Jurors heard opening arguments on Monday in the trial of former football star and actor OJ Simpson in a case that could send him to prison for life.
The defense and prosecution played excerpts from audio recordings of a September last year confrontation in a Las Vegas hotel-casino, pointing to different excerpts to argue different views of Simpson’s intentions.
The basic facts at the trial’s heart — that Simpson and four other men stormed into a hotel room and later left with pillow cases full of valuable sports memorabilia largely related to the football star’s career — are not in dispute.
The debate in court is centered around whether Simpson aimed to conduct an armed robbery or was on a mission to recover personal heirlooms that he has insisted were stolen from him.
The 61-year-old Simpson and co-accused Clarence Stewart, 54, have pleaded not guilty to 12 charges including kidnapping and armed robbery, both of which carry potential life sentences in the state of Nevada.
“The audio will show threats, it will show force, it will show demands and it will show the taking of property from the victims in this case,” prosecutor Christopher Owens said.
“In our presentation of the evidence, we are going to spend the next few days finding which may be the true face of Simpson, not necessarily the one he tries to put out to the world,” Owens said.
Simpson’s lawyer Yale Galanter said the trial was about “personal property,” and that his client was retrieving his things that had been stolen years earlier.
The first witnesses are also due to appear in the trial that gets underway in earnest this week after four days of jury selection that resulted in a panel of three men and nine women, all of them white.
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