Former O.J. Simpson defense attorney Alan Dershowitz chats with Brandon ‘Scoop B’ Robinson on Scoop B Radio. Photo Provided By: Fox News

There’s a very good chance that former NFL great O.J. Simpson will be a free man by the end of 2017.

Simpson is scheduled for a hearing in front of the Nevada Board of Parole Commissioners in Carson City, Nevada tomorrow, July 20 via video from the Lovelock Correctional Institution. Simpson was convicted  in October 2008 on 12 counts  that included conspiracy, burglary, kidnapping, robbery, assault and coercion, all with a deadly weapon for his role in a October 2007 robbery attempt in a Las Vegas hotel room.

In the robbery, Simpson took hundreds of pieces of memorabilia from two men. Simpson and his accomplices brandished a gun during the incident and the former football star told others in the room that no one could leave. Simpson indicated that he was trying to retrieve items that belonged to him which included family photos.

Fast forward to 2017. If a simple majority of the four commissioners vote in favor of parole, Simpson will be released in early October.

The parole board will give judgment on Simpson based upon his time spent in the Nevada facility and not based upon the murder case in the 90s.

For those tardy to the party or not even born yet, Simpson was charged with the murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. Simpson was acquitted on the murder charges but lost a $33.5 million judgment in civil court for the deaths of Brown and Goldman.

Alan Dershowitz was a member of Simpson’s defense team that included Robert Shapiro, F.Lee Bailey, Robert Kardashian, Gerald Uelmen, Carl E. Douglas and Johnnie Cochran in the case many dubbed the Trial of The Century. Dershowitz once wittingly said: “The defendant wants to hide the truth because he’s generally guilty. The defense attorney’s job is to make sure the jury does not arrive at that truth.”

Fully and full of quotes, the scriptwriters for the 1996 American film Jerry Maguire could only wish to come up with something so pointed.

But I digress!

Dershowitz has been in the news as of late. Dershowitz recently tried to publish an opinion piece in The New York Times that U.S. President Donald Trump likely did not attempt to obstruct justice by firing former FBI Director James Comey. According to a recent interview with the Washington Examiner, Dershowitz reached out to the New York Times in June to the paper to present an opposing view.

Always opinionated, I chatted with Dershowitz on a recent episode of Scoop B Radio about race.

Dershowitz explains his feelings on representing African Americans in the courtroom over his career particularly during the O.J. Simpson case where race was a previaling theme. Did race hinder or hurt Dershowitz in representing Simpson both professionally or personally?

“Personally not at all,” Alan Dershowitz told me on Scoop B Radio.  “It was a very important case it was a case that told us a lot about the racial situation in America. When I got into the case he was facing the death penalty.”

Check Out Alan Dershowitz & Brandon ‘Scoop B’ Robinson on Scoop B Radio

Dershowitz added: 

“Over my long career I’ve represented lots and lots of African American people; both defendants and others. I was in the Civil Rights Movement, I was down south in the early 60s. So that, part of it was very easy for me. For me the biggest thrill was having the chief counsel on the case being an African American and having all these white lawyers really working for a really brilliant, terrific, African American lawyer.”

The African American lawyer Dershowitz was referring to was the late Johnnie Cochran.

In his closing arguments in the Simpson trial, Cochran famously stated: “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”

“He really was in charge,” Dershowitz said of Cochran.

“That sent a powerful message to people watching. That also sent a powerful message to the jury. So I had worked with lots and lots of African American lawyers before, but this is a case where some of the world’s prominent white lawyers in the country, F. Lee Bailey, Bob Shapiro, Barry Scheck were all working for our leader who was an African lawyer, he was the leader, Johnnie Cochran.”

Cochran was the only attorney in Los Angeles ever to receive both the “Civil Trial Lawyer of the Year” Award and the “Criminal Trial Lawyer of the Year” Award. In 1995, he was named “America’s Trial Lawyer of the Year” by The National Law Journal, as well as being named one of the “Headliners of the Year” by Time magazine.In 1999, he was named one of the “Top 50 Trial Attorneys of 1999” by the Los Angeles Business Journal.

Dershowitz is currently a Harvard Law professor. He’s penned books like: The Best Defense (1982), Chutzpah (1991), The Advocate’s Devil (1994), Supreme Injustice: How the High Court Hijacked Election 2000 (2001), The Case for Israel (2003) and Taking a Stand: My Life in the Law (2013).

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The post O.J. Simpson Defense Attorney Alan Dershowitz Discusses Race, F. Lee Bailey, Johnnie Cochran & O.J. Parole On Scoop B Radio appeared first on RESPECT. | The Photo Journal of Hip-Hop Culture.

F.Lee Bailey stopped by Scoop B Radio and discussed O.J. Simpson’s Dream Team. Photo Courtesy of FOX News.

There’s a very good chance that former NFL great O.J. Simpson will be a free man by the end of 2017.

Simpson is scheduled for a hearing in front of the Nevada Board of Parole Commissioners in Carson City, Nevada tomorrow, July 20 via video from the Lovelock Correctional Institution. Simpson was convicted  in October 2008 on 12 counts  that included conspiracy, burglary, kidnapping, robbery, assault and coercion, all with a deadly weapon for his role in a October 2007 robbery attempt in a Las Vegas hotel room.

In the robbery, Simpson took hundreds of pieces of memorabilia from two men. Simpson and his accomplices brandished a gun during the incident and the former football star told others in the room that no one could leave. Simpson indicated that he was trying to retrieve items that belonged to him which included family photos.

Fast forward to 2017. If a simple majority of the four commissioners vote in favor of parole, Simpson will be released in early October.

The parole board will give judgment on Simpson based upon his time spent in the Nevada facility and not based upon the murder case in the 90s.

For those tardy to the party or not even born yet, Simpson was charged with the murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. Simpson was acquitted on the murder charges but lost a $33.5 million judgment in civil court for the deaths of Brown and Goldman.

Famed defense attorney F. Lee Bailey, represented Simpson during the trial. Bailey along with Robert Shapiro, Alan Dershowitz, Robert Kardashian, Gerald Uelmen, Carl E. Douglas and Johnnie Cochran were dubbed Simpson’s Dream Team.

Bailey disagrees with that notion. “No, because it had some good lawyers, some not so good,” Bailey told me on Scoop B Radio.

Check out F.Lee Bailey and Brandon ‘Scoop B’ Robinson on Scoop B Radio

Bailey who also secured a reversal of Dr. Sam Sheppard’s conviction in the murder of his pregnant wife in the 60’s and an acquittal at his second trial and represented Albert DeSalvo, who claimed to be the Boston Strangler weighed in more on his assessment of the Simpson Dream team lawyers.

“Johnnie Cochran tried his best to keep an even keel in the atmosphere of the courtroom we were working in. That wasn’t very easy and he was not always successful. Although Johnnie was a very good lawyer, I enjoyed working with him and became his good friend, but apart from that the dream team was not as well coordinated as it should have been and the work was not apportioned out on a very thoughtful basis in my view.”

According to Bailey the Simpson case was rather long and he just wanted to do his work and go home.”A lot of people were competing for the limelight,” said Bailey.

“I just wanted to get out of there because California trials are an imposition on anybody that gets wrapped up in them. The Patty Hearst case was worth three weeks of trial; indeed that was forecast. It was wrapped up in three months even in a Federal court. The O.J. case might have been three months total, it took over a year. That’s pretty unnerving for someone who has other clients to worry about, other places to be.”

 

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The post O.J. Simpson Lawyer F. Lee Bailey On Dream Team: “A lot of people were competing for the limelight” appeared first on RESPECT. | The Photo Journal of Hip-Hop Culture.

Last week, our nation elected a new president in Donald Trump. It also put to rest a year long media produced fascination that will continue forever and ever amen! With the race over it feels like the end of Christmas where it’s time to put the lights back in the attic and take the tree outside for the garbage truck to pick it up.

Yet, there’s a lot to de-clutter and plethora of pine needles to be vacuumed. Anything with Hillary Rodham-Clinton and Donald J. Trump’s name next to it was must see TV and viral ready for internet users consuming content like a Pacman arcade game.

Wikileaks, tax returns, locker room talk, ‘bad hombres’ and ‘grabbing women by the ‘pu**y’ are lexicons forever aligned into the minds of both young and old.

America’s fascination with the 2016 Presidential election campaign is reminiscent of the O.J. Simpson case. Although two human beings were murdered in a trial that Simpson was acquitted for, issues of race, wealth, conflict, slander, larger than life personalities and a nation divided on who was right and who was wrong were similar themes in the 2016 Presidential Race.

How the heck do we explain this to our kids?

“People don’t know what to do at this point,” New York Knicks forward Carmelo Anthony told ESPN’s Ian Begley and Adry Torres. “So I think it’s up to us as individuals to kind of just take that responsibility and lead, everybody got to lead in their own way. We can’t rely on a system or one person. We got to move on from that.”

The entry point for the O.J. Simpson case began June 17, 1994 on Los Angeles’ 405 freeway. A 90-minute slow car speed chase with Simpson and his friend, Al Cowlings stopped everybody’s flow on a Friday night watching the NBA on NBC’s game 5 of the 1994 NBA Finals between the Houston Rockets and the New York Knicks.

Craziest part of it all?

While the Rockets’ Hakeem Olajuwon led all scorers with 27 points and 8 rebounds in an eventual 91-84 game 5 loss to the Knicks at Madison Square Garden, his Rockets teammates were keenly aware of the chase. Apparenty, during timeouts, players were watching the Ford Bronco/LAPD chase on television’s sitting on the scorer’s table. “I go in the huddle, I’m like, “O.J.’s on the run,” TNT’s Inside The NBA analyst Kenny ‘The Jet’ Smith told me.

Smith was a member of the Rockets at the time and recalls vividly how it all went down.

Head coach Rudy Tomjanovich comes into the huddle and yells: “What are you guys doing?”

“O.J.’s on the run,” Smith yelled.

“What are you doing? We’re in the middle of the NBA Finals,” Tomjanovic yelled back.

According to Smith, Tomjanovic drew up a play and as players were walking back on the court after the timeout, Tomjanovic pulls Smith to the side and asks, “Is he really on the run?”

“Where I’m from, when you run, you did it,” said Smith. “When you first hear it, you’re like, ‘why would he do it?’ It’s O.J. Simpson. In your mind you’re thinking, he’s got so many things to lose.”

Simpson’s defense attorney F. Lee Bailey predicted that his client would be found not guilty, to the chagrin of many. “I forecasted to anyone who would listen,” Bailey told me in an interview this summer. “And many of them snickered at me, but sure enough when the verdict came in they are not the kind of people that would say I was wrong, they said the jury was wrong, they were racist. They were prejudice. It was a sad display of American culture trying to defend its wrongheadedness.”

Fast forward to 2016, these same conversations are still going on, just now in an America that’s allegedly post-racial. “I don’t think there is any room to not face the obvious truth,” Golden State Warriors forward David West said last week. “[Donald Trump] speaks for the majority of the people in this nation. His attitudes about black people, about Muslim people, about women, about just about every sort of political group you could name, folks agree with his positions and you can’t deny that because folks voted for him.”

“This whole fairy tale about some post racial, post, this utopia that Obama supposedly created is all bull,” he added. “That’s the bottom line when you look at what the results say from last night this nation has not moved a thread in terms of its ideals.”

Clinton and Trump can’t undo the mudslinging and cattiness brought to debates and through media sound bites during their campaign. What’s done is done. However, conversation is at least a starting point. Last week, President Barack Obama and President-elect Donald Trump met at the White House as the two held a transfer of political power meeting. Their wives also toured the White House. For years, Trump claimed that Obama was an immigrant, did not have a legal birth certificate and was the founder of ISIS and throughout Obama’s campaigning for Hillary Clinton, Obama expressed Trumps lack of adequacy in running a country.

In WWE fashion, the two turned-heel. President Obama expressed unity. “My number 1 priority in the next two months is to try to facilitate a transition that ensures our President-elect is successful,” Obama said.

Trump called Obama a “very good man” and stated that he would seek President Obama’s counsel in the future.

Where do we go from here?

A good start is comic relief while telling some truths. Dave Chappelle took care of that on SNL on Saturday. USA Today put it best when they said: After the electoral college answered the call to “Make America Great Again,” the country was hard pressed to find anyone willing or able to make America laugh again. Comedian Dave Chappelle hosted SNL to do just that.

The next four years in this country will be interesting. The always thoughtful and poised Ernie Johnson from TNT’s Inside The NBA threaded the needle like Magic Johnson in his prime when he expressed his displeasure with both presidential candidates. Johnson noted that he wrote in his vote for the first time in his voting history and expressed that he was optimistic. “I just hope he’s all in fixing the wounds in this country and the divides that separate this country,” he said.

“And I want to be part of that too. And for me to part of it, I have to look in the mirror and say, ‘How am I going to be a better man? How am I going to be a better neighbor? How am I going to be a better citizen? How am I going to be a better American? How can I be a fountain and not a drain?’”

Brandon Robinson is a sports and entertainment writer and TV personality. Follow him on Twitter @SCOOPB and visit http://ScoopBRadio.com

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The post Scoop B: Trump Presidency, O.J. Simpson Case Share Similar Media Fascination appeared first on RESPECT. | The Photo Journal of Hip-Hop Culture.