Simpson Guilty in Robbery Trial

By STEVE FRIESS
Published: October 4, 2008
LAS VEGAS — O. J. Simpson was found guilty late Friday on all 12 counts stemming from a confrontation in a hotel room last year, including armed robbery and kidnapping.

O.J. Simpson, left, hugged his friend Thomas Scotto after he was found guilty at his trial in Las Vegas. His sister Carmelita Durio is at right.
The verdict, which comes 13 years to the day after Mr. Simpson was acquitted in the highly publicized murders of his ex-wife and her friend, concluded a four-week trial that many have seen as a proxy for those unsatisfied by that 1995 outcome.

Mr. Simpson now faces 15 years to life for the kidnapping charge as well as a minimum of at least an additional 10 years in prison on the other charges. His attorney, Yale Galanter, said he would appeal.

After the verdicts were read, the judge revoked the bail for Mr. Simpson, a Heisman Trophy winner and an inductee in the National Football Hall of Fame. As his sister, Carmelita, wept and fainted in the front row, he was led away in handcuffs. Mr. Simpson is scheduled to be sentenced on Dec. 5.

“He’s extremely upset, extremely emotional,” Mr. Galanter said after his was escorted from the courtroom. “We knew this was going to be very difficult, we knew the jury was going to be very difficult, we knew the jurisdiction would be very difficult.”

Clark County District Attorney David Roger, the lead prosecutor in the case, said his office would not comment on the case until after sentencing. None of the jurors spoke to the media on Friday.

The charges arose after Mr. Simpson led five cohorts on a raid of a guest room at the Palace Station Hotel-Casino and departed with hundreds of memorabilia items related to the sports careers of Mr. Simpson and three other athletes.

The items were in the possession of two memorabilia dealers, Bruce L. Fromong and Alfred Beardsley, who were led to believe that a prospective buyer was coming to browse the goods. Instead, Mr. Simpson and his group burst into the room. According to several witnesses, at least one gun was brandished.

The presence of a weapon adds years to the minimum sentences for 9 of the 12 charges, which also included conspiracy to commit robbery and kidnapping, burglary, robbery, assault and coercion.

The jury of nine women and three men deliberated for 13 hours, mulling 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.

There were no blacks among the jurors, a concern of the defense that Mr. Simpson’s attorneys said would likely be part of an appeal. Eight of 12 jurors were black when he was acquitted in 1995 on charges that he stabbed to death his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman.

Convicted alongside Mr. Simpson, 61, was Clarence Stewart, 54, one of the five men who accompanied Mr. Simpson in the raid. Mr. Stewart faces the same sentences.

Throughout the trial, Mr. Stewart’s attorney E. Brent Bryson asked repeatedly for Mr. Stewart to receive a separate trial because associating with Mr. Simpson was poisonous to the defense. Each of his severance motions was denied.

“If there was ever a trial in the history of American jurisprudence that should have been severed, it was obviously this trial,” Mr. Bryson said. “There’s a spillover effect here. There’s a gentleman by the name of O. J. Simpson who was sitting across the table. Mr. Simpson has a certain history that followed him into the courtroom and, unfortunately, it engulfed Mr. Stewart also.”

Mr. Simpson’s defense was that he sought only to retrieve personal keepsakes, like ceremonial footballs from his career in the National Football League and photographs of his family that were taken from his home years ago. Mr. Roger told the jury that 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,” Mr. Roger said in his closing arguments on Thursday. “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 had accompanied Mr. Simpson and Mr. Stewart, all of whom have accepted plea deals from prosecutors in exchange for testimony. Two of them, Walter Alexander and Michael McClinton, carried guns in the incident, and one, Mr. McClinton, testified that he did so at Mr. Simpson’s request.

Mr. Simpson said he did not know that the two would carry weapons and never saw any guns displayed during the incident.

This Simpson trial failed to capture the intense public interest that turned his 1995 trial into what was called the “trial of the century.” That spectacle became a racial touchstone and turned a list of legal analysts, including Greta Van Susteren, Jeffrey Toobin and Star Jones, into television stars. Few of the media stars involved in that case flocked to this one — Vanity Fair’s Dominick Dunne was a notable exception — and even Marcia Clark, the former prosecutor who failed to convict Mr. Simpson in 1995, did not appear despite securing media credentials to report for “Entertainment Tonight.”

Video Report Indeed, this case played out against the backdrop of a nation obsessed by a presidential election campaign and the nation’s economic crisis. But the current trial also featured victims who were far less sympathetic, two middle-aged memorabilia dealers who both attempted 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 Mr. Fromong, Mr. Beardsley and the four men who assisted Mr. Simpson and Mr. Stewart. On several occasions, Simpson attorneys Yale Galanter and Gabriel Grasso caught those witnesses in apparent contradictions, like when Mr. Fromong insisted he did not try to sell his story despite audio recordings immediately after the incident in which Mr. Fromong is heard saying: “I’ll have ‘Inside Edition’ down here tomorrow. I told them I want big money.”

While Mr. Simpson’s famous acquittal in the 1994 murders was never discussed during the trial, it hung over the proceedings. Jurors were quizzed extensively before their selection about their views of the divisive 1995 trial, and references were made in some of the audio recordings to the fact that Mr. Simpson owes the estate of Ms. Simpson and Mr. Goldman $33.5 million because in 1997 he was held liable in a civil lawsuit for the deaths.

Mr. Galanter attacked that issue in his closing, noting that Mr. Riccio’s recorder had picked up police officers at the crime scene seeming to exult in their chance to prosecute Mr. Simpson. He also noted that Mr. Riccio alone testified that 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,” Mr. Galanter said. “This case has taken on a life of its own because Mr. 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.”

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