Thoughts on guilt and innocence

I was perusing the news on the web the other day and chanced upon a murder case detailed on "48 Hours". It was about the murder of a woman and her dog near San Antonio.

In 1994, I became a little obsessed with the O.J. Simpson case. I watched the trial, I taped it when I could not watch it live, I bought some of the books written about the case, and... in the end... I was stunned by the verdict.

I also learned a lot. About trials, lawyers, judges, the police... the whole justice system. I thought I knew something about lawyers. My mother was a legal secretary and, therefore, I grew up around them.  I also knew something about the police. I had had my run-ins with the police in my teens and had seen the inside of a police station on more than one or two occasions. I had numerous encounters with police outside those stations, most of which led to nothing. I had been falsely accused a couple of times and gotten away with crimes a couple of times. But you can always learn and you often find that your "knowledge" is not all that accurate.

Among the things I learned is that people might tell the truth but it may be the "truth" as they saw it. That neither side (prosecution nor defense) tells the whole story. And that juries are always manipulated.

My final take on the Simpson case? The police tried to frame a guilty man and it backfired on them.