Cup of Coffee: April 12, 2024

Good morning!

There are obviously two huge stories to talk about today. The first is the Ippei Mizuhara/Shohei Ohtani case. Ippei was charged with bank fraud yesterday and we got a detailed look at all of the alleged happenings via an IRS agent’s affidavit. If you know anything about me you know that I will spend eleventeen hours with some juicy legal documents if given the chance so, yeah, there’s a lot about that today.

The other big one: the death of O.J. Simpson. Yes, there will be some jokes. Yes there will be some serious reflection on the nature of the crime. Yes, there will be me asserting my belief that he murdered two people. Yes, there will be me arguing that his acquittal was justified, even if I believe it was mistaken. No one in my real life over the past 30 years has ever liked to listen to me thread my tedious needles in connection with the O.J. case, but you all are paying for my opinions so I consider you a captive audience.

Oh, and I also mention Rusty Kuntz, Johnny Dickshot, and Dick Pole today. You know, to keep things light.

And That Happened 

Here are the scores. Here are the highlights:

Mets 16, Atlanta 4: Well that was an ass-kickng. DJ Stewart hit a two-run homer. Tyrone Taylor hit grand slam. It was off a position player but it still counts. Jeff McNeil drove in three runs. New York takes two of three.

Royals 13, Astros 3: Another ass-kicking. One which caused the great Levi Weaver to ask “at what point do we start to consider that the Royals are actually good and/or the Astros are actually bad?” God, that’s not a thing I’ve considered since Obama was in office. Anyway, Kansas City put up a nine-spot in the first inning and everyone was thus free to talk about O.J. and Ippei Mizuhara for the rest of the day. Bobby Witt Jr. had four hits, including two home runs. Vinnie Pasquantino, who broke a major slump with a big game on Wednesday continued to stay hot, going 3-for-5 with three RBI. Basically everyone got into the act.

Athletics 1, Rangers 0: JP Sears took a no-hitter into the seventh, where it was broken up by an Adolis García base hit. That would be the only hit of the game for Texas, however, as three relievers no-hit them for the final two and two-thirds. The only scoring in the game was a second inning homer from Seth Brown.

Orioles 9, Red Sox 4: Boston gave the O’s life in the eighth while failing to turn a double play and paving the way to an Anthony Santander two-run homer. They tied things back up in the bottom half via a Connor Wong homer. It tipped back to Baltimore, however, when Gunnar Henderson hit a two-run homer before Colton Cowser hit a three-run shot in what would be a six-run tenth. Cowser also hit a homer in the fifth. Cedric Mullins hit an RBI single in the final frame as well and that was just too much to overcome.

Phillies 5, Pirates 1: Ranger Suárez shut the Pirates out for six innings, allowing only two hits and striking out eight. Alec Bohm hit a solo shot and Brandon Marsh and Bryson Stott each hit two-run jobs. In related news “Alec, Brandon, and Bryson” are the names of the kids who got into schools you couldn’t get into because their dads are rich.

Twins vs. Tigers; Brewers vs. Reds — POSTPONED:

🎶 Life is not a highway strewn with flowers
Still, it holds a goodly share of bliss
When the sun gives way to April showers
Here's the point you should never miss

Though April showers may come your way
They bring the flowers that bloom in May
So if it's raining, have no regrets
Because it isn't raining rain, you know
It's raining violets 🎶

The Daily Briefing

Ippei Mizuhara charged with bank fraud; alleged to have stolen $16 million from Shohei Ohtani, lost $40,678,436.94 gambling in all

They weren’t kidding when they reported on Wednesday night that the case against Ippei Mizuhara was “progressing quickly.” It was so quick that yesterday federal prosecutors charged Mizuhara with bank fraud for stealing more than $16 million — $16 million! — from Ohtani to pay debts with an illegal bookmaker. “Mr. Ohtani is considered a victim in this case,” U.S. Attorney E. Martin Estrada said when the criminal complaint was released.

There was a hell of a lot of information set forth in the affidavit from the IRS agent investigating the matter which can be read here, but it does answer a couple of the big questions people have had about all of this.

First question: How did the banks or accountants or whoever not know that so much of Ohtani’s money was being moved?

Answer: As alleged in the complaint: Mizuhara impersonated Ohtani in telephone conversations with bank officials and changed the settings on Ohtani’s accounts to send account notifications to Mizuhara, not Ohtani. He also told Ohtani’s agent, accounts, and financial advisors that the account from which he stole money was “private” and that Ohtani did not want anyone seeing it. They took his word for that, even if it seems highly irresponsible for them to have don so, so Mizuhara was the only one who monitored it. That apparently includes Ohtani himself, who relied on Mizuhara to tell him, broadly, what was in the account whenever he asked, which wasn’t often, as he had multiple other accounts with larger sums in them.

Second question: Why did Mizuhara’s bookie float him millions of dollars despite him making, at most, a low six-figure salary?

Answer: It would seem that the bookie believed that Ohtani was willingly backstopping Mizuhara. This was not explicitly said but it can be inferred from two text messages from the bookie to Mizuhara.

The first one came while the bookie, trying to track down Mizuhara who was dodging him because Mizuhara was deep in the hole, said he saw Ohtani out walking his dog in Newport Beach and suggested that he approach Ohtani to inquire about the money. It appears he did not do so, but that would be in keeping with a belief that, ultimately, Ohtani would bail out Mizuhara if need be.

The second text came on March 20, just before the whole story broke, in which, while talking about the news reports, the bookie referred to the suggestion of theft as “bullshit” and opined that was a “cover job” and that Mizuhara “obviously” didn’t steal from Ohtani. Mizuhara then corrected the bookie, admitting that he had been stealing: “Technically I did steal from him. it’s all over for me,” Mizuhara said.

Put that on a damn T-shit.

There may be more — and the bookie may clarify later — but It seems fairly obvious that Mizuhara told the bookie that Ohtani would cover his losses if need be and that the payments coming from Mizuhara over the years actually came from Ohtani or were made with his approval. In the meantime, the bookie was just happy to extend Mizuhara more credit as long as Mizuhara kept up regular payments on what he owed. Which Mizuhara did for a good while via stolen funds.

Also: The feds investigated nearly 10,000 texts between Ohtani and Mizuhara over a four-year period and there was not a single reference to betting of any kind and no suggestion whatsoever that Mizuhara was in any kind of debt, for gambling or anything else. Further, Ohtani’s devices, which Ohtani turned over to the IRS, never once accessed gambling material of any kind in that period.

Other fun stuff:

• Mizuhara is referred to as Ohtani’s “defacto manager” in the affidavit. The affidavit was made following interviews with Ohtani, who is referred to as “Victim A” in the affidavit. So, as many suspected, Mizuhara was more than just an interpreter and it would not necessarily be out of place for him to have the ability to do a lot of things with respect to Ohtani’s personal business, including finances and computers and things. Though obviously not as much authorized control as he did, in the event, exercise.
• Mizuhara’s involvement with the bookie went back to at September 2021. His phone records contained "hundreds of pages of text messages” with phone numbers associated with the bookie and with the bookie’s partner. The messages included detailed conversations, from the beginning of the relationship, about the logistics of Mizuhara wiring money to the bookie when it was time to settle losses.
• Mizuhara is, perhaps the biggest degenerate gambling addict I’ve ever encountered. He lost a hell of a lot. He had bad runs and repeatedly asked for “bumps” or extensions in the credit the bookie extended him. By May 2022, eight months after he began placing bets with the bookie, he was down a million bucks. By that fall he was down even more and texted the bookie “I’m terrible at this sport betting thing huh? Lol . . . Any chance u can bump me again?? As you know, you don’t have to worry about me not paying!!” Which he had been doing, because he had been accessing Ohtani’s accounts. The desperate messages from Mizuhara about his bad luck and big losses just keep on coming after that. It’s super pathetic. He’s obviously a hardcore gambling addict, completely unable to stop. I actually feel sorry for him.
• An example: “On or about June 24, 2023, MIZUHARA messaged BOOKMAKER 1 stating, “I have a problem lol. . . . Can I get one 14 last last last bump? This one is for real. . . . Last one for real[.]” BOOKMAKER 1 responded the same day, stating “Done. I have the same problem. To be honest with you Ippie, as long as you can guarantee the 500 every Monday I’ll give you as much as you want because I know you’re good for it[.]” Which further bolsters the “why did the bookie float him?” question. The texts make it clear that as long as Mizuhara paid $500K on a regular basis there was always more credit to be had. Mizuhara did so, losing more than that, but keeping up the minimum payments, as it were;
• By November 2023 Mizuhara had been ducking calls and ignoring texts from the bookie for some time. The bookie then threatened to contact Ohtani directly, saying “Hey Ippie, it’s 2 o’clock on Friday. I don’t know why you’re not returning my calls. I’m here in Newport Beach and I see [Ohtani] walking his dog. I’m just gonna go up and talk to him and ask how I can get in touch with you since you’re not responding? Please call me back immediately.” It does not appear as though the bookie actually approached Ohtani. And, of course, it could’ve been a bluff.
• The amount of bets Mizuhara placed with the bookie is staggering. Per the affidavit he placed approximately 19,000 — 19,000! — wagers between December 2021 and January 2024, which was 25 bets per day on average. The wagers ranged from as low as $10 to $160,000 per bet, with an average bet of roughly $12,800. Mizuhara’s winning bets totaled $142,256,769.74. His losing bets amounted to $182,935,206.68, leaving a total net balance of negative $40,678,436.94. Which, given the theft of $16 million to pay the bookie, it probably means that when the music stopped Mizuhara owed a hell of a lot more;
• Amazingly, none of the bets were on baseball. Not that it matters at this point. I presume Mizuhara avoided that because he figured (a) he’d eventually get out of the hole he was in without being caught stealing money; and (b) he didn’t want to risk his gravy train working with a major league baseball player;
• The affidavit then goes back and matches transfers from Ohtani’s accounts to Mizuhara’s losses and his text messages about payments and things. For what it’s worth, the account he used was the same one two which the Angels sent Ohtani’s paychecks. There were several other accounts — where endorsement and investment income and things like that were deposited that were not implicated here;
• The affidavit likewise matches the devices and IP addresses used to access the accounts to Mizuhara’s phone and computer. It further lays out how Mizuhara called the bank and impersonated Ohtani. It was easy to suss that out, as (a) the FBI agent spoke to Mizuhara in person when he flew back from Korea and his voice matched the voice heard on the recorded bank phone calls; and (b) Mizuhara, claiming to be Ohtani to the bank, spoke fluent English, which Ohtani does not do;
• Neither Ohtani’s agent nor any of his financial advisors spoke Japanese so Mizuhara handled all communications with them. At the same time, those people managed all of Ohtani’s non-salary accounts — stuff for endorsements and investments and things — to which Mizuhara did not have access. Ohtani would ask Mizuhara on occasion how much money he had in the salary account. Mizuhara would tell him, likely lying about it.
• When all hell broke loose over in Korea, and it became known that wire transfers from Ohtani’s account went to the bookie, Mizuhara told Ohtani’s agent and all of the other advisors that Ohtani had loaned him the money to pay his debts. This would explain why they felt it was OK to put Mizuhara in front of ESPN reporters. They felt that story absolved Ohtani. It was still dumb, but that’s why they did it. Only later, back at the hotel, did Mizuhara tell Ohtani what he had been saying and what the truth was. All of this, including the stolen money, was news to Ohtani at the time. It apparently never occurred to Ohtani’s people that an interpreter could be a bad actor.
• The IRS agent spoke to Ohtani’s agent, Nez Balelo of CAA. Balelo told them CAA didn’t have any Japanese speakers on staff. Which is insane to me, but it’s not my agency. Balelo always relied on Mizuhara. This was dumb, of course. Once Balelo asked Mizhara about the salary account. Mizuhara told him that Ohtani considered the account “private” and didn’t want Balelo to look at it. Balelo just accepted that.
• A bookkeeper, a financial advisor, and an accountant on CAA staff who handled Ohtani’s taxes were all more concerned and asked for access to the salary account in the event the account accrued interest or was used to give taxable gifts or so it could be incorporated into Ohtani’s overall portfolio, but Balelo told them not to worry about it, citing Mizuhara’s “it’s private” excuse.
• Mizuhara also used Ohtani’s salary account to buy thousands of baseball cards and other baseball memorabilia he planned to sell later;
• Ohtani allowed the IRS agent to search his phone. There were no records or even suggestions that he was involved in gambling, communicated with the bookie, discussed gambling or debts with Mizuhara, or gave Mizuhara access to his bank accounts.

So, yeah. It seems all that’s left is for Mizuhara to strike a plea bargain and hope to get a sentence that will allow him to live at least some part of the non-elderly portion of his life in freedom.

It also seems like CAA needs to adopt some new rules about managing their clients’ assets. Because, woof, they dropped the ball here. And will likely be paying Ohtani a lot of money to make up for it. Seriously: CAA is a major agency and this whole affair should lead to quite a reckoning for them. This whole business could’ve been stopped before it started if they demonstrated even a modicum of responsible oversight and didn’t just blindly take Mizuhara at his word, basically for everything, over the course of years.

Finally: Major League Baseball and its security apparatus probably need to ask themselves what it means that an illegal bookie, owed tons of money and apparently believing Ohtani was ultimately responsible for it, got within eye-shot of the most famous and most important baseball player on the planet while trying to collect a debt. From what is currently known about this bookie he was not the leg-breaking type, but some are. Does the league have anything to say about that?

Anyway: wow. Just wow.

Jordan Montgomery fires Scott Boras 

Kiley McDaniel of ESPN reported yesterday that Diamondbacks starter Jordan Montgomery has fired Scott Boras and has signed on with agents Joel Wolfe and Nick Chanock from Wasserman.

Could’ve been worse. He could’ve signed on with CAA.

Agent news like that is not something I usually spend a lot of time on in this space, but in this case I think it’s newsworthy. I say that because Montgomery was one of the so-called “Boras Four”, along with Blake Snell, Cody Bellinger, and Matt Chapman, whose free agencies lasted much longer than expected and resulted in deals valued at far less than projected. Montgomery, for example, was expected to land a sizable multi-year contract but ended up with a one-year $25 million deal late in spring training. Given his late signing he still hasn’t made his 2024 debut.

The reasonable assumption based on how things went was that Montgomery and Boras sought an ace-level deal in excess of $100 million, maybe. Which, sure, shoot your shot. But when such a deal did not materialize, one would’ve expected that their position would moderate and that number would come down to a lower-priced yet still multi-year contract. None of us can know for sure what happened in negotiations, but based on where he ended up — and the fact that Montgomery is now switching agents — we can presume that Montgomery was not happy with how it was handled and that he does not want to go back on the market next winter with Boras leading the charge.

Names, Part 1

As I’ve mentioned, My kids were born around the time Jacksons Holliday, Chourio, and Merrill were born. I remember seeing "Jackson" and "Jaxon" all over baby name recommendations at the time. It wasn’t as common as "Jacob" or "Emily" but it was definitely out there.

I figure that, fairly soon, the Jackson influx is gonna be almost as notable as the influx of Millennial ballplayers named Zack/Zach/Zac was a few years back.

Names, Part 2

I don’t watch a ton of TV, but Allison and I have become everyday watchers of the late night comedy/fake gameshow on CBS called “After Midnight,” hosted by comedian Taylor Tomlinson. We were at first interested because we used to watch “@midnight,” which ran from 2013 to 2017 on Comedy Central, of which “After Midnight” is a reboot. After a couple of episodes we got hooked on its sort of comforting, low-stakes goofiness and now we watch it most days when we want some mindless laughs.

[Editor: That show comes on at like 12:30 AM. You’re just DVRing it and watching the next day, right?]

Oh definitely. In this we’re like my parents who record and watch “Jeopardy!” the next morning because my dad retires to bed at like 7PM every night and wakes up at like 4AM each day. And no I am not joking about that. Why do you think I am the way I am?

“After Midnight” is very clearly aimed at people younger than me. The host is just 30 and, while they often have comedians around my age as panelists, the jokes and pop culture references are pretty clearly aimed at younger Millennials and older Gen-Z types. Almost every episode has me Googling some bit of slang with which I am not familiar or asking Allison who some pop star being referenced happens to be. It’s by no means impenetrable — 95% of it is just jokes — but I am often keenly aware that it’s not written with people like me in mind.

But do they have at least one writer on that show who is on my wavelength. Because in the past two weeks there have been two baseball-related segments. The first one was about the see-through uniforms and the second, from earlier this week, was about funny-sounding baseball player names:

I’m guessing that you all would do really well with this particular game, as most of us have been making jokes about “Johnny Dickshot,” “Rusty Kuntz,” and “Dick Pole” since the day Baseball-Reference went online. But it is funny to watch four people who obviously know jack crap about baseball work their way through these.

Well, the older guy on the far right seemed to know his stuff, but he pretty clearly tried to hide it because it made for better comedy.

Rod Carew has no love for the Angels 

There was a story in the Los Angeles Times yesterday about how Hall of Famer Rod Carew will not visit Angels Stadium because he is holding a grudge against Arte Moreno and the club as a whole for what he believes to be shabby treatment over the past several years.

Carew, who played the final seven seasons of his 19-year career in Anaheim and who served as the Angels’ hitting coach from 1992-99, is particularly miffed that the Angels would not allow him to serve as a special spring training instructor for them while he was also doing so for the club with which he is most identified, the Minnesota Twins:

The couple had lunch with [Angels team president John] Carpino and team chairman Dennis Kuhl in December 2022, a meeting in which Carew asked if he could attend Angels spring training as a guest instructor and work with hitters occasionally throughout the season. Carew has been a special assistant to Minnesota Twins president Dave St. Peter since 2013 . . . Carpino denied the request, telling Carew it would be a conflict of interest for him to work for two franchises and that some Angels coaches and scouts might not feel comfortable speaking honestly about players with an employee from another organization in the room.

Carew says the Twins were fine with it. He believes that the Angels refusal was unfair and unreasonable and for that reason he hasn’t set foot in Angel Stadium for two years and says he won’t unless Arte Moreno sells the team.

This is not the first time Carew has taken issue with the Angels. According to the article, then-manager Mike Scioscia similarly prohibited Carew from attending Angels camp in Arizona in 2000 after Carew had worked with some Twins hitters earlier that spring in Florida. He is also still upset that only one Angels official — then-V.P. of communications Tim Mead — visited him in the hospital when he was awaiting his heart and kidney transplant in 2015.

I get the beef about the hospital stuff. And while I understand the theoretical opposition to allowing a coach to work with both your team and another team, it seems kind of stupid to feel that way about Carew. Maybe it made some sense in 2000, when Mike Scioscia barred Carew, as Carew was only a year removed from being the club’s everyday hitting coach. But now? That seems petty and, frankly, idiotic.

Carew is 78 years old. He was 76 years old at the time he made his last request to attend Angels camp. Given his health issues over the years, he’s obviously not going to be spending hours intensely training hitters, running drills, or passing along opposing teams’ secrets. He’s going to do what Sandy Koufax does when he visits both Dodgers and Mets camps: be a baseball legend. He’s going to drop some advice here and there, sure, but nothing major. And even if he did offer more than some occasional insight, it’s not like it’s gonna help most of those hitters. He’s Rod Fucking Carew. Almost none of them, save maybe Mike Trout, is ever going to be able to truly apply most of what Carew tells them because they’ll never be able to do what Rod Carew could do.

I don’t think this is the greatest atrocity to ever happen. It’s not even close to the top-10 missteps the Angels or their people have made over the past decade or two. And no matter what Arte Moreno or other Angels employees do, Carew will always be loved by both Twins and Angels fans. But it is petty. I mean, if you can’t make room for a franchise legend to hang out at spring training for a few days, what’s the goddamn point of owning a team?

Indeed, I feel like that’d be one of the top benefits of owning a baseball team. If I had billions, I’d buy the Tigers primarily so that I could hang out with Alan Trammell and Lou Whitaker or the Atlanta club so that I could shoot the breeze with Greg Maddux. Well, I’d also change the team’s name and ban the Tomahawk Chop, but listening to Maddux tell off color stories while having cocktails down at Sarasota would be the big draw.

Other Stuff

NBA player faces a lifetime ban in connection with gambling

I think the business with Jontay Porter of the Toronto Raptors came up at the same time the Shohei Ohtani scandal broke, so I missed it at the time. But boy howdy, it’s a big deal. Like a bigger deal than the relative low-level press it appears to have gotten, that’s for sure.

The upshot for those who missed it: Porter played only briefly in games which took place on January 26 and March 20, Ieaving early after claiming that he was hurt or sick. As a result, his points and rebound totals fell far short of what the sports books set as prop bets for those metrics in those games. Soon after, various sportsbooks reported odd betting patterns surrounding Porter prop bets for those games. The obvious implication here is that Porter was intentionally sandbagging in a way that benefitted those who bet against him reaching the prop bet bogeys.

On Tuesday NBA commissioner Adam Silver said that Porter could be banned from the league, saying "I have enormous range of discipline available to me . . It's cardinal sin what he's accused of in the NBA. The ultimate extreme option I have is to ban him from the game. That's the level of authority I have here because there's nothing more serious."

Despite those harsh words, Silver also seemed to minimize this by claiming, essentially, that all of the legal gambling we have — and the sports’ leagues’ business partnerships with gambling — is great! Because if all that there was was illegal gambling, we’d never know about what Porter was doing!

Which is idiotic. Porter, who apparently maintained a healthy side business giving people betting and cryptocurrency advice, would almost certainly not have been altering the outcome of games if he didn’t see an upside for himself or for people he knew. That upside is a function of widespread legal gambling outlets that provide ample opportunities for him or whoever was benefitting from his activities to cash in on the crookedness.

While I in no way intend to defend illegal gambling, the fact is that barriers to actual contests being thrown or altered absent legal gambling are pretty damn high. To fix a game before required underworld connections and/or pressure between athletes and gambling interests. Now all it requires is someone like Porter to make a decision. We can argue wether society was worse off under gambling bans than it is now that gambling is widely legal, but it seems absurd to me to suggest that there are fewer opportunities and less incentive to throw games now than there used to be. If anything, there are more! It’s easier to do!

Anyway, this will happen in baseball at some point. It’s inevitable. When it does, Rob Manfred, the gambling-affiliated sports media, and everyone else involved in that business will act surprised, but they sure as hell shouldn’t be.

O.J. Simpson

As you no doubt saw, O.J. Simpson died yesterday. They say it was cancer, but I don’t think we should rush to judgment. We should try to find the real killer.

Following the announcement of his death, Simpson was immediately remembered for that which was most notable about him:

Yes, when I think “O.J. Simpson” I immediately think “Heisman Trophy-winning media sensation who had a complicated life off the field.” That’s really his legacy if we’re being honest.

Whatever. I guess it’s been 30 years and all of the people running these accounts were either in diapers or not born yet when a long-time spousal abuser took the not-uncommon next-step of murdering his abuse victim out of jealously, possessiveness, and a pathological desire for control, got acquitted due to the incompetence of the Los Angeles County prosecutor’s office, and then later did several years in prison for a different violent crime, after which he playfully taunted the families of the people he murdered by all but admitting to the crime in a cash-grab book and totally stiffing them on the massive civil judgment they obtained against him. As all that stuff barely got any coverage I’m sure it was easy to miss.

Given that yesterday’s comments section featured multiple people talking about their past or pending colonoscopies, y’all don’t need me to tell you about O.J. Simpson. You remember it well, as do I. Indeed, some of the biggest highlights of that whole affair are intertwined with significant personal memories from the period:

• News of the murder of Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman broke nationally on the morning of June 13, 1994. That was a Monday. It was also the day I took the LSAT exam. I took the exam in Charleston, West Virginia, which was an hour’s drive from my parents’ house in Beckley, West Virginia, and I listened to the news of it on the radio all the way up there and, for that matter, all the way back. It was a pretty big deal!
• I was still in Beckley on the following Friday, as two friends of mine were getting married that weekend. We had a sort of low-rent bachelor party for the groom in the Days Inn motel on Harper Road where two of his out-of-town friends were staying. As we drank cheap beer — and one of the out of town friends did cocaine off of the mirror he took down from above the dresser — we watched Game 5 of the NBA Finals between the Rockets and the Knicks. They broke into programming to show the Bronco chase. We were all riveted. The guy who had been doing cocaine was more riveted than the rest of us;
• At some point in April 1995 my fiancee and I drove to New York because I had been admitted to Fordham Law School, I had a pending application at NYU, and we wanted to see if a couple of West Virginia kids could actually handle living in New York before I made my ultimate decision. Seemingly every other bar we passed while walking around the city had signs or banners up advertising “O.J. Trial Watch Party” and attendant drink specials. It’s hard to overstate just how much that trial captivated the country and for how long it did so. To finish the story: I ended up not getting into NYU and we didn’t like New York enough to cause me to choose Fordham, but it was a fun trip. To this day I love New York for 2-3 days at a time but otherwise continue to believe it’s not for me;
• October 3, 1995. I was a first year law student at George Washington. The verdict in the O.J. trial was set to come down while I was in my Criminal Law class. The professor, Angela J. Davis, arranged for a TV to be brought into the lecture hall so we could watch it live. The not guilty verdict was announced and the room exploded, with every white student, myself included, reacting in shocked credulity and most of the Black students and Professor Davis reacting in something akin to celebration, even if it was reserved and sort of complicated.

That dual reaction, by the way, ended up leading to one of the most important and formative educational experiences of my life.

Professor Davis had not talked much at all about the O.J. trial during the first couple months of class, concentrating instead on the nuts and bolts of criminal law instruction for 1Ls. After the verdict, however, she told us that she fully expected that split reaction among the class if, indeed, a not guilty verdict was delivered. What I did not know then but soon learned was that Professor Davis is one of the foremost experts in the country with respect to the role of race in the criminal justice system, the nature of prosecutorial discretion, juror bias, both conscious and unconscious, and everything that surrounds such topics.

Professor Davis spent the rest of the semester using the O.J. trial, and other famous trials, to explain to us how the criminal justice system really works, in practice, as opposed to how we’re usually taught about how it works. About what the just world fallacy in which the privileged among us tend to believe falsely tells us. About how important it is to hold prosecutors to their burden even in cases where guilt seems pretty obvious. Maybe especially in those cases. And especially in cases with non-white defendants.

What Professor Davis did not do was to tell us that she thought that O.J. was innocent. I actually do not know if she believed he was guilty or not — maybe she did and still does — but she made it very clear to us that that was beside the point for the purposes of the class. The key points were instilling in us the importance of the prosecution’s burden and educating us as to how the criminal justice system has victimized people of color throughout history and continues to do so, making that prosecution’s burden even more important in cases involving defendants of color.

While it was a bit beyond the purview a Crim 1 class, Professor Davis did go through a number of the highlights of the O.J. trial to explain where the prosecution screwed up and how that could have and obviously did create reasonable doubt in the minds of jurors who weren’t following the coverage of the case, only the evidence presented in court. Later I had a Criminal Procedure professor who expanded on that and really got into the details. My takeaway then, which I continue to hold to this day, is that (a) O.J. Simpson murdered Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman, of that I am certain; (b) if I were on that jury I’m fairly certain that I’d have voted to convict; but (c) the LAPD and Los Angeles Prosecutors bungled their case in so damn many ways — ways in which they usually could get away with because they were not facing O.J.’s all-star defense team — that there was no choice but for the jury who, again, was not watching CNN or Court TV, but only reacting to what happened in court, to acquit him.

"It is better a hundred guilty persons should escape than one innocent person should suffer,” the old quote goes. While I would’ve greatly preferred O.J. Simpson to have spend the rest of his life in prison, given the laziness and carelessness with which authorities approached that case, some actually innocent future defendants would be imprisoned if the prosecution was not smacked down for its slapdash approach. Such behavior cannot be vindicated, even if most of us believe the defendant to be guilty and even if it so often is vindicated in other cases. Indeed, the outrage over that verdict that I and many others felt on the day it was delivered — and which many still feel to this day — was precisely because, for once, it was not vindicated.

To be abundantly clear, the views about the O.J. verdict which I have come to possess since October 3, 1995 are views about the criminal justice system, its purpose, its history, its ideals, and its realities. That stuff is of critical importance and must be treated with the utmost seriousness if we ever wish to have a just society. Which is a thing I still believe we must aspire to even if, personally speaking, I’ve grown pessimistic of seeing in my lifetime. My views about the trial have nothing to do with whether or not I thought then or think now that O.J. Simpson murdered two people. Which, as noted, I do think he did.

Anyway, I do not believe in an afterlife or some other, higher judgment that comes later. Mortal authorities got one shot to put O.J. Simpson in prison for murder and they blew it and that was that as far as I am concerned. I know a lot of people do believe in justice or reward in the afterlife, however. If I was such a person I would probably wish O.J. Simpson good luck in his future endeavors. Wherever they may take him.

Have a great weekend everyone.

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