Twelve years, 11 months and five days after he was acquitted of the murder of his former wife and her friend, OJ Simpson’s freedom is hanging in the judicial balance again at the start of his trial for robbery and kidnapping.
Simpson, who appeared at Clark County court on Monday, faces possible life imprisonment if convicted of kidnapping, one of 12 charges that arose from events last September when he challenged two dealers of sports collectors’ items in a hotel in Las Vegas. He is alleged to have organised a gang of five other men and used guns to rob the dealers.
Simpson has pleaded not guilty to all charges, which also include burglary, coercion and assault with a deadly weapon, and his defence will argue he was simply trying to regain possession of goods that had been stolen from him.
As with the hugely publicised murder trial in 1995 in which he was found not guilty of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, despite DNA evidence that linked him to the crime, the composition of the jury will be the first important stage of the trial.
Selection in the current case began in a courtroom in Nevada from a pool of 250 potential jurors.
The pool had already been reduced from 500 using a 26-page questionnaire to filter out anyone holding any bias towards the defendant.
In an earlier hearing last November, Simpson told the court: ”As always, I rely on the jury system.”
In the 1995 hearings, dubbed the trial of the century, the defence team used an elaborate process, including an 80-page questionnaire and psychological background searches to produce a jury that included only one white member.
A year after Simpson’s acquittal, Fred Goldman, Ronald’s father, took out civil proceedings against Simpson in which he was found liable for the deaths and ordered to pay $33,5-million.
Legal wrangles have continued to haunt Simpson, who now lives in Miami, including a furore in 2006 over a book he wrote, If I Did It, which was billed as a hypothetical account of what would have happened had he committed the murders.
Once the latest trial gets fully under way, the selected panel of 12 jurors and four reserves will hear the prosecution case that on September 13 last year Simpson, together with five others, burst into the hotel room and robbed the sports dealers at gunpoint.
Four of the five men will be giving evidence against Simpson, having struck plea bargains with prosecutors in return for a lesser sentence.
The fifth, Clarence Stewart, is also awaiting trial.
Simpson’s main defence lawyer, Yale Galanter, will argue that the witnesses against him are nefarious characters prepared to sell their testimony to the highest bidder. Galanter told the Associated Press that the items Simpson recovered from the hotel room were his own.
”The truth is, these items were not memorabilia. The law has always provided a right, dating back to our founding fathers, to recover personal property.”
The process of selecting a jury could take up to a week. The prosecution will then set out its evidence in a case expected to last at least five weeks. — guardian.co.uk