Juice! Ishmael Reed's novel about the O.J. Simpson trial

It turns out O.J. was innocent.

That's my conclusion from reading Juice!, the new novel by Ishmael Reed. An amazing work, much of it devoted to a fairly detailed discussion of the TV news coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial. It was all factual. I sat there reading and I'd google things I didn't remember and which seemed surprising to me. Like the fact that Nichole Simpson and her sister, Denise, both dated Mafia hitmen.

Reed made a pretty good case for Simpson's innocence, I thought. At the very least, he shows that the verdict in the criminal trial wasn't nearly as irrational and unreasonable as many seemed to imagine.

"I don't know why they're even having a trial!" said a hippie girl I was working with. "He's clearly guilty!" She had just seen the limo driver testify that Simpson seemed a bit winded when he came out for his ride to the airport. That was all she needed to hear. Come to think of it, that same girl thought the Charles Manson-like youths pictured in the paper looked too innocent to have brutally murdered a convenience store clerk like the pleaded guilty to doing. She was later fired for stealing stuff from the cars.

One day, I was sitting in the burger place next door. They had a TV on.

"Why is a 6th grade science teacher testifying?" a co-worker quipped when he saw a woman giving some scientific evidence for the prosecution.

"That's Simpson's 6th grade teacher," I said. "She's testifying that Orenthal was often tardy and disruptive in class."

I thought my quip was much cleverer than his. It wasn't that clever, I know, but he didn't appreciate it, no one else heard it, and this is my only chance to repeat it.

There was one thing that always bothered me.

When the jury returned the verdict, Ito knew what it was, but waited until the next morning to announce it. Which meant that O.J. Simpson, then an innocent man, spent an extra night in jail even though he had been acquitted. Not only that, but they kept him in suspense, not knowing if he was going to spend the rest of his life in prison. They say they told him, but watch him when the verdict was read. He was clearly relieved.