Reprinted courtesy of the
International Herald Tribune
O.J. Simpson convicted of robbery and kidnapping
By Steve Friess
October 4, 2008
LAS VEGAS: A jury convicted the former football star O.J. Simpson on Friday of robbery and kidnapping, a verdict that came 13 years to the day after Simpson was acquitted in the highly publicized slayings of his ex-wife and a friend of hers.
This time, Simpson was convicted of all 12 charges he faced stemming from a confrontation in a casino hotel room in September 2007 in which he and five other people departed with hundreds of items of sports memorabilia.
The items were in the possession of two memorabilia dealers, Bruce Fromong and Alfred Beardsley, who were led to believe a prospective buyer was coming to browse the goods. Instead, Simpson and his group burst into the room and, according to several witnesses, at least one gun was brandished.
In the courtroom as the verdict was read, Simpson showed no emotion. He was led away in handcuffs and taken into custody. Simpson, 61, and a co-defendant, Clarence Stewart, 54, are facing a prison sentence of 15 years to life on the kidnapping charge. Sentencing is scheduled for Dec. 5.
Simpson will appeal, said one of his lawyers, Yale Galanter.
"He's extremely upset, extremely emotional," Galanter said. "We knew this was going to be very difficult, we knew the jury was going to be very difficult, we knew the jurisdiction would be very difficult."
The Clark County district attorney, David Roger, who was the lead prosecutor in the case, said his office would not comment on the case until after sentencing.
None of the jury of nine women and three men spoke to the news media. They had deliberated for 13 hours, mulling over weeks of testimony as well as hours of surreptitious audio recordings of the planning and execution of the event by Thomas Riccio, a memorabilia auctioneer who arranged the confrontation.
Simpson has said he was seeking to retrieve only personal keepsakes like ceremonial footballs from his Hall of Fame career in the National Football League and photos of his family that years ago were taken from his home; the prosecutors said he should have filed a civil lawsuit to regain the items if they were, in fact, stolen from him.
"We don't want people going into rooms to take property," Roger said. "That is robbery. You don't go in and get a gun and demand property from people."
Four of the 24 witnesses who testified were the other men who accompanied Simpson and Stewart. All four had accepted plea deals from prosecutors in exchange for testimony. Two of them, Walter Alexander and Michael McClinton, had carried guns in the incident, and McClinton testified that he had done so at Simpson's request.
Simpson said he did not know the two would carry weapons and never saw any guns displayed during the incident.
The proceedings failed to capture the intense public interest that Simpson's acquittal did in 1995. That case became a racial touchstone in the United States after Simpson, who is black, was charged with murdering his former wife, Nicole Simpson, and a friend of hers, Ronald Goldman, both of whom were white. He was acquitted by a 12-member jury that included eight blacks after the defense implied that racist officials had planted or forged evidence. None of the jurors were black this time, a factor that could play into an appeal, his lawyers said.
Ronald Goldman's father, Frederic Goldman, admitted that he had followed the proceedings this time "only generally" from his home in Phoenix.
"At the absolute least, I'd like to see him in jail," Goldman said before the verdict was announced. "He's not going to get the punishment for Ron's murder that he deserved, but at least he should be in jail for as long as they can put him there."
The defense this time focused much of its efforts on discrediting Fromong, Beardsley and the four men who assisted Simpson and Stewart. On several occasions, two Simpson lawyers, Galanter and Gabriel Grasso, caught those witnesses in contradictions, as when Fromong insisted he did not try to sell his story despite audio recordings immediately after the incident in which Fromong is heard saying: "I'll have 'Inside Edition' down here tomorrow. I told them I want big money."
While Simpson's acquittal in 1995 was never discussed, it hung over the proceedings. Jurors were quizzed extensively before their selection about their views of that trial, and references were made in some of the audio recordings to the fact that Simpson owes the estates of Simpson and Goldman $33.5 million because in 1997 he was held liable in a civil lawsuit for the deaths.
Galanter attacked that issue in his closing, noting that Riccio's recorder had picked up police officers at the crime scene seeming to exult in their chance to prosecute Simpson. He also noted that Riccio testified he had made more than $200,000 in fees from the news media in exchange for interviews and rights to his recordings.
"This case has never been about a search for the true facts," Galanter said. "This case has taken on a life of its own because Simpson's involved. You know that, I know that. Every cooperator, every person with a gun, every person who signed a book deal, every person who got paid money, the police, the district attorney's office, was only interested in one thing: Mr. Simpson."
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