O J Simpson: A dramatisation of his trial reveals how little has changed in US race relations 20 years on

Out of America: Why he was acquitted makes sense today amid shootings of black men by white cops

O J Simpson trying on one of the bloody gloves during his murder trial (AFP/Getty)

They’re not quite “Where were you when JFK was shot” moments. But they’re close. More of us than would care to admit it can remember exactly when we fixed eyes on a television screen showing that hypnotic slow-motion white Bronco car chase down the LA freeways – or when we learnt the stunning news on 3 October 1995, that after an eight-month trial in what initially seemed an open-and-shut case, a jury had needed just four hours of deliberation to acquit O J Simpson of murdering his wife Nicole and her friend Ron Goldman.

It was called America’s “Trial of the Century”, and in terms of mesmerising a national and international audience, only the 1935 trial of Bruno Hauptmann for the Lindbergh baby kidnapping can compare. In the minutes around the verdict’s announcement, trading volume on Wall Street dropped 41 per cent and the US economy took a $500m hit in lost productivity.

And now the O J case is back, this time as a “docu-fiction” drama, in 10 episodes. Tabloid TV trash, I hear you saying, a cheap attempt to make a few bucks by raking over an ancient sensation. Not a bit of it. This is great television with terrific performances, that manages to cast a seemingly familiar affair in a new perspective. Even more so, it’s desperately timely TV, a reminder that where America and race are concerned, even under a black president, nothing changes.

Watch it, and it seems like only yesterday. The chase; those “Juice on the loose” newspaper headlines; the “dream team” of hotshot lawyers assembled by Simpson; the hapless Judge Lance Ito; the conflicted and well-meaning figure of lead prosecutor Marcia Clark, and her losing battle with the flamboyant Johnnie Cochran, the leader of the O J defence.

There’s the bloody glove of course, and Cochran’s famous admonition, “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” The minor characters in the drama are also wonderfully drawn, none more so than the racist Los Angeles Police Department detective Mark Fuhrman, depicted with chilling smoothness by Steven Pasquale.

American Crime Story: The People vs O J Simpson isn’t so much about whether he did it. The evidence against Simpson seems as overwhelming now as it did two decades ago. It’s about how and why a black man with a record of spousal abuse and a mountain of evidence against him was acquitted of killing his white ex-wife – and the explanation makes total sense today, amid the uproar over the lethal shootings of unarmed young black men by white cops: from Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, to Freddie Brown in Baltimore, Walter Scott in Charleston, South Carolina and others.

In every way, this revisiting of the O J drama could not be more topical. Simpson, who had transcended the black-white divide in Tiger Woods-like fashion, had been a star of the National Football League, whose current problems include a rash of incidents of domestic violence by its players.

Today, alleged institutional police bias against blacks and minorities is under unprecedented scrutiny. Here too, the Simpson trial was 20 years ahead of its time, thanks to the deftness of Cochran and the dream team’s initial leader Robert Shapiro (played by John Travolta), in turning the trial of an almost certainly guilty celebrity into a trial of the LAPD itself.

Black Lives Matter is a mantra of our times. But so it was then for Cochran, even when he was accused of “playing the race card from the bottom of the deck”. Judged through the lens of history, his tactic is not unjustified. The People vs O J Simpson starts with grainy footage of the beating of black motorist Rodney King by four white LA police officers in 1991. Their acquittal the following year led to devastating riots in black LA, in which 53 people died.

As the Simpson verdict approached, the city’s police were on standby against new riots should O J have been convicted, a precaution that was a backhanded tribute to the success of Cochran’s tactics. Believing that, other things being equal, women were more likely than men to convict, he managed to have nine women placed on the jury. Clark went along because she believed women were more likely to swayed by Simpson’s record of domestic violence against his former wife. Not so, however, when the race card was played, and nine of the 12 jurors were black.

For them, the Simpson case, like the King affair, must have seemed just another chapter in a never-ending story of repression and persecution of African-Americans, starting with slavery and lynchings – Billie Holiday’s “strange fruit hangin’ from the poplar trees” – and continuing to this day in the judicial system’s bias against blacks, and incidents such as those in Ferguson and Baltimore.

In closing arguments, Cochran told the jury that the LA police were trying to frame Simpson because of the colour of his skin, an accusation made plausible by evidence admitted during the trial showing that Fuhrman was indubitably a racist.

By then a straightforward murder case had turned into a racial litmus test. In the end, prosecutorial naivety, a deft defence and the LAPD’s dismal reputation among the city’s black community were enough to sow the seeds of “reasonable doubt”. That was all Cochran and the black jurors needed. Whites were outraged by the verdict. Blacks, by a large majority, believed justice had been done.

Early on in the saga, Time magazine produced a cover, entitled “An American tragedy” featuring a sinister photo of Simpson. It got into trouble for darkening his image to make him seem more frightening. The title, however, cannot be faulted.

Yes – as Courtney Vance, the actor who plays Johnnie Cochran, has put it – for once “a black man worked the system and got another black man off”. But that does not expunge the tragedy of the brutal murders of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman that have never been officially resolved. Nor has it removed the wider tragedy of America’s race issue that never goes away.