April 19-20, 2025: Kyle Railton’s Guest Post on the OJ Simpson Trial

[Thisweek, my amazing younger son Kyle turns 18! So I wanted to dedicate the week’sblog series to AmericanStudying some Kyle Contexts, leading up to this repeatof his excellent Guest Post on the OJ Simpson trial.]

Hey everyone, my name is KyleRailton and I am an upcoming senior in high school. As you can tell by my lastname, I am the son of the legendary professor Ben Railton, and writing for mydad’s blog has been on my bucket list for a while, so it is an honor to get thechance! I have been semi-interested in the O.J. Simpson trial for some time,hearing occasional things about how he was guilty, the lawyers messed up, thegloves, etc., but I only became very invested in the past year, when I began aschool project about the case. It was in my American Legal Studies class, and Ichose to read The Run of His Life, the book by Jeffery Toobin, whichquickly fascinated me about every aspect of the case: the media, lawyers,drama, and especially the defendant–O.J. Simpson.  

As I continued to learn more aboutthe case, a couple of parts of the case bothered me the most. I will prefacethis by stating that I do believe that O.J. committed the crime, despite themistakes from the prosecution and the alternate theories proposed by the dreamteam. Firstly, I believe that the trial did not deliver justice, as America’sjustice system is supposed to do, implied by the name. One of the main focusesof the American Legal elective I took this past school year was to study whatjustice was, and how courts are expected to promote justice through applicationof the law. However, I saw this entire case, specifically the outcome, as notproper justice, because many external factors influenced the not guiltyverdict. For example, the media played a crucial role since the discovery ofNicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, negatively affecting and manipulatingperceptions of the trial to the public, even before the jury was selected. Manypeople saw the police as “mistreating” O.J. Simpson when rather the LAPD hadtreated O.J. Simpson like royalty many times in the past, and he was close withmany officers. Additionally, race was almost certainly a deciding factor in thecase, which was exacerbated by the media and constant coverage of the case.While it is obvious that Mark Furhman was extremely racist–a nazi even–and theLAPD has a horrific history of racial prejudice and police brutality, thesefacts had nothing to do with O.J. Simpson’s case. As mentioned in Toobin’sbook, they were specifically used as the “race card” to get Simpson free. Thereason I see this as a massive injustice is because there is lots of racialprofiling in the court system and police forces across America, but this casewas not an instance of racist police officers framing an African American man.Now, it is completely understandable why many would believe that the LAPDframed O.J., but this use of the “race card” only opens the world up tocriticism when actual racist incidents come, as they too often do because then Americansclaim that it is just another use of the “race card.” I remember a hilariousquote from a show I watched with my family based on the O.J. trial, which goessomething like, “O.J. Simpson is the first defendant to get acquitted becausehe is Black!” Race has never been a black-and-white subject in America, andwhile it is unfortunately impossible to change the past and convict O.J.Simpson, it is possible to build and grow as a nation, which starts withlearning from the history of America’s complicated justice system. 

Nextseries starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Lemmeknow any responses I can pass along to Kyle!