OJ Simpson trial - 1 July 1994

There used to be a rule in England, which so far as I'm concerned might have been the 11th Commandment handed down by Moses. The rule carried a warning in two words only, for any journalist who, when a crime had been committed, felt like stretching himself. The warning phrase as pronounced by the English judges was "sub judice" or, if you pronounced your Latin in the barbarous Roman fashion, "sub judice"', either way it meant that the crime you are interested in was at the time under consideration by the courts and until some authority decided there was a case to be tried, it was none of your business commenting on or speculating about it.

In fact, there were strict sometimes expensive penalties that could be levied against any journalist, any newspaper that broke this rule. Anyway, as a fledgling journalist, I was brought up on the sub judice rule as of several others that protected the citizen from being unfairly criticised. The laws of libel and slander were also something you had to know a little about. One rule I learned very early was never to write anything that brought a man into ridicule with his fellow men. Well that pretty much would have deprived the English literature of just about every satirist you can think of, from Geoffrey Chaucer to Alexander Pope to Evelyn Waugh to Groucho Marx, not to mention Spitting Image. Mention of that last, like a bomb dropping on a tea party, will tell you in a flash that all these legal niceties and concern for what the United Nations charter calls the dignity of the individual have been trodden under foot in the rough-shod march of human curiosity as demonstrated by the daily parade of those gallant defenders of free speech the tabloid press. The tabloid telly is growing fast and flourishing in America in programmes that once would have had its producers behind bars.

So you may have gathered why I have not at anytime during the past few weeks made even a mention of the name and sudden notoriety of OJ Simpson and why even now I'm loathe to talk about him. People have been saying to me, "I suppose this week you had your fill of comment about the shocking case of OJ," and I said, "no, when it's decided there's a case against him and he comes to trial, then we'll go into it". And people say, "oh really". I'm afraid it's no longer possible to stay with the old rule without sounding prim and fussy, prissy in fact.

Now if it's possible that anyone listening to me at this moment has not heard the name and the case of OJ Simpson, I better say that he's probably the most famous, the most handsome, certainly the most greatly gifted of modern American athletes in my time, your time or the time of anyone interested in American football who is now alive and sanctioned just as once American's and not only Americans automatically referred to Bobby Jones as the greatest golfer who'd ever lived, so Americans repeat as an catechism the answer to the question "who is the greatest running back in the history of American football?" OJ Simpson. He's in his mid 40s now, long retired, but the memory of his weaving, feinting, slicing through the plunging opposition is dazzling still and the recollection of his grace, his elegant good humour, his looks has been preserved by some clever television commercials he did for a car rental agency and then a raft of movies, which were never going to collect all the Oscars, but didn't demean either the remembrance of one of the most admired men as also one of the most admired blacks of our time.

Imagine then the unhappy early morning of Monday 13 June, when the telephone rang in OJ Simpson's room in a Chicago hotel. He'd gone there for a business meeting with his car rental sponsor. The call was from the Los Angeles police to tell him that his wife had been found stabbed and murdered just outside her house along with a murdered man. Even that bare account, the first we heard was brutally shocking and the first impulse was to grieve for Mr Simpson.

Within hours, it came out that OJ had been in his Chicago hotel room only about two hours, he checked in about I believe four in the morning Chicago time, he said he'd taken a plane from Los Angeles airport at a quarter to midnight and it was shown that he had. He had his lawyer came to say been waiting in his own Los Angeles home a mile or two away from his separated wife waiting for a limousine to take him to the airport when the crime according to the police could have been committed. There the first doubt was sprung. A day or two later, the district attorney's office charged him with premeditated murder of both victims.

Then we learnt that the day before, both OJ and his wife had taken their two children to a school performance of some kind that OJ had gone home and Mrs Simpson had gone off to dinner at a favourite restaurant. She was described by friends as happy and much relieved at her decision to divorce Mr Simpson. She'd left her glasses at the restaurant and in the evening telephoned the manager, he said not to worry, a waiter who was a good friend of Mrs Simpson's would drop them off on his way home. He did so, he was the murdered man.

To that point, the case the public knowledge of it was within the normal restrictions of the law, but the moment OJ was charged, the television networks and the cable networks and the independent city stations and of course the tabloids went ape within patience to know the worst or to assume it. In no time, even the most serious American papers and the television of course were printing as news rumours and rumoured leaks they said they had from the police or from that most useful informer when you haven't much to go on, observers. There was a big to-do about a ski mask having been found, which would suggest premeditation and do away with the early idea that Mr Simpson's defence would be one of insanity.

It turned out, by a confession of the prosecutor there was no ski mask. Then lots of unproved assertions about bloodstains drops, a glove in one place that was said to match a glove in OJ's house and so on. Mr Simpson has by now fortified himself with three lawyers who have an impressive record of getting acquittals for defendants whose cases looked hopeless at the start. Mr Simpson's lawyers first complained that some of these rumours were coming from the police in the arraignment session, they said they would ask for a hearing at which the prosecution would be challenged to say whether this rumour or that was correct. The chief prosecutor responded with what amounted to an apology, there was never any ski mask. The rumour mill ground on. Meanwhile, a grand jury had been sitting, summoned the day after the bodies were found.

Grand juries abolished 60 years ago in England, are famously the creature of the DA the prosecutor, the defence plays no part, it's allowed no witnesses, no cross examination, so nine times out of 10, if not more often still, the grand jury hearing at length the prosecution's case brings in a bill of indictment. Yes, they're saying there is a case against the man or woman charged and it should go to trial. Now we were being told every day after the murders that the grand jury was on the verge on indicting Mr Simpson.

Then one evening about a week ago, it seemed to me that nearly every television programme being aired was suspended for the time it took to play over with subtitles an unseen but shocking scene and desperate sometimes sobbing wife begging the police to come and arrest her husband who could be heard in the background raving and storming and spouting obscenities. The shocking part was the realisation that the wife was Mrs Simpson and the raving man was Mr Simpson. This tape had not been filched; it had been released by the Los Angeles city police without permission from anyone.

The DA's office, the prosecutor was furious, so was the judge who'd presided over the arraignment for the same reason. The airing of that tape, the ugly brutal scene, it fed into our imaginations was about as prejudicial a piece of evidence as you can dream up. On that ground, the judge closed down the grand jury hearing, an extremely rare practice but one a judge is qualified to do, saying that it was almost inconceivable that the jurors had not heard or would not hear about the police tape.

Incidentally, the solidly planted prejudice was dug deeper by the correct report that Mrs Simpson had over the last year or two called the police nine times to save her from her husband's beatings. Once he was brought to court for a specific offence and lightly punished, somehow this never got out to the media at the time. So instead of a grand jury indictment, the defence requested and got a preliminary hearing before a judge at which the prosecution was to lay out its positive case on the understanding that the defence lawyers would be allowed to see and independently test every bit of evidence brought in to support the charge of a double murder. That began on Thursday.

The first development being that the judge ordered 10 hairs to be taken from the head of OJ Simpson to be matched against hairs found in a cap left near the murdered bodies. The first strike for the defence was scored when it urged that all the evidence – skid marks, blood, caps, whatever – picked up by the police in the early morning of the 13th should be excluded from the case because the police had secured the evidence by illegal entry, they did not have a warrant, which they didn't.

The press and other media are of course within their respectable rights in reporting that hearing, so the networks were prepared to loose millions of dollars to sponsors by stopping the soaps even going to the extreme of abandoning coverage of the World Cup and sacred Wimbledon, why, why so inpatient little man? Because everyone wants to know the verdict now before we've heard the facts, the case charged, the case defended, before, in fact, the trial, which is the point at which we the media should decently come in.

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