‘Disgraceful and appalling’: Toobin tears into O.J. Simpson’s parole testimony

CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin said O.J. Simpson’s testimony before a Nevada parole board on Thursday was “disgraceful and appalling.”

“After all these years I thought I had lost the ability to be appalled, to be nauseated, to be outraged by the behavior of O.J. Simpson,” Toobin — whose book, The People vs. O.J. Simpson, became a hit television series in 2016 — said on CNN. “His statements were self-justifying, self-pitying, showing no remorse, no understanding, no sense of reality about his own life.”

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The 70-year-old Simpson was granted parole after serving nearly nine years of a 33-year sentence stemming from a 2007 armed robbery in Las Vegas. During Thursday’s hearing, Simpson — who was acquitted in the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman in 1995 — told the four-member parole board panel that he has “basically lived a conflict-free life.”

“Put aside the murders, which I think he committed, but he was acquitted of,” Toobin said. “How about the fact that he repeatedly beat the hell out of Nicole Brown Simpson? And she called 911 all the time on him, and he is a convicted and confessed domestic abuser? No acknowledgement of that.”

During Simpson’s infamous murder trial, 911 tapes released by the Los Angeles Police Department revealed that police were called to Nicole Brown Simpson’s home on several occasions before the murders, and that she had been beaten by the former football star.

The parole board informed Simpson that it would not consider that trial in deciding whether to grant his release.

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In 2008, Simpson was sentenced to 33 years for his role in organizing the robbery. Simpson said that he had wanted to retrieve sports memorabilia that he said had been stolen from him a decade earlier. Simpson was not armed, but enlisted men who were. In 2013, Simpson sought and received parole for the weapons charges from the same parole board.

Because of Simpson’s age and clean prison record, the decision to grant him parole was expected.

“I can’t say I disagree with what the parole board did,” Toobin said. “But what an absolute disgrace this was.”

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