OJ Simpson a “completely free man”; parole ends in Nevada

OJ Simpson is a free man.

The 74-year-old former football hero and actor, charged with murder in California and convicted of armed robbery in Las Vegas, earned good conduct credits and was released on parole effective December 1, has Nevada State Police spokeswoman Kim Yoko Smith said Tuesday.

“Mr. Simpson is a completely free man now,” said Malcolm LaVergne, Simpson’s lawyer in Las Vegas.

Simpson declined an immediate interview, LaVergne said, and the attorney declined to talk about Simpson’s future plans, including whether he intends to stay in Nevada.

Simpson had told parole officers before his release from prison on October 1, 2017, that he planned to move to Florida.

Instead, he moved to a gated community in Las Vegas, where he plays golf and frequently uses Twitter to post his thoughts on college and professional sports, particularly soccer.

“Life is going well,” he told The Associated Press in an interview in June 2019.

The Simpson saga makes him, in the words of one of his Las Vegas trial attorneys, one of the most famous people on the planet.

He grew up in social housing in San Francisco, attended the University of Southern California, and won the Heisman Trophy for Best College Football Player in 1968. He became a member of the NFL Hall of Fame and the The first running back to gain 2,000 yards in a season with the Buffalo Bills in 1973. He appeared in films and was a pitchman for a rental car company and a football commentator.

In what has come to be known as “The Trial of the Century”, he was acquitted in 1995 of the double murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and his friend Ronald Goldman.

The trial was the subject of hammer-to-hammer television coverage, with Simpson represented by a legal “dream team” that included the late Johnnie Cochran Jr. and F. Lee Bailey.

In another case more than a decade later, Simpson was convicted by a jury in Las Vegas and sentenced to prison for leading five men, two with guns, in a 2007 confrontation with two sporting collectibles dealers in a cramped room at a Las Vegas strip hotel and casino.

Simpson insisted he only wanted to recover personal memorabilia and items that were stolen from him after his acquittal in the double murder.

He was found responsible for the deaths in 1997 by a jury in a California civil court which ordered him to pay $ 33.5 million to the families of the victims.

Simpson served nine years in a Nevada prison for armed robbery.

His initial parole date was September 29, 2022. Last summer, this date was brought forward for good behavior to February 9. The majority of the Nevada Board of Parole, which finally granted his early release after a November 30 hearing, cut his term by about three more months for good behavior.

While on parole in 2019, Simpson sued a Las Vegas Strip resort that had banned him two years earlier. He alleged that anonymous employees defamed him by telling a celebrity news site that he was drunk, disruptive and unruly.

The Las Vegas Cosmopolitan argued that Simpson could not be defamed because his reputation was already tarnished by his criminal and civil trials, as well as his conviction and imprisonment in Nevada.

The two sides reached an amicable settlement on March 31 on terms neither disclosed.

LaVergne said in June that Simpson would also continue to fight court orders that he owed at least $ 60 million in judgments resulting from the 1994 murders.