If I did it: From Brentwood to Mar-a-Lago

Former U.S. President Donald Trump appears ahead of the start of jury selection at Manhattan Criminal Court on April 15, 2024, in New York City. Trump faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in the first of his criminal cases to go to trial. (Jabin Botsford-Pool/Getty Images)

Thirty years ago this summer, on a cool evening in the Brentwood community of Los Angeles, California, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were brutally murdered. The evidence pointed to just one suspect – Nicole’s ex-husband and NFL Hall of Famer O.J. Simpson.

The investigation identified Nicole’s blood in O.J.’s house and O.J.’s blood at the murder scene. The next day, police observed a deep, fresh cut on O.J.’s hand. He had no alibi.  Police found a bloody glove at the crime scene – and its match at O.J.’s residence. A slam dunk case, right?

Not exactly. Because how we view the facts of the O.J. case (including this admittedly simplified version) depends remarkably on our identity – in this case, our racial identity. In the years after the (not guilty) verdict, 83% of white Americans believed that O.J. killed Ron and Nicole, while only 31% of Black Americans believed O.J. was the murderer.

James Lance Taylor, a politics professor at the University of San Francisco, noted that even as the number of Black Americans who believe in O.J.’s guilt later climbed above 50%, “I think in the barbershops today, Black people are saying, ‘he got away with it, but the police got away with killing a lot more of us.’ That’s the mentality.”

As Taylor explained to the Washington Post earlier this month, the Black community had no particular sympathy for O.J. But O.J. was “an extension of the general polarization between Black America and law enforcement.” His murder trial demonstrated that human nature leads us to evaluate facts through the lenses of our personal beliefs, history and identity.

Keep that in mind as you observe the criminal trials of former President Donald Trump in the coming months, especially as recent research indicates that Americans’ partisan identities may be even stronger than our racial and ethnic identities.

There will be those, on the juries and elsewhere, who see the condemning facts of Trump’s criminal trials only through the lens of their MAGA, Republican or conservative politics, or in their antipathy toward perceived liberal, government or “elitist” groups. Likewise, there will be those who see exonerating and extenuating facts only through the lens of their identification in liberal identity groups, or in their antipathy toward conservative causes they view as evil, racist or dishonest.

Whether these things have anything in particular to do with the evidence and the law is irrelevant: The unconscious bias created by our in-group identity can be hard to overcome (assuming one is even interested in overcoming it).

And when particular testimony or evidence in the cases confirms our worst fears about the “other” side – like detective Mark Fuhrman denying ever using a racial slur, only to be confronted with audiotapes of him doing just that over and over again – results can be awfully hard to predict, even in a case where the evidence seems otherwise clear.

We may never have a trial that tests the limits of our polarization like the O.J. trial, coming as it did in Los Angeles just years after the beating of Rodney King. But Trump’s four election-year criminal trials are about to give it a run for its money.

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