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I forsee future murder trials of a black defendant and white victim, where the jury is made up of mostly Blacks just as in the OJ trial. And the result will be the same. The verdict will be not guilty and considered payback for Travon Martin.

Interview: William Hodgman

As assistant district attorney for the city of Los Angeles, Willliam Hodgman was one of the lead prosecutors, arguing pretrial motions and working on the jury selection process.

How do you explain the images of the black community rejoicing at the O.J. acquittal?

I think it can be summed up in four words: payback for Rodney King.

The afternoon after the verdicts came in, I was in my office, and after having spent time briefly with the Brown family, more time with the Goldman family, attempting to console them as well as console the junior members of our own team who were quite distraught over the verdicts, ... there was a knock at the door, and a couple deputy sheriffs came in. They had been with the group of deputies who had transported the jurors who had been sequestered out to a sheriff substation to be released back to their loved ones and boyfriends and others. And they described the scene as joyous, high-fiving, smiles, laughter, hugs. And these two deputies told me, they said: “Bill, you guys never had a chance. We were standing there in the parking lot, and all we could hear was, ‘That was payback for Rodney King. That was payback for Rodney King.’”

As assistant district attorney for the city of Los Angeles, Willliam Hodgman was one of the lead prosecutors, arguing pretrial motions and working on the jury selection process. However, in late January 1995, he took on a less prominent role due to health reasons. In this interview, he explains the prosecution’s reasons for making Simpson’s domestic violence a key part of their case — and one that had little impact on the jury — as well as their decision to use Detective Mark Fuhrman, despite knowing about his previous racist remarks. Hodgman discusses how, in retrospect, he might have handled the case differently, but feels that it probably would have mattered little in the end. He believes the public, and possibly the jurors, were seeking “payback.” “This is cognitive dissonance: this feeling, this sentiment that somehow the score was going to be even by acquitting O.J.,” Hodgman tells FRONTLINE. “I have no idea if those jurors … felt that maybe O.J. did it, but that they were simply going to let him go — a jury nullification — or, if they really carefully deliberated and felt that somehow the evidence was inadequate.” This interview was conducted on April 4, 2005.

What was the O.J. Simpson trial all about? Was this just a murder trial, or was it something else as well?

... I’ve often likened the O.J. Simpson case to a perfect storm, a crashing together of these external

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/oj/interviews/hodgman.html