With sentencing still a month away, the anger over the verdict of innocence to murder charges for South African double amputee sprinter Oscar Pistorius has evoked memories of another famous athlete's verdict in a murder trial 20 years ago:
O.J. Simpson.
Judge says lying on the witness stand doesn't mean Oscar Pistorius murdered his wife
The British newspaper, The Guardian, talked about examples of brutalized partners of professional athletes, evoking the case of former Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice before bringing the definitive case of assumed injustice against a partner of an athlete - the 1994 deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson, O.J.'s estranged wife, along with Ronald Goldman.
Simpson was cleared of murder charges, though later lost a civil trial charging him responsible for her death.
"The abuse of Janay Rice and the death of Reeva Steenkamp - and of Nicole Brown Simpson, while we're talking about brutalized partners of celebrity athletes - remind us, were reminders needed, that men can cause unimaginable physical damage to the women they say they love."
The Simpson trial, right or wrong, became a trial about race. A 1995 CNN poll, reproduced by the Los Angeles Times, reported that 62 percent of Caucasians believed Simpson was guilty of killing his wife and Goldman against only 21 percent believing he was innocent. Just 14 percent of African-Americans believed Simpson was guilty while 66 percent believed he was innocent.
The racial tension overshadowed the domestic violence aspect that is front and center in the minds of American sports fans, thanks to Rice.
The Guardian talked about the relationship between Pistorius and Steenkamp, reporting that Steenkamp once wrote to Pistorius, saying how she was to be "scared of you sometimes and how u snap at me and of how you will react to me."
Steenkamp felt "attacked" by the person she "deserved protection from." The Guardian produced that quote in response to an aspect of Judge Thokozile Masipa's verdict of Pistorius' innocence of murder that referred to her notion that "Normal relationships are dynamic and unpredictable most of the time, and human beings are fickle."
The Guardian acknowledged in another article that the prosecution deserves blame for not proving its case; but "Those words feel flimsy right now. A woman is dead at the hands of her intimate partner. She is dead under the most implausible of circumstances because what would an intruder be doing, locked in a bathroom in the middle of the night?"
Do you consider the Oscar Pistorius murder trial to be similar to that of the O.J. Simpson murder trial? Comment below or tell us @SportsWN.
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