Marcia Clark: OJ Jurors Didn't Care if He Was Guilty

The former Los Angeles County prosecutor who failed to convict OJ Simpson of murder in 1995 says she would probably fail to convict now, for the same reason: Jurors who didn't care whether he was guilty or not. In an interview for an NBC Dateline special, Marcia Clark says some of the nine black jurors "came in for the purpose of payback" amid a similar climate of "racial mistrust" of the police as exists today. "They didn't care whether he was guilty or innocent," Clark says. "They were going to use this case for payback." There was plenty of evidence pointing to Simpson's guilt, but it "didn't wind up mattering because there was a fundamental large issue standing in the way of seeing the evidence," she says. "You had this enormous mistrust of everything LAPD, everything officer related."

"There was no way to reach that jury. There was no way to make them believe. There really wasn't," Clark says, per the Hollywood Reporter, which notes that interest in the case has surged during the airing of the FX series The People v. OJ Simpson: American Crime Story. Clark says the infamous decision to have Simpson try on a glove found near the murder scene wasn't hers. She says co-counsel Christopher Darden came up with the idea and apologized after it backfired. She says she told him it was OK. "If that lost the case for us, we were never going to win anyway," she says. (A knife allegedly found nearly two decades ago on Simpson's former estate is now being tested by the LAPD.)