End of parole for O.J. Simpson
Steph Deschamps / December 15, 2021
The courts have officially ended parole for former American soccer star O.J. Simpson, who made headlines in the 1990s before being convicted in 2008 of an armed robbery in Las Vegas.
He had burst in 2007 with five henchmen in a Las Vegas casino to retrieve, at gunpoint, sports memorabilia and had been sentenced to between 9 and 33 years in prison. In July 2017, O.J. Simpson had obtained an early release and has since sunk into a peaceful retirement in Nevada, regularly commenting on the American soccer championship on social networks. The fallen star, now 74 years old, was still subject to the measures that the criminal authorities had attached to his parole. They should theoretically end on February 9, 2022, said Tuesday in a statement to AFP the Parole Monitoring Board of Nevada. But O.J. Simpson made a request for early lifting of these measures which was granted by the Commission as of December 1, 2021, the statement said. The septuagenarian is now completely free of his movements.
In 1994, O.J. Simpson tried to escape from the police during a car chase that was broadcast live on all American televisions. He was suspected of stabbing to death his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and a man who was with her, Ron Goldman. In 1995, at the end of a rocky trial, over-publicized and which had deeply stirred up racial tensions in the country, O.J. Simpson was found not guilty by a popular jury. Although not criminally responsible, Orenthal James Simpson was found civilly liable two years later for the deaths of his ex-wife and Ron Goldman, with substantial damages.
The athlete has always maintained his innocence. He also denied having tried to escape his summons to the police station on the day of the famous pursuit, ensuring that he just wanted to visit the grave of his ex-wife. A bag containing his passport, cash as well as a revolver 357 Magnum was well discovered by the investigators in his vehicle. But these items were never entered as evidence in the case file because the car did not belong to the suspect and the prosecution was unable to prove who had placed them there.