Criminal: Ronald Goldman and College Football Career Essay

Submitted By ivanflores89
Words: 696
Pages: 3

O.J. Simpson was born on July 9, 1947, in San Francisco, California. After a successful college football career at USC, winning the Heisman Trophy, Simpson went on to star in the NFL as a running back. He left football in 1979 to pursue what would become a relatively successful acting and commentating career. However, Simpson is now best remembered for his arrest and trial in the 1994 murder of his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ron Goldman, of which he was found not guilty. He is currently in prison for kidnapping and armed robbery convictions that he received in 2008. But no one would ever thought that a man who became perhaps the most famous criminal defendant in American history and so easily recognizable that people referred to him by his initials only. It went on for nine months. There were 11 lawyers representing the man in the dock and 25 working around the clock for the largest prosecutor's office in the country It became the most publicized case in US history. It was the longest trial ever held in California, costing over $20 million to fight and defend, running up 50,000 pages of trial transcript in the process. There were 150 witnesses called to give evidence before a jury that was sequestered at the Hotel Intercontinental in downtown L.A. from January until October. Half way through the trial, the presiding judge, who could so easily have wandered into the whole thing from Alice in Wonderland, decided they needed some recreation and arranged for them to go sightseeing in a Goodyear blimp. For added measure he sent them to the theater and on a boat trip to Catalania Island as well.No movie or television courtroom drama would have dared to unfold the way this one did, and it was not without coincidence that it evolved in Los Angeles, so often referred to by cynics as La La Land the only place in the world where you look for culture in yogurt cups. The rest of the country became obsessed with the empty, celebrity-dominated West Los Angeles backdrop to the crime. Despite his acquittal in a criminal court, in 1997, a civil jury found Simpson liable for the wrongful death of his Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, and ordered him to pay $33 million in damages.
Simpson was planning to publish If I Did It a hypothetical account of how he would have committed the Brown Simpson/Goldman murders in late 2006, but after a publishing deal fell through, a federal bankruptcy judge awarded the book's rights to the family of Ronald Goldman. The Goldman family added commentary to the work and re. In October 2008, O.J. Simpson was convicted on 12 counts of armed robbery and