the final analysis, the fact that Fox News darling, convicted felon Mark Fuhrman tried to «frame a guilty man» was rightly a Get Out of Jail Free card for Simpson.

Of course, as any Monopolist can tell you, a Get Out of Jail Free card is good for one use only. The card didn't apply for the New and Improved Juice Trial. On the other hand, the purposeful scheduling of the second verdict to occur on the anniversary of the first ought to be an indication that the second trial was a «do over» of the type prohibited by the Fifth Amendment. Even barring that view, those who insist on painting the more recent sentence as correcting a «miscarriage of justice» need to remind that themselves that there was no miscarriage to be remedied. Even assuming Simpson killed two people in 1994, the purposeful use of tainted evidence was plenty of «reason to get him off.»