At least in my opinion. You don’t have to be a Thurgood Marshall, Antonin Scalia or Judge Learned Hand to appreciate the fact that OJ’s eligibility for parole on his armed robbery and kidnapping conviction has nothing to do with any offense to which the newly discovered knife might relate. He was, after all, found not guilty in a court of law of the murders of Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman.
Whether or not the system worked in the way that any of us individually thought it should, in America, when the jury acquits, the matter concludes– forever.
For those who somehow don’t know, a knife has miraculously surfaced– allegedly found by workers several years ago when OJ’s property was being bulldozed. People are speculating that it is the infamous “murder knife” that was used in the brutal double slaying. No murder weapon was ever produced during the trial.
I, for one, don’t buy for one minute that “the murder knife” has suddenly surfaced.
According to reports, workers who were involved in the demolition of OJ’s old estate found the knife buried in the ground. Surely the search for the murder weapon back in 1994 included the use of metal detecting equipment and a sweep of the entire OJ property. And how deep could OJ have buried it according to the timeline laid out by prosecutors before he was picked up and taken to the airport?
At any rate, the workers are said to have turned the knife over to a detective who simply tossed it into a shoebox or something. Maybe he was hoping for a huge Ebay pay day.
Or maybe he realized that the knife found by the workers didn’t match the description of the type of knife that made the wounds described by the coroner.
The only thing a suddenly found murder knife could do in this case would be to either confirm or put to rest the 2012 statement given by confessed serial killer Glen Rogers, that he killed Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman in 1994 when he went to the house at the urging of OJ to retrieve some jewelry, then went on to kill more than 70 women throughout 1994 and 1995. Prosecutors accepted Rogers’ confessions on other killings, but not as to Simpson and Goldman. Funny how that works.
The 68-year-old OJ is currently doing 9 to 33 years in Nevada for armed robbery and kidnapping. He’s up for parole next year. A spokesman for the Nevada Parole Board suggested that the board may consider the knife in deciding whether to let him out or not.
I submit that the knife, no matter what the forensic examinations disclose, has no relevance to the crime for which he is currently doing time. At most, a knife with his blood on it could be evidence that he committed a crime, but since OJ has already been determined NOT to have committed murder, it could not be used as evidence that he did. For a parole board to use such evidence against him would be an end run around the constitutional concept– and the spirit– of double jeopardy.
Nevada law permits the parole board to take into account “the [person’s] history of criminal conduct.” Since aside from the armed robbery and kidnapping charges OJ has no criminal history, I can’t see how the knife could be used.
For me, then, this newly discovered knife is, in the words of William Shakespeare: “much ado about nothing.”
