LAS VEGAS — A jury here Friday night found O.J. Simpson guilty of robbery and kidnapping, a verdict that came 13 year to the day after Simpson was acquitted in the highly publicized murders of his ex-wife and her friend.
Simpson was facing 12 charges stemming from a September 2007 confrontation in a casino hotel room in which he and five cohorts departed with hundreds of items of sports memorabilia.
The items were in the possession of two memorabilia dealers, Bruce L. Fromong and Alfred Beardsley, who were led to believe a prospective buyer was coming to browse the goods. Instead, Simpson and his group burst into the room and, according to several witnesses, at least one gun was brandished.
The jury of nine women and three men, who deliberated for 13 hours, mulled weeks of testimony as well as hours of surreptitious audio recordings of the planning and execution of the event by Thomas Riccio, a memorabilia auctioneer who arranged the confrontation.
Simpson, 61, and a co-defendant, Clarence Stewart, 54, are facing 15 years to life on the kidnapping charge.
Simpson has said he was seeking to retrieve only personal keepsakes like ceremonial footballs from his Hall of Fame NFL career and photos of his family that years ago were taken from his home; the prosecutors said he should have filed a civil lawsuit to regain the items if they were, in fact, stolen from him.
"We don't want people going into rooms to take property," said David Roger, the Clark County district attorney who led the prosecution. "That is robbery. You don't go in and get a gun and demand property from people."
Four of the 24 witnesses who testified were the other men who accompanied with Simpson and Stewart, all of whom have accepted plea deals from prosecutors in exchange for testimony. Two of those men, Walter Alexander and Michael McClinton, carried guns in the incident and one, McClinton, testified that he did so at Simpson's request.
Simpson said he did not know the two would carry weapons and never saw any guns displayed during the incident.
The proceedings failed to capture the intense public interest that turned Simpson's 1995 trial into the so-called Trial of the Century. That spectacle became a racial touchstone and turned a list of legal analysts including Greta Van Sustern, Jeffrey Toobin and Star Jones into television stars. Few of the news media stars involved in that case flocked to this one, although Dominick Dunne of Vanity Fair was a notable exception. Marcia Clark, the former prosecutor who failed to convict Simpson in 1995 did not appear despite securing media credentials to report for Entertainment Tonight.
The case played out against the backdrop of a nation more interested in the presidential election campaign and the nation's economic crisis. It also featured victims who were far less sympathetic: two middle-aged memorabilia dealers who tried to profit from their roles in this case by trying to sell their stories to the tabloid media.
The defense focused much of its efforts on discrediting Fromong, Beardsley and the four men who assisted Simpson and Stewart in the alleged robbery. On several occasions, Simpson attorneys Yale Galanter and Gabriel Grasso caught those witnesses in apparent contradictions, as when Fromong insisted he did not try to sell his story despite audio recordings immediately after the incident in which Fromong is heard saying: "I'll have 'Inside Edition' down here tomorrow. I told them I want big money."
A measure of the limited public interest in the case may be that Frederic Goldman, the father of Ronald Goldman, admitted he followed the proceedings "only generally" from his home in Phoenix. Still, with a verdict coming he sharpened his focus.
"At the absolute least, I'd like to see him in jail," Goldman said Friday of Simpson. "He's not going to get the punishment for Ron's murder that he deserved, but at least he should be in jail for as long as they can put him there."
While Simpson's acquittal in the 1994 murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman, was never discussed during the trial, it hung over the proceedings. Jurors were quizzed extensively before their selection about their views of that trial, and references were made in some of the audio recordings to the fact that Simpson owes the estate of Ms. Simpson and Goldman $33.5 million because in 1997 he was held liable in a civil lawsuit for the deaths.
Galanter attacked that issue in his closing, noting that Riccio's recorder picked up police officers at the crime scene seeming to exult in their chance to prosecute Simpson. He also noted that Riccio testified he had made more than $200,000 in fees from the news media in exchange for interviews and rights to his recordings.
"This case has never been about a search for the true facts," Galanter said. "This case has taken on a life of its own because Simpson's involved. You know that, I know that, every cooperator, every person with a gun, every person who signed a book deal, every person who got paid money, the police, the district attorney's office, was only interested in one thing: Mr. Simpson."