They’re all white. Every single one of them. Now don’t get us wrong, it almost wasn’t an entirely white jury. It’s just that one prospective black juror was quite religious and therefore capable of forgiveness so she had to go. We’re not making this up, you know.

So, here’s how OJ Simpson stands before his trial properly starts on Monday. He’s being tried for the first time since he was acquitted of two murders he’s widely believed to have committed, for a crime with several witnesses that he was actually recorded participating in, and the only thing stopping him from spending the rest of his life in jail is a group of 12 white people who’ve been specifically chosen for their lack of forgiveness.

Yeah, we’re sure he’ll be fine.

Since he was acquitted of a double murder in 1995, OJ Simpson hasn’t exactly gone out of his way to endear himself to the public – apart from the time he tried to stab Ruby Wax in the chest with a banana, obviously. He’s not a total monster.

Anyway, since his last trial OJ Simpson has tried to keep a low-profile, only popping up occasionally to get banned from a steakhouse or write hypothetical murder books in the worst taste possible. But then OJ Simpson just had to go and get himself arrested on suspicion of armed robbery, didn’t he?

You know what happened by now – right up to the inflection in OJ Simpson’s voice during the last “You think you can steal my shit?” – and that’s the reason for all the jury-selecting that’s gone on in Las Vegas this week ahead of OJ Simpson’s trial.

OJ’s already up against it, thanks to the recording of his alleged armed robbery and the fact that all his hired goons have already pleaded guilty and will testify against him in court. But OJ Simpson likes a challenge, so let’s also make sure that the jury he faces are completely white and sort of mean-seeming just for the hell of it. AP reports:

An all-white jury will judge O.J. Simpson and a co-defendant on kidnapping and robbery charges after defense lawyers lost a contentious courtroom battle to include two African-American women on the panel… Both of the women who were removed had strong religious views, and the prosecutor said he thought one of them would be inclined to “forgive” Simpson while the other said she was hesitant to send anyone to prison.

Of course, back in 1995 OJ Simpson faced a jury that was chiefly black and he was acquitted, so now the fear is that – since the scientific opposite of black is white, and the scientific opposite of innocent is guilty – all the white people are going to find OJ Simpson guilty.

They probably won’t even be making notes on the testimonies, either – the only thing they jot down will be the word ‘guilty’ scrawled several times in a row and crude cartoons of OJ Simpson literally burning in hell while a lot of white people laugh and dance.

Alternatively, the jurors have been picked based on their open-mindedness and neutrality, two things which have never really been race-specific, and the notion that OJ Simpson will be found innocent or guilty depending on how many black faces happen to be present in the jury is completely offensive to just about everyone.

Oh who are we kidding? It’s the first one, isn’t it. Thought so.

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?

You know, the trial about how OJ Simpson allegedly stormed into a sports memorabilia collector’s hotel room with a bunch of gun-brandishing heavies and demanded that they give him everything with his face on it, or thereabout. Well guess what – OJ Simpson’s trial started yesterday, or at least the jury selection process part of it.

It’s an extremely tricky part of the trial procedure, too. Not just because OJ Simpson faces the rest of his life spent in jail if he’s found guilty of his charges, but because the judge doesn’t want to pick jurors who’ll punish OJ for his murder trial acquittal. Jurors who’ll punish OJ Simpson for his creepy book about the murder or his role in the underwhelming Naked Gun 33/3, sure. Just not the murder thing.

There’s been a dearth of decent celebrity trials lately, hasn’t there? Phil Spector’s murder trial ended up all muddled and crap, and R Kelly’s child pornography trial wasn’t as hilarious as everyone thought it’d be. Honestly, if it wasn’t for Uma Thurman’s berserko stalker, we’d have given up hope long ago.

But maybe our celebrity trial ennui was down to the fact that we were waiting for the daddy of them all to resurface: OJ Simpson. Acquitted of murdering his wife in 1995, but later found responsible for her death in a civil trial, OJ Simpson had been keeping himself to himself in recent years, only pottering around with hobbies like writing the stupidest book in the entire history of humanity. But then the unthinkable happened – OJ Simpson got arrested again.

For those with short memories, here’s a quick recap of the crime OJ Simpson was alleged to have committed. Almost exactly a year ago, OJ Simpson and a gang of gun-toting hired goons stormed the Las Vegas hotel room of a sports memorabilia collector in an attempt to recover items that OJ says were stolen from him. He did this by yelling “You think you can steal my shit?” a million times in a row and calling people a “motherfucker” and so forth.

Unfortunately, one of the men OJ Simpson was allegedly robbing was recording the incident and most of OJ Simpson’s hired goons were only too quick to blab about what a violent criminal mastermind OJ was to get themselves shorter sentences – proving once and for all that you should never trust goons recruited at a wedding reception. And now, despite OJ Simpson’s claims of innocence, it’s gone to trial and Simpson faces life in jail if he’s convicted.

But before any of that can happen, a jury has to be picked. And that might prove to be quite tricky, given that half the population thinks that OJ Simpson is a murderer who narrowly avoid his well-deserved time in jail 13 years ago, and those who think that OJ Simpson was innocent of the murder and therefore innocent of all other crimes as well.

And the Judge presiding over the OJ Simpson trial has decided that she’s not even letting one bitter, drooling, revenge-obsessed lunatoid in the jury. Not one. We know. Weird. Clark County District Judge Jackie Glass told the jurors:

“If you are here thinking you are going to punish Mr. Simpson for what happened in Los Angeles in 1995, this is not the case for you. If you’re looking to become famous because of your service in this case, write a book, then this is not the case for you.”

Several potential jurors have already been dismissed from the trial because they say they can’t put aside feelings about OJ Simpson’s murder trial. How odd – it’s almost as if they knew that by saying they hated OJ Simpson and wanted him to go to jail for stabbing his wife to death over a decade ago they’d be spared a role in a tortuously long, often quite tedious trial. Funny, that.

The testimony in the OJ Simpson trial is set to begin next week, but before then the court has to whittle 500 prospective jurors down to a pool of 40, and then pick the final 12 from that. So don’t hold your breath.

But know one thing – the OJ Simpson trial will start soon, and it’s going to be one exciting ride. Wait, did we say ‘exciting’? We meant ‘really incredibly lose-the-will-to-live long’. Sorry.

The process involves weeding out those who really like R Kelly, those who really hate R Kelly, anyone who’s formed an opinion about R Kelly based on the mountain of press he’s received over his alleged underage sex tape, those who like the idea of watching child porn a little too much and those who did all of the above on purpose to get them out of jury service.

But, despite all that, three jurors have been chosen for the R Kelly child porn trial. The big news, however, is that yesterday R Kelly sat next to a toilet and the poo-stink went up his nose and he got all sad. No, really.

Although being a juror in R Kelly’s upcoming child porn trial means subjecting yourself to weeks and weeks of probably quite harrowing evidence and then wrestling with your conscience about whether or not to send a man to jail until the year 2023 because of that evidence, chances are you’ll get to write a book about it afterwards and that sounds fun. We want in, frankly.

Sadly, because we own over 38 copies of the Space Jam soundtrack on multiple formats and actually do believe we can fly, that’s not likely to happen. But yesterday three lucky kids were chosen to be part of the jury on the long-delayed R Kelly child pornography trial.

As you probably know, after six years of dreaming up new excuses why he shouldn’t stand trial, R Kelly is about to go to court over the video that surfaced in 2002 of him apparently having sex with a girl possibly as young as 13. The jury selection process has begun – an arduous task involving 150 people who must all be interviewed and whittled down to 16 – and according to the Associated Press the three picked yesterday included:

The wife of a Baptist preacher from R. Kelly’s hometown, a business executive and a telecommunications company employee… The executive, a middle-aged man, called child pornography “the lowest of the low” during questioning by the judge and attorneys. But he said he felt he could give a fair trial to the 41-year-old Kelly, who is accused of videotaping himself having sex with a girl as young as 13.

In addition to this, the telecommunications employee stated that he didn’t even like walking past pornography magazines in convenience stores, while the wife of a Baptist preacher is, well, the wife of a Baptist preacher. It’s not looking great for R Kelly – who denies the charges – although there’s still plenty of time to balance this out by picking a bunch of jaundiced-looking perverts in the coming days.

But, of course, the most fun in jury selection processes involve the jurors who didn’t make it. These apparently included a man who seemed to indirectly threaten R Kelly with violence if he was found guilty. God knows we wish he was picked.

The selection process is likely to take up the rest of the week, after which the meat of the trial can begin in earnest. That is unless R Kelly doesn’t pass out from all the shit-fumes billowing up his nose all the time. It’s a possibility – it’s been reported that yesterday R Kelly was made to sit so close to the men’s toilet that he had to keep a tissue clamped against his nose for most of the proceedings.

Hopefully this won’t change during the actual trial, because we’d quite like R Kelly’s poo-sensitive nose to be the new Phil Spector’s lesbian wig. And hopefully that will be enough to keep us going throughout the entire trial, because we can’t find a trace of humour in a video of a grown man weeing all over a girl’s face.

Oh, OK, yes we can, but the poo-nose thing would be an extra special treat on top. Make it happen, court people! Neglect all basic toilet hygiene for us! We’d do the same for you

Read more:

3 jurors chosen for R&B superstar R. Kelly’s trial – AP