What can be said of this film/documentary/dramatisation? The very first thing that should be said about it is that you will almost certainly not be able to watch it in one sitting, it will probably take you four or five. In fact you will lose little or nothing if you don't watch the second two segments but simply listen to them because they are basically all Bugliosi talking, dissecting and analysing the case, then presenting his closing argument to the jury. The first segment contains interviews and commentary from many people including Mark Fuhrman who became the scapegoat for Simpson's bizarre acquittal.
If you are not familiar with him, Vincent Bugliosi, who died in June this year, was the Los Angeles County District Attorney who prosecuted the Manson "Family". By the time of the OJ Simpson double murder he had long since left the legal profession but continued to make his living off it by writing, lecturing and occasional ventures into film. This video is about how he would have tried the Simpson case had he been DA at the time.
If you are not that familiar with America's most infamous acquitted double murderer since Lizzie Borden, Bugliosi will tell you more than you ever wanted to know about his crime. If you are familiar with it to at least some degree, as is most likely if you speak fluent English and have not been living on Mars for the past twenty years, you may think he takes an awful long time to tell you what you already know, namely that while the controversy over Borden's 1892 acquittal continues to this day, there has never been any real controversy over the guilt of OJ Simpson. And that the judge was more interested in playing to the camera, that the defense was manifestly dishonest, and that this was the dumbest jury ever empanelled in America, at least until the acquittal of Casey Anthony a decade and a half later.
Seriously, this is everything you need to know about a case and a trial that dragged on for the best part of a year from the selection of the jury to the verdict, a trial that in the UK would have lasted a maximum of 2 months and where the nonsense over Mark Fuhrman's use of the dreaded N word would have been disposed of in half an hour at most because of restrictions on cross-examination as to credit.
Bugliosi has done an excellent job, something that cannot in truth be said of anyone who took part in the actual trial. To take just a few points, as he said, there were too many, indeed far too many prosecutors on the case: twenty-five. You don't use a team to paint the Mona Lisa. Not all the criticism and controversy concerning Mark Fuhrman related to his language, there was the little matter of a mysterious fingerprint, this came from other officers. And Fuhrman did have a point when he said Marcia Clark went too far when she said the world would have been a better place had he not been born!
The one tiny criticism that can be made of Bugliosi is that he overstates the case against Simpson, something that must have taken a Herculean effort.
