Editor’s note: This essay originally appeared in New York’s issue dated October 16, 1995, shortly after a jury acquitted O.J. Simpson. We’re reprinting it on the occasion of his death today at 76.
As you may have heard, O.J. Simpson walked. And the first thing he did, Disney World being out of the question, was have a party at his Rockingham estate. O.J. would see his small children Sydney and Justin the next day in a tasteful reunion, with only the Star present to take exclusive photos for upwards of $500,000; right now, as Nicole’s father said, he had “some wild oats to sow.” Near where police had found O.J.’s blood-saturated socks, white-gloved waiters hovered with offerings of shrimp, steak, and chicken. The wingding featured Champagne on the balcony; Simpson’s mother, Eunice, arriving in a cream Rolls-Royce; and “curvy nude model” Paula Barbieri — as the New York Post delicately put it — arriving for the night. The whole fiesta was filmed for later airing on O.J.’s expected $10 million pay-per-view interview. A classy homecoming, in short, one bespeaking the humility that has enabled Simpson to endure these monstrous false accusations.
Wait. That little bubble of sarcasm was wholly inappropriate, and I apologize. I still catch myself thinking that a man who is manifestly guilty of butchering two people like pigs in a slaughterhouse and who should spend the rest of his life vainly scraping at his bars with a dull toothbrush might give thanks for his freedom in a more seemly manner. Might even feel a pang of, oh, I don’t know, guilt.
But that’s old thinking, yesterday’s morality. The fact is that today powerful men walk or do only token time, feel no guilt, and often cash in even bigger than before. In the old days Fatty Arbuckle’s career was ruined, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb received lengthy sentences for murder, and Robert Mitchum served time for smoking pot. Nowadays, punishment, like taxes, is for the little people.
Witness sculptor Carl Andre (acquitted of pushing his wife out the window after an argument); John DeLorean (acquitted of drug possession, conspiracy, and distribution, despite an incriminating videotape); the director John Landis (acquitted of the involuntary manslaughter of actor Vic Morrow); Washington fixer Clark Clifford (indicted but never tried — because of ailing health — on charges of bribery and conspiracy in the secret acquisition of First American Bank by BCCI); Senator Alfonse D’Amato (found by the Senate Ethics Committee to have conducted his office in an “improper and inappropriate manner,” but not charged with influence peddling to Wedtech, Unisys, and many other companies); and Michael Milken (did time but just rehabilitated with a $50 million bouquet from Ted Turner for his fine work in getting Turner together with Time Warner).
Witness also the merry Iran-contra gang: Oliver North and John Poindexter, whose felony charges were reversed on an evidentiary technicality; Caspar Weinberger and Robert McFarlane, who were pardoned by outgoing president George Bush; Bush himself, whose claim to be “out of the loop” was undercut by Weinberger’s handwritten meeting notes; and Ronald Reagan, who gave investigators three different versions of what he knew and when he knew it.
All these guys knew other guys who knew the guys to know; they were upheld by their network; they had top lawyers. Lawyers! The one moment in the Simpson trial when I admired a defense lawyer’s probity was when Robert Shapiro stood in court to denounce Johnnie Cochran for making racist detective Mark Fuhrman the issue. “Not only did we play the race card, we dealt it from the bottom of the deck,” Shapiro said, apologizing to humanity in general. Oh. My time line is off — Shapiro said that after the verdict, when the race card had already trumped for his client.
The piety we heard from so many commentators, including President Clinton, to the effect that the jury system, whatever its flaws, blah, blah, blah, is a dusty civics lesson that shouldn’t even be taught in the third grade. The truth is: If you can afford to hire Johnnie Cochran — or Roy Black or Richard “Racehorse” Haines or Gerry Spence or Thomas Puccio or Alan Dershowitz — at $400 an hour, you’ll probably get away with it. While Martha “Sunny” von Bülow lies in a coma from insulin injections, her husband, Claus, is a glam socialite with a roguish cachet (yes, yes, acquitted in the retrial with Puccio at his side after Dershowitz won an appeal). We kinda think you did it, Claus, but you’re so darn Continental and debonair.
Does anyone doubt that if Susan Smith, who drove her kids into a lake, had had enough money to hire Leslie Abramson, she’d be home right now eating microwave popcorn? Abramson, Erik Menendez’s fiercely mothering attorney, would connect the dots of victimization: sexually abused by her stepfather; rejected by her boyfriend; hasn’t she suffered enough? Gina Grant, too, suffered considerable abuse before she clubbed her mother 13 times with a candlestick. But she worked hard, aced her SATs, and was set to go to Harvard until the university caught wind of the whole, um, you know, the thing that happened. lf Grant had had Johnnie Cochran, she’d be blowing froth off a cappuccino in Harvard Square.
Of course, both Smith and Grant would have done better if they were men. Guys have license. Judges and juries find their flaws natural and forgivable (of Dershowitz’s celebrity clients, Patty Hearst and Leona Helmsley fared least well). But even prominent men need a fortune to be convincing as poor victims. Former House Ways and Means chairman Dan Rostenkowski is having trouble defending against charges that he misappropriated more than $640,000 simply because, after spending $3 million on lawyers, he’s broke. Robert Vesco, now languishing in a Cuban prison for marketing a supposed wonder drug, was a fool to flee America. He should have taken the $224 million he embezzled, hired about 500 lawyers, and gotten himself off on a technicality like a man.
So clear is it that money buys reasonable doubt that we should simply codify it: Henceforth, anyone who can afford to hire Johnnie Cochran is not guilty. Simple as that. When the prosecutor says, “Isn’t this you on the videotape, killing your whole family down to your daughter’s gerbils, Puff and Spanky, and then illegally hooking yourself up to a premium cable channel?” you simply say, “May it please the court, my attorney [dramatic pause] … Johnnie Cochran!” Pandemonium in the court, and you’re escorted home in a white minivan.
Let’s allocate society’s resources where they can be effective. In the future, we should only try poor people, preferably those with marginal IQs who don’t speak much English and have never heard of the Miranda decision. And let’s reconsider the whole idea of court-appointed lawyers. If Colin Ferguson can do such a masterful (and cheap!) job defending himself — even while missing a few toys in the attic — this is clearly an area where private enterprise should replace government intervention.
In employing the Cochran standard, we will simply be adopting our foreign-relations paradigm for domestic use. The U.S. has expressed distaste for — and finally bombed the positions of — Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karazdic and General Ratko Mladic (charged with crimes against humanity for their gleefully announced blood “feast” against Muslims, which required killing 200,000 civilians and raping up to 20,000 women). Yet we winked at the ethnic cleansings carried out by Croatian president and unreconstructed antisemite Franjo Tudjman.
So, too, we insisted that Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, which killed at least 1 million Cambodians during the ’70s, be part of recent election negotiations. And remember George Bush shamelessly toasting the late Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos: “We love your adherence to democratic principles”? We brought that policy home in 1990, when Imelda Marcos was acquitted of stealing $222 million from the Philippines and investing it in Manhattan real estate. Somehow, she was able to afford Gerry Spence.
What a benevolent country! The O.J. case was rife with troubling portents about spousal abuse and racist police, but the bottom line is that — finally! — a prominent Black reprobate can go as scot-free as a prominent white reprobate. Boxing promoter Don King’s odyssey shows how far we’ve come. Thirty years ago he served four years for manslaughter, but he cleanly beat a 1985 federal indictment for tax evasion. Just charged again with nine more counts of insurance fraud, he’ll walk out free and proud.
Mike Tyson and Marion “The Bitch Set Me Up” Barry semi–got away with it. Tyson served three years for the sexual assault of a beauty-pageant contestant, but he scored $25 million in a 90-second comeback fight with a palooka; Barry served six months for an infamous crack possession, then was reelected mayor of Washington. “Get over it,” he told old-school moralists. Clarence Thomas mostly got away with it (his nomination to the Supreme Court confirmed, so able to deal a lethal blow to affirmative action, but left deeply embittered). And now Michael Jackson has totally gotten away with a reported payment of $15 million to the family of the boy he allegedly molested. Given the singer’s wealth, this is less a punishment than a tip.
In our gorgeous mosaic, any member of a historically disadvantaged group who can afford to hire Johnnie Cochran should now feel free to run amok. Bully for Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell if he decides to strangle a few liberals to prove his new GOP bona fides. If autograph seekers pester Hideo Nomo, he has our permission to club them like baby seals. And Stephen Hawking — cowabunga!
Instituting the Cochran standard carries little downside, as most of these rich guys have only one or two or three or four spectacular crimes in them. How likely is it, really, that William Kennedy Smith, now a physician with a special interest in fetal-alcohol syndrome, would get another chance to employ his seduction techniques at one of the family compounds? The old “I’m a Kennedy, you should try it” line has pretty much lost its appeal. And the chance that former U.N. secretary-general Kurt Waldheim would join another Nazi unit that commits atrocities in Yugoslavia is near zero, as he’s almost 80 and the Yugoslavs want younger, more vigorous soldiers to commit their atrocities. Nor can Lyle and Erik Menendez kill any more of their parents, as they’re in jail and, for that matter, orphaned.
And I think we all feel pretty confident that O.J. will be too busy chatting with Larry King, making infotainment deals, and assembling enemies lists to butcher anyone else like a pig in a slaughterhouse. The only ticklish scenario would be if curvy nude model Paula Barbieri makes him really, really mad by, say, disagreeing with him in public, talking to another man in the checkout line, or growing old and wrinkly. And if I were her, I wouldn’t.
