Freedom For OJ Simpson

2024 Author: Steven Freeman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 08:15

Former football player OJ Simpson, 70, received a unanimous vote Thursday from a criminal commission that granted him probation after spending almost nine years in jail.

Since 2008, the former athlete has served a conviction for kidnapping and armed robbery in a hotel room in Las Vegas, Nevada, and in recent years has been held in the Lovelock prison in that state.

In a hearing that was televised live on Thursday, the four members of a parole board ruled that Simpson had met the requirements for parole. One of the commissioners in the case opined that he had complied with "the prison rules and had changed in an acceptable manner," and that "he has no prior conviction for criminal activity."

Simpson was serving a sentence of 9 to 33 years in prison after an incident in which he tried to take some of his articles from a hotel room in Las Vegas, accompanied by two other men. His companions were armed, and although not a single shot was fired, Simpson was sentenced after one of the men took out the gun and pointed it into the room.

Visibly older, with tired eyes and gray hair, Simpson listened carefully to the verdict, always under the scrutiny of the cameras.

Thursday's hearing was not the first time Simpson confronted the cameras in legal proceedings. The player, who was quite a football star, was prosecuted in the mid-1990s, accusing the murder of his wife and the mother of his children, Nicole Brown Simpson, and a friend of hers, Ron Goldman.

Marked as a suspect in the case, Simpson captured world attention in that lengthy trial that took place in the city of Los Angeles and was recently portrayed in the acclaimed series The People v. OJ Simpson: American Crime Story from FX Network.

On that occasion, Simpson was supported by a powerful team of lawyers and advisers that included Rob Kardashian, father of Kim Kardashian. Simpson was found not guilty of both deaths on October 3, 1995. Subsequently, Simpson was blamed for the same deaths during a civil trial in 1997 and was required to pay the families of the deceased, said his attorney during the hearing, has plans of residing in Florida.