O.J. Simpson trial. The trial began on January 24, 1995, with Lance Ito as the presiding judge. The Los Angeles district attorney’s office, led by Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden, emphasized the domestic violence that had occurred prior to and after the Simpsons’ 1992 divorce as a motive for the murders.
It ended at Simpson’s home in Brentwood, California, where he was placed under arrest and taken into police custody. Simpson was formally arraigned on July 22, 1994, entering a plea of not guilty.
In 1996, Fred Goldman and Sharon Rufo, the parents of Ron Goldman, and Lou Brown, father of Nicole Brown filed a civil suit against Simpson for wrongful death. The Plaintiffs were represented by Daniel Petrocelli and Simpson by Robert Baker.
Christopher Allen Darden (born April 7, 1956) is an American lawyer, author, actor, and lecturer. He worked for 15 years in the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office, where he gained national attention as a co-prosecutor in the O. J. Simpson murder case.
When the case ended, Darden became a college professor before starting his own law firm. He is now 65 and still practicing law.
Sum it up: What happened with Marcia Clark during the O.J. Simpson trial? Marcia was the lead prosecutor on the case, which attempted to charge O.J. with the murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown, and her friend, Ron Goldman in 1994. The sensational 252-day trial ended on October 3, 1995, when O.J. was acquitted.
Ultimately, Shapiro settled the case for $450,000 (nearly twice the amount he said he was paid to represent the client in the first place), without admitting any wrongdoing.
Chris Darden confirms he and Marcia Clark 'were more than friends' | EW.com.
Marcia Clark, the trial's lead prosecutor, resigned from the Los Angeles District Attorney's office after the case and left the practice of law.
June 16, 1994Nicole Brown Simpson / Date of burial
Marcia Clark was a second- or third-rate lawyer. She didn't do a good job. She hit on everybody but Bob Shapiro, who she hated." The 2016 FX true crime anthology series, “The People v.
Marcia CarterChristopher Darden / Spouse (m. 1997)
66 years (April 7, 1956)Christopher Darden / Age
Marcia CarterChristopher Darden / Wife (m. 1997)
Gordon Clarkm. 1980–1995Gabriel Horowitzm. 1976–1980Marcia Clark/Husband
The two lead prosecutors were Deputy District Attorneys Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden. Clark was designated as the lead prosecutor and Darden became Clark's co-counsel. Prosecutors Hank Goldberg and William Hodgman, who have successfully prosecuted high-profile cases in the past, assisted Clark and Darden. Two prosecutors who were DNA experts, Rockne Harmon and George "Woody" Clarke, were brought in to present the DNA evidence in the case and were assisted by Prosecutor Lisa Kahn.
J. Simpson was tried and acquitted for the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald "Ron" Goldman.
Fears grew that race riots, similar to the riots in 1992, would erupt across Los Angeles and the rest of the country if Simpson were convicted of the murders. As a result, all Los Angeles police officers were put on 12-hour shifts. The police arranged for more than 100 police officers on horseback to surround the Los Angeles County courthouse on the day the verdict was announced, in case of rioting by the crowd. President Bill Clinton was briefed on security measures if rioting were to occur nationwide.
The defense team's reasonable doubt theory was summarized as "compromised, contaminated, corrupted" in opening statements. They argued that the DNA evidence against Simpson was "compromised" by the mishandling of criminalists Dennis Fung and Andrea Mazzola during the collection phase of evidence gathering, and that 100% of the "real killer (s)" DNA had vanished from the evidence samples. The evidence was then "contaminated" in the LAPD crime lab by criminalist Collin Yamauchi, and Simpson's DNA from his reference vial was transferred to all but three exhibits. The remaining three exhibits were planted by the police and thus "corrupted" by police fraud. The defense also questioned the timeline, claiming the murders happened around 11:00pm that night.
From an original jury pool of 40 percent white, 28 percent black, 17 percent Hispanic, and 15 percent Asian, the final jury for the trial had ten women and two men, of whom nine were black, two white and one Hispanic. The jury was sequestered for 265 days, the most in American history.
The prosecution denied that the mistakes made by Fung and Mazzola changed the validity of the results. They noted that all of the evidence samples were testable and that most of the DNA testing was done at the two consulting labs, not the LAPD crime lab where contamination supposedly happened. Since all of the samples the consulting labs received were testable, while Scheck and Neufeld's theory predicted that they should have been inconclusive after being "100% degraded", the claim that all the DNA was lost to bacterial degradation was not credible. The prosecution denied that contamination happened in the LAPD crime lab as well because the result would be a mixture of the "real killer (s)" DNA and Simpson's DNA but the results showed that only Simpson's DNA was present. The prosecution also noted the defense declined to challenge any of those results by testing the evidence themselves. Marcia Clark called Scheck and Neufeld's claims a "smoke screen."
Alternative theories of the murders, supposedly shared by Simpson, have suggested they were related to the Los Angeles drug trade, and that Michael Nigg, a friend and co-worker of Goldman, was murdered as well. Simpson himself has stated in numerous interviews that he believes the two had been killed over their involvement in drug dealing in the area, and that other murders at the time were carried out for the same reason. Brown, Simpson believed, had been planning to open a restaurant using proceeds from cocaine sales. Mezzaluna was reportedly a nexus for drug trafficking in Brentwood.
On the prosecution side, Marcia Clark served as lead counsel, supported by Christopher Darden. Lasting close to a year, the trial and the events surrounding it were considered the most publicized events the world had ever seen. To many, it became a media circus full of colorful characters, opportunists and courtroom dysfunction ...
After losing the Simpson case, Clark resigned from the L.A. District Attorney's office.
After prosecutor Darden made the mistake of demanding Simpson try on the ill-fitted bloody gloves, Cochran uttered the famous phrase: "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit.".
However, the blow that removed Shapiro from his lead status was when Cochran won Simpson's favor by visiting him in jail — something Shapiro preferred not to do with any of his clients. Once Cochran took over as lead counsel, Shapiro was vocally critical and attempted to distance himself from his team's chosen strategies. He would later tell Barbara Walters that "not only did we play the race card, we dealt it from the bottom of the deck."
Due to Kaelin's shiftiness on the stand , prosecutor Clark turned against him and treated him as a hostile witness. Regardless, Kaelin — with his thick tufts of blond hair and surfer dude ways — gained considerable popularity in the media as a likable and comedic character of the trial.
Reportedly, one juror wholly dismissed Park's testimony because he was unable to recall the number of cars parked at the Rockingham mansion.
Aspiring actor and houseguest of Simpson, Brian "Kato" Kaelin was a star witness for the prosecution. Present at Simpson 's Rockingham mansion at the time of the murders, Kaelin claimed that he ate dinner with Simpson that night but could not account for the star athlete's whereabouts between the hours of 9:36 p.m. and 11 p.m. (the prosecution theorized that Simpson murdered his ex-wife and Goldman between 10 p.m. and 10:30 p.m.).
She worked as a deputy district attorney for Los Angeles County, California, and was mentored by prosecutor Harvey Giss.
Prior to this trial, Clark's highest-profile prosecution was in 1991, when she prosecuted Robert John Bardo for the murder of television star Rebecca Schaeffer. Clark said that the media attention she received during the trial was "the hell of the trial", calling herself "famous in a way that was kind of terrifying".
Horowitz was briefly in the news after he sold topless photos of Clark to the National Enquirer during the O. J. Simpson trial. In 1980, Clark married her second husband, Gordon Clark, a computer programmer and systems administrator who was employed at the Church of Scientology.
Simpson wanted a speedy trial, and the defense and prosecuting attorneys worked around the clock for several months to prepare their cases. The trial began on January 24, 1995, seven months after the murders, and was televised by closed-circuit TV camera via Court TV, and in part by other cable and network news outlets, for 134 days. Judge Lance Ito presided over the trial in the C.S. Fo…
Nicole Brown met O.J. Simpson in 1977 when she was 18 and working as a waitress at the Daisy (a Beverly Hills private club), and they began dating even though Simpson was already married. Simpson filed for divorce from his first wife in March 1979 and married Brown on February 2, 1985. Brown and Simpson went on to have two children, Sydney (b. 1985) and Justin (b. 1988). Accordin…
On the evening of June 12, 1994, Brown and Simpson both attended their daughter Sydney's dance recital at Paul Revere Middle School. Afterwards, Brown and her family went to eat at Mezzaluna restaurant; they did not invite Simpson to join them. One of the waiters at the restaurant was Ron Goldman, who had become close friends with Brown in recent weeks, but was not assign…
On the night of June 12, Simpson was scheduled to board a red-eye flight from Los Angeles International Airport to Chicago, where he was due to play golf the following day at a convention with representatives of Hertz rental car Corporation, for whom he was a spokesman. The flight was due to leave at 11:45 pm, and a limousine arrived early at Simpson's Rockingham estate to pick him up at arou…
After learning that Brown was the female victim, LAPD commander Keith Bushey ordered detectives Tom Lange, Philip Vannatter, Ron Phillips, and Mark Fuhrman to notify Simpson of her death and to escort him to the police station to pick up the former couple's children, who were asleep in Brown's condominium at the time of the murders. The detectives buzzed the intercom …
On June 20, Simpson was arraigned and pleaded not guilty to both murders and was held without bail. The following day, a grand jury was called to determine whether to indict him for the two murders but was dismissed on June 23, as a result of excessive media coverage that could have influenced its neutrality. Instead, authorities held a probable cause hearing to determine whether to bring Simpson to trial. California Superior Court Judge Kathleen Kennedy-Powell ruled on July …
When the trial began, all of the networks were getting these hate-mail letters because people's soap operas were being interrupted for the Simpson trial. But then what happened was the people who liked soap operas got addicted to the Simpson trial. And they got really upset when the Simpson trial was over, and people would come up to me on the street and say, 'God, I loved your show.'— …