The Juice ain’t loose any more

That the number thirteen is unlucky may be just a superstition to many, but to O.J. Simpson it is reality. Precisely thirteen years after the Hall of Fame professional football player and celebrity was acquitted for the 1994 murders of his ex-wife Nicole Browne Simpson and her lover, Ronald Goldman, he was convicted of armed robbery and sentenced to prison. The event that precipitated his adjudication happened to occur also on September 13, 2007. If The Juice doesn’t loathe the number thirteen now, he probably will in nine years when he’s eligible for parole. The whole thing might become eerily ironic if his parole is denied until after his thirteenth year in the cooler.
There are a few ways to look at this irony: either as a coincidence, bad karma, poetic justice or a combination of the three. I think most people are as convinced that Simpson’s conviction and sentence is justice being served as they are of his guilt in the 1994 double murder case.
And what reasonable person would argue with that?
This is a man who beat his ex-wife on multiple occasions, including at least once to a bloody pulp. He also fled from authorities before he could be arrested and booked for the murders. Heck, the blood left all over the crime scene, in and around Simpson’s now-infamous white Ford Bronco, and even at his own house should have been more than enough DNA evidence to implicate him beyond a reasonable doubt.
But, without going over the particulars of the trial and the case as has already been done ad nauseum, we know that legal technicalities and threats of racial backlash ultimately acquitted The Juice and handed him his freedom.
Unfortunately, ineptness within the Los Angeles Police Department overshadowed Simpson’s evident guilt and turned what ought to have been a slam-dunk case of a man with a violent streak finally snapping into a courtroom farce complete with shenanigans that would have embarrassed even the Keystone Cops.
The tragedy in the aftermath of the Simpson acquittal was that the lives of Nicole Browne Simpson and Ronald Goldman became vested in controversy long after their violent deaths instead of being allowed to rest in peace, because the work of justice remained unfinished.
Until now, that is.
Justice has caught up with their killer. The only tragedy now is that O.J. Simpson isn’t going to serve the time he really deserves, in my opinion.
Had this been any other ordinary person committing armed robbery, the sentence would probably have been 25 years to life in prison. But this is O.J. Simpson we are talking about; not Joe Six Pack. He’s being let off rather easy in my opinion because of who and what he is. O.J. Simpson is a black man, whose race has been a factor in far too many injustices in this country and it’s high time, by gosh, to tip the balance in the other direction for a change, right?
Such was the motivation behind his murder acquittal. Let’s be honest about it. There were a lot of minority voices crying foul and inciting others to protest what they perceived to be just another racist lynching. As such, certain voices threatened to duplicate the 1992 race riots that literally set Los Angeles on fire. Because of race, and the threat of revenge, an evident killer was set free.
Frankly, I think this lingered on the minds of the jurists and the judge who handed down the conviction and passed sentence, respectively. They wanted to avoid touching off a powder keg, so they gave O.J. another break.
The other part of this is simply that The Juice is a celebrity, and our culture has been conditioned to put such a person on a pedestal—even with regard to crimes and punishment. We don’t want to be too harsh on him now and appear as though we were being vindictive in our envy, do we?
The bottom line is that O.J. Simpson beat the system once, but he pressed his luck once too many. And this time, as luck would have it, his had run out—with the number thirteen no less. As the old adage goes, “Fool me once shame on me. Fool me twice, shame on you.”
In the thirteen years since his murder acquittal, The Juice obviously hasn’t learned much about second chances, remorse and how to put them to good use. I doubt in his arrogance and narcissism that he has ever cared to. The violence coursing through his veins on the night of June 12, 1994 returned on September 13, 2007. Instead of a knife, he pulled a gun. The men who were robbed ought to thank their lucky stars that they were not added to Simpson’s body count.
But one thing that concerns me is how in the heck O.J. will be able to search for his ex-wife’s killer while sitting in a prison cell? His pursuit of clues on golf courses around the country proved to be an abject failure. I mean, come on, you don’t really think he was looking for his ball in the tall grass, do you?
If O.J. Simpson is really serious about searching tirelessly for his ex-wife’s killer as he proclaimed shortly after his acquittal, then why doesn’t he just procure a mirror from the prison commissary and look into it.
Not only will his search end, but it will also be just beginning.