SOCIETY

"The trial of the century": A decade later

A divided nation continues to search for meaning in the O.J. Simpson murder case.

By Jamie Malanowski and John Connolly

Ten years ago next week, Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson were found murdered outside her Los Angeles home. The awful crime set into motion an investigation, a trial, a long-running "reality TV" program, and a national Rorschach test about our most painful social problem. Their accused killer -- football Hall of Famer, rental car pitchman and Hollywood actor O.J. Simpson -- was found not guilty on all criminal charges. But even now, after a decade, we are still trying to peel away the theatrics and the emotion, and assess the true effects of the experience.

"The lasting impact of this case was its deeply sobering message about race relations,'' says Jeffrey Toobin, the CNN legal analyst and author of "The Run of His Life," a book about the case. "Other than the car chase, the most memorable image is black people cheering the verdict. We all knew blacks and whites saw things differently, but the degree was shocking.''

For many people, it wasn't surprising at all. Over the course of the nine-month trial, Simpson's attorneys focused on the attitudes and conduct of the police. Detective Mark Fuhrman had been caught lying on the stand, and questions were raised about the handling of key pieces of evidence. For many, the case put a spotlight on the way minorities (particularly African Americans) are dealt with in the criminal justice system, where excessive use of force and racial profiling arise all too frequently and are routinely discounted.

"Nobody is happy that two people died,'' says cultural critic and "Rolling Stone" contributing editor Touré, "and nobody is what you would call pro-O.J. He's pathetic, a really poor standard-bearer for any standard you want. But a lot of people who are frustrated with the way people of color are treated before the law were simply pleased that, for once, a black person beat the system.''

But Greta Van Susteren, host of Fox News Channel's "On the Record," believes the lesson we ought to grasp is not that the system produced a shocking outcome, but that the system worked: "Remember, the final instruction judges give to juries is 'Don't leave your common sense behind.' When Mark Fuhrman, who's a good detective, is caught in a flat-out lie, it's not unreasonable for a jury member to ask, 'Can I send someone to prison when the cops are lying?' ''

More than anything else, the O.J. ordeal changed the news media by creating an appetite for reality television. Cable news executives learned that by providing saturation coverage (endless reports and analysis) of a sensational story, they could keep viewers watching for hours on end. Soon they began looking for stories that warranted massive coverage -- Princess Di, Monicagate, the D.C. Beltway snipers, gay marriage -- to compensate for a drop in ratings when there were lulls in legitimate news events. But while the industry's business model was being transformed, the attitudes behind the news remained unchanged.

"The media likes to simplify things when it comes to racial issues,'' says Juan Williams, a senior correspondent for National Public Radio and author of the newly released "My Soul Looks Back in Wonder: Voices of the Civil Rights Experience." "Its tendency is to emphasize the disagreement between the races, and to paint what whites think and do as the norm and what blacks think and do as the 'not norm.' The way the media portrayed the reaction to the Simpson verdict fit that inclination. They showed footage of black students cheering, followed by footage of whites looking downcast. There was [little] effort to put those images in context, to say, 'Well, this is a room full of young people who have their own issues and who are at a time in their lives when they're trying to assert their blackness.' " More important, Williams adds, there was no apparent effort to portray the many black people who thought Simpson should have been convicted.

In the end, it created a lose-lose situation, says Tavis Smiley, the USA WEEKEND contributing editor who hosts daily talk programs on NPR and PBS. "I think the police framed a guilty man. They did some things they should not have done to sweeten the evidence, because they wanted to convict him so much," Smiley says. "And as a result, O.J. got off. The murders, what the police did, the verdict -- it's all disturbing.''