OJ Simpson murder trial: How the dramatic court case unfolded

Published

1 year ago

April 14, 2024

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Former American footballer and actor OJ Simpson, who has died of cancer, will be remembered most for his role at the centre of the “trial of the century”.

Accused of double murder, his case captured the attention of the US until it came to a dramatic end in late 1995.

Here’s a look back at how that trial unfolded.

12 June 1994

Simpson‘s ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson was found dead in front of her home in Los Angeles with her friend Ronald Goldman, who was a waiter at a restaurant where she had just dined.

The pair had been stabbed to death outside her home in the neighbourhood of Brentwood.

17 June 1994

After the bodies were found, suspicion quickly fell on Simpson, who had been married to Nicole for seven years until their divorce became final on 15 October 1992, little more than 18 months before her death.

Simpson had been ordered by prosecutors to surrender, but on this day, carrying a passport and a disguise, he instead fled, with friend and former team-mate Al Cowlings in a white Ford Bronco.

The vehicle was soon spotted on a California freeway and pursued by police in a car chase that was televised live across the country and watched by an estimated 95 million viewers.

Cowlings, in a phone call to police, said Simpson was lying in the back seat of the car holding a gun to his own head. After eventually driving to his Brentwood home he was persuaded to surrender.

Sky News’ Steve Bennedik recalls how Simpson’s trial was covered

It was the first few weeks of 1995 when Sky News’ live coverage of the OJ Simpson court case got under way. Each evening we showed the trial and invited questions. In those days, the main form of correspondence was by letter.

But there was also a new electronic method emerging, called email. And the first of these had the simple, but deflating, sentence: “Which one is OJ?”

We asked ourselves: Is our audience ready to follow the story of a very American tragedy unfold on British TV? We decided to stick with it.

In contrast, OJ Simpson was a household name in the US. So much more than an ex-football star. But the shock of this icon being arrested for murder, the bizarre Bronco highway chase, the high-profile celebrity defence team, and ultimately the “did he do it?” question had universal attraction.

Although the case stuttered through until October, the weak Judge Lance Ito was obsequious to lawyers’ demands for delays, but the interest among Sky News viewers surged and remained undimmed.

As the court camera panned to the state of California seal, signalling another adjournment, we and no doubt the viewer sighed.

More behind-the-scenes legal wrangling, but we had an ace up our sleeve – Professor Gary Solis. Gary is a Vietnam veteran, former military judge advocate, with alma maters including George Washington University and the London School of Economics.

At the time, he was in London and ready to give up his evenings. He calmly steered our presenters, Laurie and Vivien, and our often puzzled viewers through the complexities of the Californian legal system and became a firm favourite with the newsroom and the public alike.

The court characters emerged. Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden for the prosecution, and the “Dream Team” defence – Jonnie Cochran, F Lee Bailey, Alan Dershowitz and Robert Kardashian, whose children would go on to outshine his fame.

It was compelling court drama, but it was also the very tragic story of two young people who’d been savagely attacked and murdered, with their families devastated by the loss, and tormented by the lingering back and forth court battle.

The proceedings had lasted months, but the jury reached their verdict in just a few hours and when they returned to the courtroom to deliver it, an early evening audience in the UK was hanging on every moment. And then it was over. OJ was a free man.

The People of the State of California v Orenthal James Simpson faded as a memory, flickering back to life with the news of his death.

24 January 1995

The murder trial, dubbed the “trial of the century” by the media, began.

Prosecutors argued OJ Simpson had killed Nicole and Ron in a jealous rage, and they presented extensive blood, hair and fibre tests linking him to the murders.

The defence countered that the celebrity defendant was framed by racist white police.

15 June 1995

Perhaps the defining moment of the trial came on a Thursday in June, when the prosecution committed what a defence lawyer would later describe as the “greatest legal blunder of the 20th century”.

On this day, a prosecutor asked him to put on a pair of gloves believed to have been worn by the killer.

The gloves appeared to be too small, as OJ Simpson struggled to put on the gloves in a highly theatrical demonstration and indicated to the jury they did not fit.

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This led defence lawyer Johnnie Cochran to famously state in his closing argument: “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”

3 October 1995

The trial came to an end with two words – not guilty.

OJ Simpson, who maintained from the outset he was “absolutely 100% not guilty”, waved at the jurors and mouthed the words “thank you”.

US

Musk appears with black eye at White House farewell – as Trump says he’s ‘not really leaving’

Published

3 hours ago

May 30, 2025

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Musk appears with black eye at White House farewell - as Trump says he's 'not really leaving'

Elon Musk has formally left his role in Donald Trump’s administration.

Mr Musk sported a black eye at a press conference with Mr Trump in which the president confirmed the tech billionaire’s expected departure on Friday.

The billionaire owner of Tesla, SpaceX, and X said his five-year-old son X Æ A-12, or X for short, was responsible for the bruising.

“I was horsing around with my son… I said ‘go ahead and punch me in the face’, and he did,” Mr Musk told reporters in the Oval Office.

“It turns out a five-year-old can punch, actually. I didn’t really feel much at the time.”

At the press conference, Mr Trump thanked Mr Musk “for his incredible service” with his work for his help setting up and running the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, and suggested he would continue to be “back and forth”.

The US president handed Mr Musk a golden key in a White House-branded box, which he described as a “special present”.

“Elon gave an incredible service. [There is] nobody like him. And he had to go through the slings and the arrows, which is a shame, because he is an incredible patriot,” Mr Trump said.

“Some of the media organisations in this room are the slingers,” Mr Musk said when asked about the “slings and arrows” in an apparent dig at The New York Times.

The US president praised Mr Musk as “one of the greatest business leaders and innovators the world has ever produced”, commending him for “stepping forward to put his talents into our nation” by leading DOGE.

Meanwhile, Mr Musk, who was wearing a DOGE-branded baseball cap and a T-shirt with “The Dogefather” written on it, said it was “not the end of DOGE, but the beginning” and that the DOGE team would “only grow stronger”.

The 53-year-old added that he would continue to visit the White House and would still be an adviser to Mr Trump.

During the press conference, Mr Trump also turned to various conflicts around the globe, telling reporters that Israel and Hamas are “very close to an agreement” for a ceasefire in Gaza.

The president said an agreement with Iran to stop it from developing nuclear weapons was also “very close”.

Meanwhile, following recent tensions between India and Pakistan, Mr Trump took credit for de-escalating the situation between the two countries.

The US president had handed Mr Musk the task of cutting government spending by sacking federal workers and eliminating bureaucratic waste as head of the newly formed DOGE department.

Mr Musk oversaw drastic cuts to America’s humanitarian efforts, leading to criticism that the US was relinquishing some of its global influence.

Despite promising to save taxpayers as much as $2trn (£1.5trn), DOGE currently estimates its efforts have saved $175bn (£130bn).

Mr Musk claimed the savings could be even higher, saying in the Oval Office on Friday: “We do expect over time a trillion dollars in savings. Say by the middle of next year, with presidential support, we can do it.”

Mr Trump read out a list of savings DOGE has allegedly made, including cutting $101m spent on DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) policies in the Department of Education, $59m on hotel rooms for migrants in New York, $42m on a project for social and behavioural change in Uganda, £24m “for an Arab Sesame Street” and $8m “for making mice transgender”.

But questions have been raised about whether the department has actually saved taxpayers as much money as suggested.

Meanwhile, Mr Musk – who famously brought his son X Æ A-12 to the Oval Office – has expressed frustration about resistance to his ideas, and clashed with other senior members of the Trump administration.

He claimed DOGE had been blamed for cuts that had nothing to do with his department.

“What we found was happening was if there were any cuts anywhere, people would assume that was done by DOGE,” he explained.

“We essentially became the ‘DOGE’ boogie man.”

It comes after Mr Musk’s father, Errol Musk, speaking to Gillian Joseph on The World earlier this week, insisted there had been “no rift between Elon and Donald Trump”.

As a “special government employee”, US law allowed Mr Musk to serve for 130 days, which would have ended around Friday.

He announced he was leaving in a post on X, in which he said: “I would like to thank President Donald Trump for the opportunity to reduce wasteful spending.”

US

Elon Musk reveals when he hopes to launch mission crewed by robots to Mars

Published

9 hours ago

May 30, 2025

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Elon Musk reveals when he hopes to launch mission crewed by robots to Mars

Elon Musk has said he wants to send a spacecraft crewed by humanoid robots on a voyage to Mars by the end of next year.

The tech billionaire outlined his latest schedule for Starship in a video presented at the project’s Starbase home in Texas and posted online on Thursday.

The SpaceX founder had been set to give a presentation, called The Road to Making Life Multiplanetary, on Tuesday night, following a ninth test flight of the spacecraft earlier that evening.

But the speech was cancelled after the vehicle spun out of control about 30 minutes into the launch, having not achieved some of its most important test goals.

And on Wednesday, Musk confirmed his brief but tumultuous spell in the Trump administration as head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was ending.

Musk warned there was no guarantee he would be able to meet the Starship timeframe he set out and much depended on overcoming a number of technical challenges, during flight-test development, especially a post-launch refuelling operation while orbiting Earth.

He previously said he aimed to send an unmanned vehicle to the red planet as early as 2018 and had targeted 2024 to launch a first crewed mission there.

Humans would land on Mars as part of the second or third flights, he said on Thursday, but the first trip would be in the hands of one or more humanoid Optimus design robots built by Tesla, the electric vehicle and battery maker he leads.

The current target to land a human on Mars using Starship is 2028, but it has yet to make an orbit of Earth.

Musk said he wants to make it so that “anyone who wants to move to Mars and help build a new civilisation can do so. Anyone out there. How cool would that be?”.

At the end of 2026, Mars and Earth align around the sun, reducing the distance between the two planets to its shortest, but still seven to nine months’ travelling time by spacecraft.

Musk said they had a 50-50 chance of meeting that deadline and if Starship isn’t ready by then, SpaceX would wait another two years before trying again.

NASA, which hopes to land astronauts on Mars sometime in the 2030s, is planning to use Starship to return humans to the surface of the moon as early as 2027 – more than 50 years after the last lunar landings of the Apollo era.

Starship’s previous test flights in January and March also failed, with the spacecraft exploding moments after lift-off, raining debris over parts of the Caribbean and forcing scores of commercial jets to change course as a precaution.

Musk shrugged off the latest mishap on Tuesday with a brief post on X, saying it produced a lot of “good data to review” and promising a faster launch “cadence” for the next several test flights.

US

Federal judges rule Trump tariffs can stay in place for now – as president rages at trade court’s ‘country threatening decision’

Published

21 hours ago

May 30, 2025

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Federal judges rule Trump tariffs can stay in place for now - as president rages at trade court's 'country threatening decision'

A federal appeals court has ruled that Donald Trump’s sweeping international tariffs can remain in place for now, a day after three judges ruled the president exceeded his authority.

The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) has allowed the president to temporarily continue collecting tariffs under emergency legislation while it considers the government’s appeal.

It comes after the Court of International Trade blocked the additional taxes on foreign-made goods after its three-judge panel ruled that the Constitution gives Congress the power to levy taxes and tariffs – not the president.

The judges also ruled Mr Trump exceeded his authority by invoking the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

The CAFC said the lower trade court and the Trump administration must respond by 5 June and 9 June, respectively.

Trump calls trade court ‘backroom hustlers’

Posting on Truth Social, Mr Trump said the trade court’s ruling was a “horrible, Country threatening decision,” and said he hopes the Supreme Court would reverse it “QUICKLY and DECISIVELY”.

After calling into question the appointment of the three judges, and suggesting the ruling was based on “purely a hatred of ‘TRUMP’,” he added: “Backroom ‘hustlers’ must not be allowed to destroy our Nation!

“The horrific decision stated that I would have to get the approval of Congress for these Tariffs. In other words, hundreds of politicians would sit around D.C. for weeks, and even months, trying to come to a conclusion as to what to charge other Countries that are treating us unfairly.

“If allowed to stand, this would completely destroy Presidential Power — The Presidency would never be the same!”

The US president unveiled the controversial measures on “Liberation Day” in April, which included a 10% tariff on UK imports and caused aggressive sell-offs in the stock market.

Mr Trump argued he invoked the decades-old law to collect international tariffs because it was a “national emergency”.

Tariffs ‘direct threat’ to business – Schwab

The trade court ruling marked the latest legal challenge to the tariffs, and related to a case brought on behalf of five small businesses that import goods from other countries.

Jeffrey Schwab, senior counsel for the Liberty Justice Center – a nonprofit representing the five firms – said the appeal court would ultimately agree that the tariffs posed “a direct threat to the very survival of these businesses”.

US treasury secretary Scott Bessent also told Fox News on Thursday that the initial ruling had not interfered with trade deal negotiations with partners.

He said that countries “are coming to us in good faith” and “we’ve seen no change in their attitude in the past 48 hours,” before saying he would meet with a Japanese delegation in Washington on Friday.