The Los Angeles Police Department had been dispatched to the home of Nicole Brown Simpson nine times by the year that O.J. Simpson pleaded no contest to spousal abuse. Over three years passed before Nicole finally filed for divorce from the retired football star. But the cycle of abuse did not end with their marriage. Just as he had threatened, battered, and abused Nicole during their marriage, he continued to do so after their split.
O.J. had beaten his wife badly enough over the years that she wound up in the hospital, where she lied to a doctor that she’d fallen off a bike rather than expose her husband. Yet as it turned out, she didn’t have to protect him. The LAPD would continue to do so prior to the night O.J. nearly decapitated her with a knife, killing Nicole and her friend Ronald Goldman in cold blood. The people of Los Angeles would continue to protect O.J. after that.
Despite prosecutorial slip-ups and the LAPD’s typically unprofessional conduct, the evidence against O.J. was overwhelming. It wasn’t just the glove and the blood and the DNA and the absence of an alibi and the lies and the obvious cover-up. Nicole had documented O.J.’s abuse for years, not just with photos and journals corroborating her dozens of allegations, but also in 911 calls. Judge Lance Ito allowed the prosecution to play the audio for the downtown L.A. jury.
“Would you just please, O.J., O.J., O.J., O.J., could you please? Please leave,” Nicole sobbed in a 1993 call from when O.J. was breaking into her house to beat her.
“I’m not leaving,” the call recorded O.J. threatening in the background.
The jury didn’t just know the facts of the case. They heard the sheer terror in Nicole’s voice as she begged for her life the night of June 12, 1994.
Twenty-four years ago this week, the jury acquitted O.J. of all charges.
Well, officially speaking, that’s what they did. In the years that followed the verdict, various members of the jury confessed that they, like the majority of the country, believed O.J. was guilty as sin. They just didn’t care. Rather, they thought, freeing O.J. served as revenge for the Rodney King case.
Two years prior to the O.J. verdict, the acquittal of King’s abusers in the LAPD had been acquitted in criminal court. This had sparked riots in Los Angeles, concentrated heavily in South Central and Koreatown, with the city’s black, Hispanic, and Korean communities violently sparring across ethnic lines. Koreans were the victims of more than half of the $50 million in city damage incurred. The King verdict and its militant aftermath proved a galvanizing moment for the city’s minorities, all independently convinced that the city was rigged with racism.
So despite O.J.’s flagrant disregard and distance to the black community — “I’m not black, I’m O.J.,” he famously said — the predominately black jury chose to set him free as payback for King. “Probably 90% of them,” juror Carrie Bess claims made their decision sheerly based on revenge. It’s only now that they’re saying the quiet part out loud, but they made their motivation clear moments after the verdict was announced. As juror Lon Cryer left the courtroom, he raised his fist in a black power salute to Simpson, and thus, the world was introduced to social justice.
The term “social justice” truncates the actual calculus of the phenomenon, which is socialized justice, a philosophical and economic term describing a peculiarly modern form of injustice.
Justice — the real, blind kind that is dependent on due process, the presumption of innocence, and evidentiary standards — takes each case in a vacuum. The individual is judged for his individual crimes or lack thereof, and guilty or innocence is not transferred by association. Social justice, in contrast, judges based on collective responsibility. Rather than evaluate O.J., a black man with all of the privilege and wealth of a beloved celebrity in white America, for his individual crime, social justice averaged out all of the historical and not-so-historical atrocities against black Americans and gave him a get-out-of-jail free card as a result.
There’s no question that sexism was also a factor in the jury’s decision. As recently as three years ago, Bess, a woman herself, said she had no “respect” for any woman who stayed in an abusive relationship as Nicole did. (Studies have proven that victims of domestic violence overwhelmingly stay with their abusers due to physical or verbal threats and force.) But in large part, the “reasonable doubt” rendering the not guilty verdict possible was just a seed of the foul social justice tree that has since grown and flourished.
Some O.J. defenders have a belief in O.J.’s innocence could be earnest because of anti-black racism in the criminal justice system, but the statistics belie that hypothesis. The majority of black Americans, who overwhelmingly believed in O.J.’s innocence when the verdict was announced, now believe he’s guilty. But polling on police bias has remained exactly the same. That is to say that we all know that even a broken criminal justice system was incapable of planting nearly two decades of evidence painting the portrait of a murderer.
What white elites spent nearly half a millennium doing to millions of black Americans was unpardonable. Slavery (and its legal and social legacy) is our original sin, an intractable stain on our nation’s history. But justice is not transferable according to group membership. To let a man go free who spent half a lifetime hunting his prey before slaughtering her does not right prior wrongs against King or any other black American subjected to racism. The O.J. verdict was a perversion of the system foundational to Western civilization. In other words, it was social justice in action.
