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There have only been a couple of national events in my life where I can very clearly remember exactly where I was at the moment they happened. Obviously 9/11 was one of those most of us remember.
The Rodney King riots in 1992 are another one. I was at work in Washington, DC that day. A group of us were being sent to a warehouse in Virginia in the back of a panel van with benches rather than seats. I was the only white guy in a van with 8 black men, all of them in their mid-20s as I was at the time. The radio was on and the DJ announced the news and then played «Fight the Power» by Public Enemy. The driver, who was black, cranked it up loud. Fortunately, I was friends with one of the guys and he sort of vouched for me («He’s white but he’s alright.») And after that it was okay.
And then there was the acquittal of OJ Simpson in 1995. I happened to be in Pittsburgh visiting a close friend that day. Over the course of the long trial, I had become one of those obsessives who was watching events in real time every day after work, sometimes for hours. I knew the names of everyone involved in the trial. I knew all of the arguments being made by both sides.
That day, October 3, 1995, we knew the verdict was coming so we wound up on the second floor of a little house watching an old TV. It wasn’t my friend’s house. I don’t remember whose house it was but I remember the verdict being red and both of us being in disbelief that the «Dream Team» had somehow managed to convince the dumbest jury in the history of juries that there wasn’t enough evidence OJ was guilty.
He was of course guilty as sin. He had a long history of violence toward his ex-wife, Nicole Brown. Police had been involved multiple times. She was clearly in fear that he would kill her in a jealous rage and that’s exactly what happened in 1994.
There was also overwhelming physical evidence that OJ was the killer. I’m pulling this from Wikipedia now but 29 years ago I knew about all of this and so did anyone else watching the trial.
With no witnesses to the crime, the prosecution was dependent on DNA as the only physical evidence linking Simpson to the crime. The volume of DNA evidence in this case was unique and the prosecution believed they could reconstruct how the crime was committed with enough accuracy to resemble an eyewitness account. Marcia Clark stated in her opening statements that there was a «trail of blood from the Bundy Crime scene through Simpson’s Ford Bronco to his bedroom at Rockingham».
Simpson’s DNA found on blood drops next to the bloody footprints near the victims at the Bundy crime scene. The prosecution stated that the probability of error was 1-in-9.
