WASHINGTON – O.J. Simpson, the American football star and actor who was acquitted in a sensational 1995 trial of murdering his former wife but was found in a civil lawsuit to be responsible for her death and was later imprisoned for armed robbery and kidnapping, has died at the age of 76.

Simpson, cleared by a Los Angeles jury in what the US media called “the trial of the century”, died on April 10 after a battle with cancer, his family posted on social media on April 11.

He avoided prison when he was found not guilty in the 1994 stabbing deaths of former wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman in Los Angeles. Simpson later served nine years in a Nevada prison after being convicted in 2008 on 12 counts of armed robbery and kidnapping two sports memorabilia dealers at gunpoint in a Las Vegas hotel.

Nicknamed “The Juice”, Simpson was one of the best and most popular athletes of the late 1960s and 1970s. He overcame childhood infirmity to become an electrifying running back at the University of Southern California and won the Heisman Trophy as college football’s top player. After a record-setting career in the National Football League (NFL) with the Buffalo Bills and San Francisco 49ers, he was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

He parlayed his football stardom into a career as a sportscaster, advertising pitchman and Hollywood actor in films, including the Naked Gun series.

All that changed after Ms Simpson and Mr Goldman were found fatally slashed in a bloody scene outside her Los Angeles home on June 12, 1994.

Simpson quickly emerged as a suspect. He was ordered to surrender to police, but five days after the killings, he fled in his white Ford Bronco with a former teammate – carrying his passport and a disguise. A slow-speed chase through the Los Angeles area ended at Simpson’s mansion, and he was later charged in the murders.

What ensued was one of the most notorious trials in 20th-century America and a media circus. It had everything: a rich celebrity defendant; a black man accused of killing his white former wife out of jealousy; a woman slain after divorcing a man who had beaten her; a “dream team” of pricey and charismatic defence lawyers; and a huge gaffe by prosecutors.

Simpson, who at the outset of the case declared himself “absolutely 100 per cent not guilty”, waved at the jurors and mouthed the words “thank you” after the predominantly black panel of 10 women and two men acquitted him on Oct 3, 1995.

Prosecutors argued that he killed his former wife in a jealous fury, and they presented extensive blood, hair and fibre tests linking him to the murders.

The defence countered that the celebrity defendant was framed by racist white police.

The trial transfixed America. In the White House, then President Bill Clinton left the Oval Office and watched the verdict on his secretary’s TV.

Many black Americans celebrated his acquittal, seeing Simpson as the victim of bigoted police. Many white Americans were appalled by his exoneration.

His legal team included prominent criminal defence lawyers Johnnie Cochran, Alan Dershowitz and F. Lee Bailey, who often outmanoeuvred the prosecution.

Prosecutors committed a memorable blunder when they directed Simpson to try on a pair of bloodstained gloves found at the murder scene, confident they would fit perfectly and show he was the killer.

In a highly theatrical demonstration, he struggled to put on the gloves and indicated to the jury they did not fit.

Delivering the trial’s most famous words, Mr Cochran referred to the gloves in closing arguments to jurors with a rhyme: “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” Mr Dershowitz later called the prosecution decision to ask Simpson to try on the gloves “the greatest legal blunder of the 20th century”.

“What this verdict tells you is how fame and money can buy the best defence, can take a case of overwhelming incriminating physical evidence and transform it into a case riddled with reasonable doubt,” University of California law professor Peter Arenella told The New York Times after the verdict.

“A predominantly African-American jury was more susceptible to claims of police incompetence and corruption and more willing to impose a higher burden of proof than normally required for proof beyond a reasonable doubt,” Professor Arenella said.

After his acquittal, Simpson said that “I will pursue as my primary goal in life the killer or killers who slayed Nicole and Mr Goldman... They are out there somewhere... I would not, could not and did not kill anyone.”

The Goldman and Brown families subsequently pursued a wrongful-death lawsuit against Simpson in civil court. In 1997, a predominantly white jury in Santa Monica, California, found Simpson liable for the two deaths and ordered him to pay US$33.5 million in damages.

“We finally have justice for Ron and Nicole,” Mr Fred Goldman, Ron’s father, said after the verdict.

Simpson’s “dream team” did not represent him in the civil trial in which the burden of proof was lower than in a criminal trial – a “preponderance of the evidence” rather than “beyond a reasonable doubt”. New evidence also hurt Simpson, including photographs of him wearing the type of shoes that had left bloody footprints at the murder scene.

After the civil case, some of his belongings, including memorabilia from his football days, were taken and auctioned off to help pay the damages he owed.

On Oct 3, 2008, exactly 13 years after his acquittal in the murder trial, he was convicted by a Las Vegas jury on charges including kidnapping and armed robbery. These stemmed from a 2007 incident at a casino hotel in which Simpson and five men, at least two carrying guns, stole sports memorabilia worth thousands of dollars from two dealers.

Simpson said he was just trying to recover his own property but was sentenced to up to 33 years in prison.

“I didn’t want to hurt anybody,” Simpson, in a blue prison jumpsuit with shackles on his legs and wrists, said at his sentencing. “I didn’t know I was doing anything wrong.”

He was released on parole in 2017 and moved into a gated community in Las Vegas. He was granted early release from parole in 2021 due to good behaviour at the age of 74.

His life saga was recounted in the Oscar-winning 2016 documentary O.J.: Made In America, as well as various TV dramatisations.

He was born Orenthal James Simpson in San Francisco on July 9, 1947. He had rickets when he was two years old and was forced to wear leg braces until he was five, but recovered so thoroughly that he became one of the most celebrated football players of all time.

During nine seasons for the Buffalo Bills and two for the San Francisco 49ers, he became one of the greatest ball carriers in NFL history. In 1973, he became the first NFL player to rush for more than 2,000 yards in a season. He retired in 1979.

He also became an advertising pitchman, best known for years of TV commercials for Hertz rental cars. As an actor, he appeared in movies, including The Towering Inferno (1974), Capricorn One (1977) and The Naked Gun cop spoof films in 1988, 1991 and 1994, playing a witless police detective.

Simpson married his first wife Marguerite in 1967, and they had three children, including one who drowned in the family’s swimming pool at the age of two in 1979, the year the couple divorced.

Simpson met future wife Nicole when she was a 17-year-old waitress and he was still married to Marguerite. They married in 1985 and had two children. She later called police after incidents in which he struck her. Simpson pleaded no contest to spousal abuse charges in 1989. REUTERS