OJ Dead-they Finally Got Their Pound Of Flesh..

The CORPORATE Media shills blared out head­lines: OJ Simpson dead at 76. But it was­n’t just about the for­mer foot­ball great pass­ing from can­cer; it’s also about wring­ing one last drop of pub­lic­i­ty from the dead man’s car­cass before it can go cold.
So lit­er­al­ly every one of the cor­po­rate media hous­es led with the sto­ry of OJ’s mur­der tri­al after his arrest in 1994, three decades ago.

May OJ Simpson rest in peace, whether he com­mit­ted the mur­ders for which he was charged three decades ago or not; the fact of the mat­ter is that he was exon­er­at­ed in a court of law. But we also know that when it comes to black peo­ple, there can be no redemp­tion, no for­give­ness, no find­ing of inno­cence in the crim­i­nal jus­tice system.
The sys­tem was cre­at­ed and designed specif­i­cal­ly to ensure that blacks are puni­tive­ly dealt with at all lev­els. In fact, blacks are the only peo­ple who are judged by their past even when the very jus­tice sys­tem set up to ensure they do not get away with any­thing finds them innocent.
On the oth­er hand, when blacks excel and shine, the lime­light is turned on the white fail­ures who could not make the grade.
I speak of South Carolina’s NCAA wom­en’s bas­ket­ball pro­gram, which did not lose a sin­gle game all sea­son and went on to win the nation­al cham­pi­onship, beat­ing the much-hyped Iowa team and its star, Kaitlyn Clarke.
The dif­fer­ence is that South Carolina is a team of most­ly black women coached by a black woman. Iowa, on the oth­er hand, is an over­whelm­ing­ly white team coached by a white woman.
After South Carolina beat Iowa, all the media hous­es could talk about was the los­er, Iowa, and their idol, Kaitlin Clarke, not the record-reach­ing win­ners, South Carolina.

So it is lit­tle won­der that in death, OJ Simpson will be talked about by the media talk­ing heads, and 99% of what they talk about will be a dou­ble mur­der case he was charged with and exon­er­at­ed by a jury of his peers. As we know, in rare instances, crim­i­nal jus­tice works cor­rect­ly to right the wrongs of law enforce­ment, the sys­tem is seen to have failed. The sys­tem only works when blacks are dealt with most puni­tive­ly, regard­less of inno­cence or guilt.
As peo­ple of col­or, we are also high­ly con­ver­sant that even when the sys­tem does work to exon­er­ate the inno­cent or those not found guilty in an ele­phant-like fash­ion, the sys­tem does not for­get that the defen­dant walked away with­out incar­cer­a­tion or worse, par­tic­u­lar­ly if the vic­tims hap­pened to be white.

In the case of OJ Simpson, the sys­tem was not about to allow an uppi­ty black man to walk away with­out pun­ish­ment after being charged with killing two white people.
Never mind that a jury of his peers did not con­vict him. Never mind the moun­tain of evi­dence that was revealed at the tri­al of the sys­temic cor­rupt racism with­in the Los Angeles Police Department.
OJ Simpson would be made to pay one way or anoth­er, and so in a civ­il tri­al, they took from him every­thing he had. In a civ­il tri­al, the bur­den of proof is of a low­er stan­dard, and they ensured that the jury was white. This is the American jus­tice sys­tem, and the real­ly com­i­cal thing about the injus­tice of it all is that they do it out in the open with­out an ounce of shame.
But as bad as the civ­il tri­al and for­fei­ture of Simpson’s assets were, they were only the beginning.
For one rea­son or anoth­er, OJ Simpson, like so many oth­er black men, lacked vision or wis­dom even though they were ful­ly vest­ed with good eye­sight. Simpson could not under­stand the mine­field that he, like all oth­er blacks, must tra­verse in America, so he hopped and skipped like an inno­cent child in a mead­ow of daisies on a beau­ti­ful sum­mer day.
Completely obliv­i­ous to the traps set and lying in wait to snap around his ankles.
And ‘snap,’ it clamped shut on him in 2007 when he was accused of lead­ing a group of men into a Las Vegas hotel and casi­no to retrieve sports mem­o­ra­bil­ia he claimed they stole from him.

Las Vegas Police and pros­e­cu­tors ecsta­t­i­cal­ly piled on a pletho­ra of charges: Count 1: Conspiracy to com­mit a crime · Count 2: Conspiracy to com­mit kid­nap­ping · Count 3: Conspiracy to com­mit rob­bery · Count 4: Burglary while in pos­ses­sion of a weapon, on and on…Simpson was found guilty of all 12 charges by a white jury.
No gun was ever found!!! No one denied that the mem­o­ra­bil­ia belonged to him. But he was not about to wig­gle out of tak­ing back his own prop­er­ty. This was the oppor­tu­ni­ty they were wait­ing for.
On December 5^th, 2008, OJ Simpson was sen­tenced to 33 years in prison for steal­ing his own stuff in a Las Vegas court.
The tri­al judge, Jackie Glass, insist­ed the sen­tence was not ret­ri­bu­tion for the 1994 slay­ings in Los Angeles in which the one­time foot­ball hero was acquit­ted. Still, to rel­a­tives of Simpson’s ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman, it was.
The fact that the judge tried to influ­ence his­tor­i­cal per­cep­tions of her actions in the case is proof enough that OJ Simpson was sen­tenced to 33 years in prison not for steal­ing his own prop­er­ty but for a dou­ble mur­der for which he was exon­er­at­ed four­teen years earlier.
OJ Simpson is gone now. They will need to find anoth­er black man to hate.

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com.