How Did The Gloves Play Into The Oj Trial - T-Tees - Your Answers Await, Life's Questions Unraveled

O.J. Simpson never testified at his months-long double-murder trial in 1995.

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But a consistent feature of the absorbing yet often-repellent case was that Simpson was never far from center stage — especially so at key moments in the proceedings, which stretched from late January to early October and ended in his acquittal.

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One of the trial’s most memorable and decisive moments came 25 years ago when Christopher Darden, an assistant prosecutor, surprised his colleagues by asking Simpson to try on a pair of blood-stained leather gloves believed worn in the fatal attack on Nicole Simpson and Ronald L. Goldman.

One glove had been found at the murder scene, outside Nicole Simpson’s condominium in west Los Angeles. Its mate was found by a police detective outside of O.J. Simpson’s mansion a few miles away.

The gloves demonstration in the Los Angeles courtroom took place June 15, 1995. It was a memorable, theatrical, and even farcical moment in what was often called the “Trial of the Century.”

The demonstration brought Simpson squarely to center stage and he milked the moment, standing before the jury box as he seemed to struggle to tug on the gloves over latex gloves he was obliged to wear, to avoid contaminating evidence.

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Simpson grimaced repeatedly and said so that jurors could hear, “Too tight.”

And he smirked faintly, perhaps in apparent triumph.

As I noted in my book, 1995: The Year the Future Began, the gloves did seem small for Simpson’s hands. But they likely had shrunk in the testing that they had been exposed to.

In any case, “the ill-advised demonstration had allowed Simpson to testify in effect, without having to face cross-examination.” I wrote.

The prosecution’s botched move inspired a rallying cry for Simpson’s defense team — an idiom that remains familiar despite the passage of 25 years. In closing remarks at the trial, Simpson’s lead lawyer, Johnnie Cochran, recalled how Simpson struggled to pull on the gloves and advised jurors:

“[R]emember these words; if it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”

Cochran described the gloves gambit as “perhaps the single most defining moment in this trial,” adding:

“We may all live to be 100 years old, and I hope we do, but you’ll always remember that those gloves, when Darden asked him to try them on, didn’t fit.”

WJC