Quote:
Originally Posted by Douchemaster General
It still amazes me how inept the prosecutors were. A complete slam dunk and they blew it. Every one of them should have been disbarred.
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They'd have won that case 100 times out of 100 had they re-done it today.
They did a mediocre, but not altogether terrible job. The problem is that DNA was so 'novel' a concept then, and so new to the general public, that it was easy to blow holes in it if you were a skilled defense team.
Cochran was the master of baffling with bullshit and he was given an absolutely perfect case to use that approach on.
There's no such thing as a 'slam dunk' murder case, to be honest. They're
extremely hard to win if you have a good defense team. Simpson probably had the best team ever assembled and he set them to work on a barely understood 'new' science. The prosecutors didn't even understand it that well and it was obvious in how they tried to use it.
But again, given how limited general knowledge of DNA was at the time, it's not terribly surprising that the verdict went as it did.
And like I said, if that trial happens even 5 years later, OJ's jury comes back with a guilty verdict in 10 minutes. The evidence presented by the prosecutors was sufficient to seal a verdict. The Jury just didn't know what to do with it.
EDIT: Dane's spot on about Ito, though. That guy did an absolutely horrific job overseeing that trial.