The news this week has been full of the second O. J. Simpson trial, conviction and subsequent prison sentence. The former football star, mediocre actor and pitch man for Hertz finally got at least a portion of what he had coming to him. He’s headed to prison to serve a 9 to 33 year stretch for armed robbery and several other charges connected with it. At 61, this may turn out to be a life sentence.

At first glance, the punishment for his latest crime is perhaps excessive, but given the fact that almost everyone in the country, white people at least, believes he got away with two brutal murders in 1995, his punishment for this may really be for that.

There’s no doubt that he killed his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. O.J.’s blood was found at the murder scene and the victims’ blood was found in Simpson’s car, his driveway and his house. There were matching bloody footprints found in both places as well. His bloody socks were found in his bedroom. The defense claimed they were planted by police, as they did most of the evidence they couldn’t explain away.

Had he been anyone but a celebrity, he would have been convicted easily and the murder wouldn’t have made the front page of the LA Times. But few people have the money to hire the kind of defense lawyers that Simpson retained to save his sorry hide. He hired Johnny Cochran, a black trial lawyer to defend him. Cochran turned it into a black vs. white case and put the LA Police Department on trial, accusing them of framing Simpson. It was somewhat ironic in that O.J., who had had little to do with black people since his pro-football days, became black again to beat the rap for killing two white people.

‘Do you think he did it?’ Defense lawyers usually recoil from that question. They either go off the record and say, ‘Of course he did it, but that doesn't matter, that's not my concern,’ or they issue some vague ritual denial all fluffed up with incantations about the sanctity of our legal system and every man's right to a vigorous defense.

Cochran by this point was well past ritual. So he dished, off the record, of course. Cochran died in 2005, so, by tradition of the craft, those comments are now fair game.

‘There's something wrong with him,’ Cochran said, and he talked about other clients he'd had who somehow managed to persuade themselves that they hadn't done what they actually had done.

Simpson was a big star, a hero to some, a talented person. But, said Cochran, ‘I wouldn't believe him if he told me the sun was coming up again tomorrow morning.’

And then the lawyer went back to work on a defense so wonderfully constructed that it got off a guy who had done a truly terrible deed.”

You may recall that the trial lasted for a year. Bringing TV cameras into the court room was probably one of the many mistakes that the trial judge, Lance Ito made in the case. But it allowed everyone in the entire nation to hear the case in its entirety. Therefore, everyone had the opportunity to be a juror. It also let everyone see the tactics Cochran was employing to dodge the real evidence and sidetrack the jury with unsupportable accusations against the police. Anyone who doubted Simpson’s guilt was either stupid or not paying attention.

As for the real jury, I doubt that the nine blacks were really seeing the actual evidence. Instead, they believed Johnny Cochran who convinced them that Simpson was being railroaded by a racist police force.

I remember the day the verdict was announced. I was at work. The TVs in the company cafeteria were on and when the verdict was read, all the blacks stood up and cheered. Many of the white people booed while the Asians looked around wondering what all the fuss was about.