The Goat Pen

AlabamAlum wrote:Of course OJ was the killer. Dear lord....

Professor Tiger wrote:

AlabamAlum wrote:Of course OJ was the killer. Dear lord....

No. Kato Kaelin did it.

Or a complex murder/suicide by Ron Goldman.

FWIW, Black America is amazed at White America's outrage at OJ.

Black Opinion on Simpson Shifts

By Darryl Fears
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 27, 2007

In a nation that largely despised him, O.J. Simpson always had strong support within the black community, where polls showed a majority of people believed he was innocent of charges that he murdered his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her acquaintance Ronald Lyle Goldman outside her home in Los Angeles's Brentwood neighborhood in 1994.

But after a string of missteps by the former football star -- a heated 2003 argument with his teenage daughter in which she called police; a book, "If I Did It," that raised eyebrows last year; and a dispute over sports collectibles in Las Vegas this month that led to an armed-robbery arrest -- black opinion has shifted.

A Washington Post survey found that 40 percent of black respondents believe he is innocent of the murders, compared with 71 percent who felt that way around the time Simpson was acquitted in 1995. The change in black opinion brings African American views of Simpson's guilt closer to those of white people. In late 1995, 72 percent of white respondents said Simpson was guilty of murder, and 74 percent say they feel that way now.

The 31-percentage-point drop among black respondents is a head-turner, sociologists said, because African Americans were such steadfast supporters of the celebrity, cheering in some places when the verdicts were read.

"Blacks in the survey are probably saying, 'We're sort of fed up with this guy,' " said Earl Smith, a Wake Forest University professor who wrote "Race, Sport and the American Dream." "If you look at his actions since the murder, they've all been bad decisions, just constant."

Carl E. Enomoto, a New Mexico State University professor who wrote a book on public attitudes toward Simpson, agreed. "There's just been a lot of things that have happened, that robbery arrest and the tape on TV shows the rage he's capable of," Enomoto said. "He's such an emotional person that you can set him off pretty quickly. People are seeing all this and starting to change their opinions."

John Hull, 44, an African American living in Memphis, said he believed that Simpson was innocent in 1995, but has shifted his view. "I think people's views have changed because O.J. has changed," he said. "It's his behavior, his demeanor. His reputation is shot to hell. That could have been his behavior before but nobody knew."

Another black man, Ronald King, 56, of Nashville, said he saw Simpson less as a black man and more as a black eye on his community.

"O.J. is crazy," he said. From the book to the hotel melee, he said, "It's stupidity. He's a stupid man."

At the time of his acquittal, many commentators asserted that many black people saw Simpson as a symbol of the unfair treatment that African Americans feel they receive from the criminal justice system. A 1995 Post poll, for example, found that nearly nine in 10 African Americans said blacks and other minorities do not receive equal treatment in the criminal justice system. The latest survey indicates that distrust has not substantially dissipated. Nearly half of black respondents believe that Simpson is being unfairly targeted by police. Seventy-three percent of white respondents said otherwise.

The Post poll was conducted by telephone over five days ending Sunday, among a national random sample of 1,062 adults. The margin of sampling error for the full survey is plus or minus three percentage points, it is minus eight points for the African American sample.

In accompanying street interviews with African Americans, few thought their views on the issue had evolved. Many said they felt Simpson was innocent 12 years ago and still do now. Others said their belief that he was guilty is unchanged.

Evan Holland, 26, of Los Angeles said she cheered the verdict. "At the time it was not far from the L.A. riots where police officers were acquitted of beating Rodney King," she said. "For me, it was like we need some justice, we need some support, we need a win. I didn't think he did it." She still doesn't.

Greg Thornton, 43, of Oxon Hill said the prosecution of Simpson is a media frenzy driven by white-controlled news media. "I felt relieved that he was let off," Thornton said. Justice for black people is rare, he said, citing the slow response to help New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and the prosecution of six black teenagers in Jena, La.

But Carlton Land, 64, of Houston disagreed. "I thought he was guilty, and I still do," he said. "All this mess he's in now, we just want to say, 'O.J., you need to go sit down somewhere.' "

AlabamAlum wrote:Of course OJ was the killer. Dear lord....

Jungle Rat wrote:"Ben Roethlisberger (my fellow Miami Redhawk), has been arrested for three different rapes in three different states - AND WAS SUSPENDED BY THE LEAGUE FOR ONE OF THEM "

I hate him and the Steelers but this is a bunch of shit. We all know about the 1 time in the bathroom but you need to support the other two in some way or Shut The Fuck Up.

MILLEDGEVILLE, Ga. -- The young woman who accused Ben Roethlisberger of sexual assault said she tried to get away from the Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback and told him "no, this is not OK," according to police documents released Thursday.

A second woman has told police that Pittsburgh Steeler quarterback Ben Roethlisberger sexually accosted her while he was drunk, according to a police report.

The fresh accusation came as the National Football League is considering disciplinary measures against the star quarterback. It's not clear whether the new allegations could affect those calculations.

"Big Ben" Roethlisberger dodged prosecution earlier this week when a Georgia district attorney announced that he could not prove that the quarterback had raped a 20-year-old sorority girl in a nightclub bathroom. The girl told the DA she did not want to proceed with a prosecution.

AlabamAlum wrote:OJ got away with murder, but he's not the first, or the last. I haven't heard anyone here calling for vengeance. And Ben Rapelisburger is reviled. Wagner was a better actor than OJ and stayed out of jail on other charges afterwards - that's why he got more roles after Wood's murder than the one or two roles that OJ got after he killed his ex and Goldman.

Was the OJ trial a media event? Sure. It was frigging OJ Simpson and it happened when Court TV and 24-hour networks and the internet were taking off. Now, things get play even if you're not famous (like Caylee Anthony - if Caylee had killed her baby in 1982, the media circus would have been less.

*White people were mad as hell.

I’ve never seen or felt anger around Los Angeles like I did on October 3, 1995. It was unfiltered, devoid of any of the time-honored White Guilt that blacks in America have long manipulated and relied upon.

That day, after the verdict was read, sitting at traffic lights, I’d glance into the car next to me and see the person behind the wheel wearing a scowl, sometimes aimed at me. Just after noon I walked down tony Robertson Blvd. in cosmopolitan, liberal West Hollywood, where I lived. I didn’t get the usual smiles or nods.

They were pissed.

They still are, twenty years later. Bring up O.J. Simpson’s acquittal of the June 13, 1994 murders of ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman and they’ll let you know how they feel about it.

They don’t care to know that I feel the same way.

Yes, I, a black man, believe that Simpson killed his ex-wife and Goldman. That was the other injustice meted out on that fateful day: the perverted notion that most black Americans believed Simpson was innocent.

As if those who make up the black community are unable to think and reason as individuals.

Cementing the myth was television news footage aired over and again for days–first of a room of blacks gathered before a TV cheering the verdict, followed by a scene of whites in front of a TV elsewhere, gasping in stunned disbelief and rage.

Obviously they exist, but frankly I don’t know any black people who ever thought O.J. was innocent. Still, it was only natural to make room in our minds for the usual bamboozlement blacks have historically endured. I remember the exchange a friend and his father had one morning during the trial.

“They framin’ O.J.,” his dad pensively opined from his favorite chair while watching yet another day of coverage.

“Daddy, O.J. killed those people,” my buddy replied.

“I know he did,” said Dad. “But they still framin’ him.”

Actually, in addition to blacks who truly believed Simpson was being unjustly accused, there was another demographic quietly convinced of Simpson’s innocence: white men. Sometimes, superstar jockdom trumps everything. One monday evening, at the height of the trial, while nursing a Guinness at the bar of the long since shuttered Morton’s, I initiated small talk with the tall, casually dressed middle-aged white man drinking next to me. When I asked him what he thought about the trial, he was adamant.

“O.J. Simpson did NOT kill those people,” said the man, who, of all people with whom to strike up an O.J. conversation, happened to be Don Ohlmeyer. The former president of NBC’s west coast division and former producer of ABC-TV’s iconic “Monday Night Football ” told me he was a longtime personal friend of Simpson.

“Our kids used to go trick-or-treating together,” he said. “I know this man. He wouldn’t do something like that; he wouldn’t do it to his children.”

Today, Simpson is in prison, “officially” convicted of having some shady associates held at gunpoint in Las Vegas over some memorabilia he says they took from him. We all know why he’s really there.

Simpson’s incarceration quelled the racially charged vexation of a segment of white America, but not by much. Today I say to them what I said then: if white folk were as outraged every time a white person was unfairly exonerated of a crime the way they were outraged when O.J. was acquitted, then perhaps O.J. might not have walked in the first place. Maybe the justice system would work for everyone all the time, instead of for a select few.

In the meantime, they should dispense once and for all with the insulting, self-serving fantasy that all black Americans believe Simpson is innocent of the heinous crime of double murder.

We know better than anyone that acquittal doesn’t equate innocence. For what seems like forever, our understanding of the term is all we’ve had to console us while watching those who commit crimes against us and our community go free with absolute impunity.

Those Black people cheering that day weren’t celebrating the triumph of a murderer. A galaxy away from Obama’s election, they were reveling in what, if only for a fleeting, conflicted moment, felt like equality in America: a black man had gotten away with something in the same bold and arrogant fashion in which white people do all the time, with the best justice money could buy.

A guilty man getting away with murder is not equality. But sadly, for just a little while in October of 1995 , it somehow felt like it.

A guilty man getting away with murder is not equality. But sadly, for just a little while in October of 1995 , it somehow felt like it.

sardis wrote:Good show Ohio Dems. You'd be better off having Rat run for governor.

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