06 Sep 2006
O.J. Simpson faces battle over publicity rights

Squeezing the Juice seems to have become some people's primary occupation. And it's a travesty of justice ...

I can hear a lot of folks howling right now about OJ's guilt, but the fact remains that he was found not guilty by a duly constituted jury of his peers in the State of California. You may disagree with that verdict, but to allow the families of the victims and the State to continue to pursue him civilly makes a mockery of the double jeopardy clause of the Constitution, and sets us up for a dangerous world in which one can become a criminal without being convicted of anything.

The standards of proof in a civil action are much lower than in a criminal one: circumstantial evidence is given greater credence and hearsay can be heard - essentially, in his civil trial, OJ had to prove he didn't do it, rather than the State or the plaintiffs proving that he did.

Could you ever really prove you didn't do something? This was a part of the whole reason that our Founding Fathers set up the jury system so carefully, and were so jealous of a jury's prerogatives.

Yet today, by allowing civil "wrongful death" actions to "follow up" on failed criminal prosecutions, we've put the cart before the horse, and have opened up the system to a potential for abuse that we've never faced before.

It's no accident that civil forfeiture laws have been revived in the same judicial climate that allows actions like this, nor is it a coincidence that other extra judicial actions now allow a person to be declared a criminal without so much as a prosecution, let alone a conviction.

We're gutting the whole notion of due process for the convenience of a good feeling: we perceive that justice was denied, so we rig the system to get justice done, we see predators walk free, so we find a way to mark them without recourse to a jury, we see piles of cash and assume it's ill gained. If this continues, more than feelings are going to be hurt: we can kiss our [mostly] free society goodbye.

In what may be an unprecedented legal move, Fred Goldman is asking to have control over O.J. Simpson's publicity rights to his own likeness, name and persona to satisfy a multimillion-dollar wrongful death judgment.

(link) [CNN.com]

07:45 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link