Mike Barnicle

6/25/08: Comments Don Imus made this week about football player Adam Pacman Jones.

Listen here: http://barnicle.969fmtalk.mobi/2008/06/25/62508-don-imus.aspx

“Barnicle’s View”, with Mike Barnicle, Imus in the Morning, Monday-Wednesday-Friday, 6:55a & 8:55a.

METRO/REGION

In the grippe of O.J. fever

Mike Barnicle, Globe Staff

7 July 1994

Look, I’m not going to kid you. I’m not going to pretend I am busy memorizing the collected works of Yeats or preparing my entry for the Nobel Peace Prize.

I’m thinking no big thoughts here on a humid July day. I’m having no huge discussions of merit about the seminal issues of our time.

Why, I’m not even going grocery shopping because I can’t: I am obsessed with O.J.

I am supposed to be on vacation. I am supposed to be sitting on some beach, surrounded by Canadians and New Yorkers, the perennial human litter of a New England summer.

But I have no interest in the sun. And, for now, I don’t want to read books, look at newspapers, play golf, go to the movies, listen to or watch baseball.

Instead, I am like a lump in front of the tube, hypnotized by the O.J. channel. All O.J. All day. Every day. O.J. news followed by O.J. updates followed by O.J. analysis and round-ups.

Yesterday, I woke to hear Mr. Imus, America’s morning man, interviewing Gerry Spence, the lawyer. Today, he’ll be talking with Fred Graham of Court TV.

As I listen, my mind strays. I wonder what O.J. wakes up to these days: Is it a radio? The voice of a guard? The noise of a jailhouse? The sound of a bird somewhere beyond a high wall?

I wonder if he’s gone crazy yet. Gone right around the bend, totally whacked out by his new reality: the fact he can’t call at will for a tee time at Bel Air Country Club. That he can’t get up and plunge into his back-yard pool whenever he wants, can’t drive to the store, take a walk, make a phone call or receive a visitor on his clock, on his terms.

For him, that life is gone. Maybe forever.

He lives today in a tiny cell, watched by guards at night and the world during the day. His privacy is now simply something others talk about. It’s a constitutional issue rather than a personal reality.

I wonder how he’s handling it. I wonder if he sometimes doesn’t want to jump up and scream, right on national TV: “OK. I’ve had it. Here’s what happened. Here’s what I did, when I did it and why I did it. Now leave me alone.”

This is what my life has been like since O.J. went wall to wall: I spend a couple of hours rooting for the police, a couple more trying to figure who Simpson will get to actually try the case and a couple more laughing at the absurdity that pops across the screen every once in a while.

This extended peek into the bowels of a preliminary hearing has been a terrific thing. It has given people a fairly good idea of how our judicial system has nearly been stripped of common sense to the point where it is becoming easier to literally get away with murder — something that occurs more and more often every single day in courtrooms across the country.

For example, yesterday was spent watching the defense try to get some evidence tossed out. The evidence was a bloody glove police found behind a pool house on Simpson’s property.

So the question became: Did Los Angeles detectives violate O.J.’s rights by jumping the wall without a warrant and finding this glove? In other words, did they deprive the defendant of his constitutional allowance to try to trick the cops?

But what do you suppose the public and press reaction would be today if testimony showed that four detectives left a double homicide, traveled to O.J. Simpson’s house, noticed blood on the handle of a Ford Bronco parked at the curb, saw blood on the driveway, rang the bell repeatedly for 10 or 15 minutes, got no answer and, instead of pursuing their case as well as their duty, hopped back into their cars and drove to Denny’s for the $1.29 Early-Bird special? What do you figure all the brainy editorial writers and absurd law professors would have said about them then?

The sad fact is our judicial process — marvelous in most respects — no longer honors the dead or the victim. The lawyers don’t, either. Many of them are in it for either a fee or glory. Even judges don’t stand for the aggrieved. Too often, they are simply timid referees, keeping both teams in bounds, afraid of being overruled by some higher court.

So it comes down to the cops: In the end, with the focus on the defendant, with two people murdered, they speak for the dead.

Watch this show. Watch what happens. Pay attention to the twists, the turns and the tricks. It is all a wonderful, mesmerizing lesson in semantics and legal hocus-pocus and very few of us can take our eyes off O.J. Simpson.

It’s great summer theater. Unfortunately, two human beings got killed in the very first act and the only people on TV who seem bothered by that brutal act are the police now on trial themselves. That’s American justice, 1994.

MIKE BARNICLE