Burn in hell, OJ Simpson — where you belong if there’s any justice in this world
In life, Orenthal James Simpson got away with a horrific 1994 double murder — nearly decapitating his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson with a knife and stabbing her friend Ron Goldman so viciously and repeatedly, the overkill continued after he was dead.
If there is justice in this world, the former football star affectionately known as The Juice is now burning in hell.
It was October 1995.
It seemed as if time stopped.
People everywhere froze where they stood and looked at TVs as a deaf, dumb and blind Los Angeles jury declared OJ not guilty.
I was in the courthouse that morning, outraged but not a bit surprised.
For nine months I’d seen up close as OJ’s Dream Team of immoral lawyers warped the justice system.
They turned a straight-forward murder case into a three-ring circus and the murderer into a victim.
Though there was ample evidence of OJ’s guilt, jurors fell for the fiction that he was persecuted by a legal system that targeted him simply because he was black.
Rubbish.
In truth, this case was never about race, but about the way wealth and celebrity can make a man untouchable.
Cops did not brutalize him.
Star-struck lawmen asked for his autograph.
And fame-craving Superior Court Judge Lance Ito repeatedly and infuriatingly fawned over defense lawyers while excluding evidence presented by prosecutors.
When it was done, Johnnie Cochran, the late defense lawyer and chief architect of the lunacy that set OJ free sued me as well as The Post for $10 million.
Because I’d suggested in print that Cochran was a liar.
Sanity prevailed after judges ruled that this was my Constitutionally protected opinion.
In the end, perhaps the most famous murder defendant ever to face trial was felled not by the justice system, but by prostate cancer at age 76.
I would like to think the lessons learned from his agonizing acquittal will not be repeated.
That a man will never again get kid-glove treatment simply because he’s a superstar.
And that a defense lawyer won’t attempt to bully a journalist out of stating the truth, as she sees it.
But mostly that a clearly guilty man will never again get away with murder.
Until that day, we’ll just have to settle for justice in the next life.