O.J. Simpson's former lawyer is out to prove that because the glove didn't fit, the jury was right to acquit.
In a 46-page document posted on the website of his consulting firm, F. Lee Bailey wrote that he had additional evidence that would finally erase all doubt about the Heisman trophy winner's innocence.
"The facts offered here are either largely unchallenged, or much more persuasive than those contrary views which have been argued," he promised.
While Simpson was acquitted by a criminal jury, he was later found guilty in a civil trial and ordered to pay millions to the family of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson.
Bailey was on his defense team in the 1995 criminal trial and said he may turn the document into a book about the experience and his former client.
The 77-year-old lawyer says that despite what the public may believe about his former client, Simpson wasn't the type of person to use "raging violence to solve his emotional problems."
"O.J. – apart from the infliction of injury on Nicole – has no history of resorting to raging violence to solve his emotional problems," Bailey wrote in the documents, adding that a psychiatrist agreed the former football star had never been psychotic. Simpson also had never exhibited the demeanor or the motive to kill his ex-wife and Brown, Bailey said,
Simpson's suicide attempt, Brown added, was caused by distress over the death of a loved one.
"The unlikelihood that a person of O.J.'s character would be capable of such brutality has somehow devolved into a mystical certainty among many that he nonetheless is the perpetrator," he wrote. "Most amazing to me is that many - indeed the majority - of my otherwise intelligent and thoughtful friends have a knee-jerk certainty of O.J.'s guilt. I can only attribute this to a natural tendency to infer guilt from the suicide escapade, despite O.J.'s clear declarations of innocence to the contrary."
Bailey also presents the following arguments to prove Simpson didn't kill his wife:
*The infamous Bronco chase wasn't actually a chase but a "high-tension escort"
*O.J. Simpson's demeanor wasn't one of a killer. Bailey said Simpson repeatedly offered to give police a statement following the deaths of his ex-wife and her friend, which they refused. He also seemed friendly to attendants and a pilot on a flight that he was on only hours after the murders. "During their time together, [the pilot] was able to discern that Simpson had no cuts, bruises, or unusual marks about his body, and that he was relaxed, affable, and polite."
*Testimony of Tom Lang, a dog walker, who said he saw a blonde woman arguing with a man near a white pickup truck on the night of a murder with another man crouching 70 feet away. He said he didn't think anything of it, until he learned of the murder.
*A key witness, Keith Douglas Zlomsowitch, was never called, though Bailey claims Zlomsowitch would have testified that Simpson wasn't jealous of other men's relationships with his ex-wife. "The public never heard from Zlomsowitch, even though his testimony would have posed a powerful contradiction to the prosecution's only claim of motive: that Simpson killed Nicole because of a jealous rage. We had him under subpoena and were prepared to call him, but like so much other critical evidence, the threat of further erosion of the jury was just too great," he said.
Guilty of the murders or not, Simpson is currently serving 33 years on a kidnapping and armed robbery conviction after a botched sports memorabilia recovery attempt in Arizona.
Bailey said he didn't publish the evidence to clear his client in the public eye because he felt people were too biased following the explosive trial.
"I had always decided to move forward, but was convinced it would take time until anyone has an open mind," he said.
nmandell@nydailynews.com
Read more:
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/2...
Posted By: DAVID JOHNSON
Tuesday, January 11th 2011 at 11:32PM
You can also
click
here to view all posts by this author...
