OK, hands up who thought that it’d take 400 years to pick the jury for the new OJ Simpson trial because the whole world obviously hates OJ Simpson.
Anyone? Just us? OK, well then we’re the wrong ones. In actual fact, the jury for OJ Simpson’s armed robbery and kidnap trial has almost been completely picked. What does that mean? Well, most importantly it means that the scene is set for us to plunge headlong into the nitty-gritty of the OJ Simpson trial itself next week.
Secondly it ostensibly means that there are a handful of people in Las Vegas who say they don’t care about OJ Simpson murder acquittal in 1995. But what it actually means is that there’s a handful of people who’ve either hidden their furious bitter hatred of OJ Simpson well enough to pass the jury selection process or are currently busy phoning publishers and scribbling down the first draft of their new book How I Banged OJ Simpson Up. Fun!
The best way to think of OJ Simpson trials, we’ve found, is to think of them as Rocky movies. Honestly – it fits. The first one was a sensation that captured the public’s imagination and took loads of money even though it didn’t have a traditional feel-good ending, and the second one is Rocky 2 – a bit more spurious and clumsily put-together, but more likely to give the public the ending they crave.
Or perhaps it won’t. This week has seen the jury selection process for the OJ Simpson trial take place, and the judge has gone to extreme lengths to ensure that no jurors picked have any lingering resentment over OJ’s acquittal a decade ago.
How successful they’ve been remains to be seen, but at least they’ve done it quickly. Yesterday, during the third day of jury selection, the judge declared the process to be almost over, which was especially thrilling because they’d managed to catch some real lunatics in the process. AP reports:
One man’s angry outburst against Simpson led to a defense motion to dismiss the entire jury pool because everyone had heard it. The man, who had been waiting for three days to have his say, blurted out a comment that stunned the courtroom. “I feel the case down in Los Angeles — if someone got away with that, you would keep yourself clean and you wouldn’t come back and commit another crime,” he said.
Luckily for OJ Simpson, though, this man and others who shared similar opinions were weeded out of the prospective jury pool, leaving only those with no real interest or memory of OJ Simpson’s murder trial in the running to decide his fate. So basically it’s going to be a jury comprised of elderly Alzheimer’s sufferers and some toddlers.
And that’s probably a good thing because, considering that OJ Simpson faces life imprisonment if he’s found guilty of a crime that he was allegedly actually taped doing, he might just need all the help he can get.
But back to the whole Rocky analogy again. Let’s hope the formula sticks, because that way the OJ Simpson trial after next will include a hamfisted Cold War allegory and Paulie getting a robot for his birthday. And isn’t that what everyone wants to see?