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New Evidence OJ Was Framed -
Police 'Almost Certainly'
Planted Blood In House & Car
By Giles Whittel
http://www.the-times.co.uk/news/pages/tim/2000/10/02/timfgnusa01001.html
10-1-00
 
 
 
Bloodstains in OJ prosecution put in doubt...
 
Vital clues that might have supported O.J. Simpson's denial of the murders of Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman were ignored by American police, according to a new investigation that found evidence that the celebrity was framed.
 
Six years after the killings that ended Simpson's charmed life, Los Angeles, especially its police force, hoped that they were forgotten. Yet pressure will build to reopen the case with the disclosure today that crucial blood evidence was almost certainly planted in the footballer's house and car after the murders.
 
A BBC documentary to be broadcast on Wednesday will say that Mr Simpson's son, Jason, then 24, was never considered a suspect in the murder, even though he had a history of domestic violence and no reliable alibi. The film includes a claim by a convicted drug dealer that six months before Ms Simpson's death, he was offered money to kill her.
 
Simpson was acquitted at his murder trial five years ago. The verdict by a largely black jury split America along racial lines and he was found financially responsible for the deaths in a separate $34 million (£23.5 million) civil verdict a year later.
 
He vowed then to devote his energy and dwindling resources to finding the real killers of his former wife and her friend. Instead, the most famous running back in the history of American football has immersed himself in golf, leaving further investigation to journalists and private detectives.
 
Their findings suggest that the criminal trial jury, vilified by white America, made the right decision. They show that clear chances to solve the murders were missed or deliberately ignored by a prosecution anxious above all about its image.
 
The most damning new information concerns a synthetic preservative known as EDTA, found in blood on a gate at the murder scene and on a pair of socks which Mr Simpson allegedly wore there. EDTA, which does not occur naturally in the human body, is often used by detectives to conserve evidence but was found nowhere else on the gate or socks. Peter Harpur, a British crime scene expert interviewed for the programmes, said that there could not be any other explanation than that the blood had been put there.
 
Evidence may also have been planted in the white Ford Bronco that mesmerised a global television audience when Mr Simpson was pursued in it along California's freeways holding a gun to his head.
 
Bloodstains on the car's central console which police had said consisted only of Mr Simpson's blood were relisted three months later as a mixture of his and the victims' blood. The discrepancy was not highlighted at the criminal trial, which ended with the chief prosecutor, Marcia Clark, adding the Bronco bloodstains to a "pyramid" of what she said was undisputed evidence against Mr Simpson.
 
Extraordinarily, police were in a position to mix and plant the blood after the killings. The lead detective in the case requested and obtained a vial of Mr Simpson's blood, and in a violation of normal procedures obtained samples of the victims' blood from the Los Angeles Coroner's Office. Such a violation would have meant the summary dismissal of a lower-profile case, according to Donald Freed, a law professor who has written a book on the Simpson case.
 
Detectives went back to the Bronco during their investigation but whether they planted evidence there remained an open question at the criminal trial. Detective Mark Fuhrman, exposed on the witness stand as a racist, was asked if he had planted evidence but refused to answer, invoking his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself. Since then the Los Angeles Police Department has been humiliated by revelations of systematic evidence planting in hundreds of other cases.
 
According to Mr Harpur, the Simpson trial should never have begun. Sloppy police work at the crime scene, at Simpson's house and in his car contaminated the evidence so badly that had it been a British case the Crown Prosecution Service would have rejected all of it, he said.
 
That sloppy work may save Jason Simpson, O.J.'s son from his first marriage, from unwelcome further scrutiny. Jason, a chef, had a history of brandishing kitchen knives in argument, including one with a girlfriend who feared for her life and described him as having a Jekyll and Hyde personality.
 
The documentary says that Jason was a "walking time-bomb" on rage suppressant drugs and that Nicole Simpson believed he may have been stalking her. He claimed to have been working at the time of the murders but appears to have left work early that night.

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