Moments after Luigi Mangione was handcuffed at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s, a police officer searching his backpack found a loaded gun magazine wrapped in a pair of underwear.
The discovery, recounted in court Monday as Mangione fights to keep evidence out of his New York murder case, convinced police in Altoona, Pennsylvania, that he was the man wanted in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan five days earlier.
Rodney King was the case of a driver who got assaulted by police and brutally beat, it led to rioting across LA because it was captured on video, and King’s iconic “Can’t we all get along” speech on TV. It was the same general time and place, but not directly connected to the OJ case.
Mark Fuhrman may or may not have been some racist tampering with evidence but it still would have taken enormous resources and a risky gamble to frame OJ for… reasons. OJ was not framed, he got off because they turned the trial into a media circus and the jury didn’t understand DNA evidence which was very new and few people had heard of it as an investigation tool. They have tried to leverage Rodney King’s beating but that was only one part of the massive fuck-up by prosecution and the legal system.
My memory of events is still pretty fresh but you’re welcome to look it all up.
Any movies or other media you’d recommend for getting an accurate and detailed account of the OJ case?
I would have to look it up, I didn’t watch documentaries, I watched it all on live TV at the time. I’m sure there’s boatloads of stories and documentaries on youtube, just beware anything that tries to paint the case as anything other than a massive clusterfuck and failure of the system to safeguard judicial system from money, fame, influence and media hype. What went wrong, was it was the first huge celebrity trial covered on live TV, and all the same nonsense and political bullshit you would expect to happen today, happened then.
The DNA evidence was biggest the key which would have clinched any similar case today, but it was still a very new thing, and people were as dumb about science then as they are now, so that ignorance was leveraged by a rich man’s legal team and whatever political funding they were getting.
Time is a flat circle.
There was more than DNA evidence, there was a fat ton of circumstantial evidence, testimonies from associated people, and of course things like Nicole Brown Simpson having previously called 911 as OJ was beating her up and threatening her life, the whole massive performance piece of the slow-speed bronco chase, it was just a fuckup from the start and everyone involved just wanted to get famous from it.