A highly anticipated parole board hearing will be taking place in Nevada, Thursday, to determine whether ex-football star OJ. Simpson is eligible to leave the prison, multiple US news outlets are reporting. Simpson has served nine years of his 33-year prison sentence for armed robbery and assault in Las Vegas a decade ago.
Why is he in prison?
In 2007, Simpson and several friends, including Clarence “C.J.” Stewart, burst into a Las Vegas hotel room armed with guns and stole about $100,000 worth of his sports memorabilia from collectors Alfred Beardsley and Bruce Fromong, who had been expecting to meet a wealthy buyer. Simpson claimed the memorabilia and other personal items belonged to him, according to the Associated Press (AP). The next year on Oct. 3, Simpson was convicted of robbery and assault charges exactly 13 years after a jury found him not guilty of killing ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman.
Stewart was also convicted for his role but was released more than a year later after the Nevada Supreme Court overturned his conviction, finding that he had been denied a fair trial by being tried alongside the much more famous and controversial Simpson.
Simpson, now 70, could be released as soon as Oct. 1 if a second round of parole is granted Thursday, a move many expect to happen, given little if any opposition, according to BuzzFeed. Simpson was previously granted parole in 2013 for a series of charges related to the robbery but had to wait another four years to become eligible for parole on the remaining convictions.
At the 2013 parole hearing, Simpson recalled telling the prison warden upon entering the Lovelock Correctional Facility in Nevada that he was going be “the best prisoner they ever had.” In the years that followed, he took classes and coached other prisoners. His friend also told the Associated Press that he leads a prayer group, mentors inmates, and serves as commissioner of the prison yard softball league.
Simpson said he has also apologised to all the victims involved and truly regrets his actions.
“I wish I had never gone to that room,” Simpson said in 2013. “I really do. I wish I would have just said, ‘Keep it.’”
The father of four also said the sports memorabilia he stole in the robbery has since been returned to him by the state of California.
What could happen to him next?
According to Buzzfeed, even when he is eventually released, Simpson’s legal troubles are far from over. in 1997, Simpson was found civilly liable for the deaths of ex-wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ronald Goldman; he was ordered to pay their families $33.5 million. However, the attorney for the Goldman family, David Cook, told BuzzFeed News that the amount Simpson now owes has grown to more than $50 million.
“He has paid zip,” Cook said.
It is unclear if Simpson still receives a football pension that was once estimated at $19,000 a month, but even if he did, that money would be “near impossible” to reach an amount to satisfy the civil judgment, Cook added. Any movie or television residuals, though, “we reach that.”
Simpson’s ability to earn money has been hampered by his incarceration, but he again became part of the national conversation with The People Vs. O.J. Simpson, the FX hit that chronicled his dramatic murder trial of 1995.
What happens after prison is anyone’s guess.
“We are all strangers in O.J. Simpson’s strange land,” Cook said, “Because at every turn it gets stranger and stranger, from the white Bronco, the LA trial, to the acquittal, to the wrongful death.”
News source: TIME and Buzzfeed
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