Absent compelling eyewitness testimony, the prosecution didn't have a chance. For whites, the Simpson story was a moral tale of a hero with a fatal moral flaw that resulted in the brutal death of two people. They were overwhelmed by the evidence, and wanted him found guilty to reaffirm their belief that justice generally prevails in this world. And whites felt betrayed by Simpson, whom they had accepted as a hero only to learn he had done such a horrible thing. It's as if we were to learn that in his off-camera life, Barney the Purple Dinosaur sexually molests, murders, and eats the bodies of small children.
Celebrity is one of the ugliest aspects of American public life.
It is aspired to even more widely than wealth or political power. It confers on those who achieve it a license to be forgiven for horrible things, an ability to have others hide one's faults, a permission to survive and prosper without the normal sort of human decency. O.J.'s violence toward his wife was not unknown, either to the public or to his friends. In Defense of Juries One of the inherent features of the jury system in this country is that it makes mistakes. But no sensible person has ever argued that the jury system is infallible.