Noted attorney Alan Dershowitz on Thursday reacted with sadness to his former client O.J. Simpson’s death.
A criminal jury, in an October 1995 trial Dershowitz was involved in, acquitted Simpson on charges of murdering his ex-wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ronald Goldman after their deaths in June 1994, according to The New York Times. Simpson reportedly passed away from cancer on Wednesday, with Dershowitz expressing how he felt after learning of his death and reminiscing on Newsmax about their time together. (RELATED: Trump’s Legal Team Gets Big Shakeup)
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“I knew he had been sick and suffering from cancer, so it was not a great surprise to me,” Dershowitz said. “I was saddened. I didn’t know him well personally, obviously, I worked with him very closely during the trial, visited him in prison, was in the courtroom the moment he tried on the glove, and so I was there for some of the highlights of the case.”
“It’s a very important case in American history. It divided the country along racial lines,” he added. “Also, it showed that a person, whether guilty or innocent, could be framed for a crime and the police created a piece of evidence against him. A bloody sock, which had blood, which was poured from a test tube instead of coming from the crime scene and the jury saw through that, we exposed it. And he was acquitted not so much on on the theory that he was or wasn’t innocent or guilty, but on the theory that when the government tampers with evidence there can’t be trust in the rest of the evidence, so it it became an important case, and I spoke to him occasionally after the verdict, but not not very often.”
Dershowitz was an adviser on Simpson’s so-called legal “Dream Team,” which featured lawyers such as Johnnie Cochran, Robert Shapiro, Robert Kardashian and F. Lee Bailey, according to NBC News.
When Simpson evaded police by hiding in the back of a white Ford Bronco after the murders, Dershowitz was not his lawyer yet, and thought the former football star was likely guilty of the charges against him, he said.
“I was not his lawyer at the time,” the lawyer said. “I was watching the NBA finals or the NBA playoffs when it happened. And said to my family who I was watching with, ‘it looks like he’s probably guilty, otherwise, why would he be running away?’ Also, we thought he might have tried to kill himself. But that became a very memorable moment.”
A jury found Simpson liable for the deaths of Brown and Goldman in 1997, with a jury ordering Simpson to pay the Goldman family $8.5 million in compensatory damages as well as pay $25 million in punitive damages, according to CNBC.
“The View” co-host Joy Behar swiftly drew an analogy after Simpson’s death to former President Donald Trump, who a jury in January found liable for sexual battery of Elle Magazine writer E. Jean Carroll.
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