‘Too tight’: The botched glove demonstration at O.J. ‘Trial of the Century’ in 1995
Simpson: Center stage
O.J. Simpson never testified at his months-long double-murder trial in 1995.
But a consistent feature of the absorbing yet often-repellent case was that Simpson was never far from center stage — especially so at key moments in the proceedings, which stretched from late January to early October and ended in his acquittal.
One of the trial’s most memorable and decisive moments came 25 years ago when Christopher Darden, an assistant prosecutor, surprised his colleagues by asking Simpson to try on a pair of blood-stained leather gloves believed worn in the fatal attack on Nicole Simpson and Ronald L. Goldman.
One glove had been found at the murder scene, outside Nicole Simpson’s condominium in west Los Angeles. Its mate was found by a police detective outside of O.J. Simpson’s mansion a few miles away.
The gloves demonstration in the Los Angeles courtroom took place June 15, 1995. It was a memorable, theatrical, and even farcical moment in what was often called the “Trial of the Century.”
The demonstration brought Simpson squarely to center stage and he milked the moment, standing before the jury box as he seemed to struggle to tug on the gloves over latex gloves he was obliged to wear, to avoid contaminating evidence.
Simpson grimaced repeatedly and said so that jurors could hear, “Too tight.”
And he smirked faintly, perhaps in apparent triumph.
As I noted in my book, 1995: The Year the Future Began, the gloves did seem small for Simpson’s hands. But they likely had shrunk in the testing that they had been exposed to.
In any case, “the ill-advised demonstration had allowed Simpson to testify in effect, without having to face cross-examination.” I wrote.
The prosecution’s botched move inspired a rallying cry for Simpson’s defense team — an idiom that remains familiar despite the passage of 25 years. In closing remarks at the trial, Simpson’s lead lawyer, Johnnie Cochran, recalled how Simpson struggled to pull on the gloves and advised jurors:
“[R]emember these words; if it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”
Cochran described the gloves gambit as “perhaps the single most defining moment in this trial,” adding:
“We may all live to be 100 years old, and I hope we do, but you’ll always remember that those gloves, when Darden asked him to try them on, didn’t fit.”
Darden wrote in a memoir, titled In Contempt, that his decision was preemptive, saying he believed Cochran would likely to call for such a demonstration if the prosecution did not.
But Darden conceded in the memoir that his move was a mistake, stating :
“People ask me now would I do it again. No. Of course not. I should have taken into account shrinkage” of the gloves. “But, while I wouldn’t do it again, I know those are [Simpson’s] gloves.”
Darden said he received the cold shoulder from colleagues in the district attorney’s office after the bungled demonstration. “That afternoon,” he wrote, “I went upstairs and passed a clerk; he did not look at me. No one did. I passed my colleagues in the hallway and they were silent. They had nothing to say to me.”
He also said the lead prosecutor, Marcia Clark, “didn’t talk to me for a few days. For weeks after that, I was left out of major decisions involving the case.”
Darden said he called Clark on the phone a few days later to apologize, telling her, “I’m sorry I screwed up your case.”
But there was no way Darden could undo the stunning blunder of mid-June 1995.
He appears to have lived hard with the botched demonstration. He mentioned it at a panel discussion in New York in 2012, saying that Cochran, who died of a brain tumor seven years earlier, might have tampered with the lining of the gloves so that they wouldn’t fit Simpson’s hands.
Alan Dershowitz, another Simpson defense lawyer, shot back at Darden, declaring:
“Having made the greatest legal blunder of the 20th century, he’s trying to blame it on the dead man.”
In an interview on NBC’s Today show in 2016, Darden asserted, perhaps ironically and in jest, that “the whole glove thing was just the most brilliant move in any criminal courtroom in the history of American jurisprudence. Let me go on the record and say I can’t regret it. It’s the past.”
[Adapted with new material from an essay posted June 14, 2015, at The 1995 Blog]
More from The 1995 Blog:
- The inevitability of O.J. Simpson’s acquittal in 1995
- The false equivalence of Trump and O.J. trials
- O.J. Simpson, egregious again: 25 years after ex-wife’s vicious slaying, he says, ‘Life is fine’
- Clinton, his portrait, and the persistent shadow of scandal
- When Secret Service agents wore gloves to greet gay officials
- Recalling the ’95 case against lecherous Bob Packwood, whom Biden praised
- With us still: 1995, 25 years on
- What did the ’90s mean?
- The ’90s deserve better
- Why 1995?
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