Former American football star O.J. Simpson was released from a Nevada prison early Sunday, October 1, 2017 after serving nine years in prison for a 2007 armed robbery and kidnapping in Las Vegas.
The onetime football legend whose earlier murder trial in Los Angeles inspired years of debate over race and justice was paroled only minutes after he first became eligible for release, a Nevada prison official confirmed.
Simpson left the Lovelock Correctional Center northeast of Reno at 12:08 a.m. in the company of an unidentified driver, said Brooke Keast, a spokeswoman for the Nevada Department of Corrections.
“He is out,” Keast said.
“It was incident free, nobody followed, it was exactly what we’d hoped we could do for public safety,” Keast said. “It was a public safety concern. To make it quiet, under the radar and incident free.”
Keast said she had no information on Simpson’s intended destination.
“I do not know where he’s going. I didn’t want to know, to be honest,” she said.
Simpson’s attorney, Malcolm LaVergne, interviewed before his client’s release, did not reveal any plans, but said Simpson was “excited” to be leaving prison.
“I can tell from his voice on the phone last night that he’s looking forward to freedom and hugging his family on the outside,” LaVergne said.
Speculation had swirled over when Simpson would be turned loose after the Nevada Parole Board granted him parole in July for serving a portion of his 33-year sentence and getting credit for good behavior and taking classes in prison.
But with Simpson, controversy and attention seem to chase him wherever he goes — dating back to 1994 when he was arrested and charged with the double-murder of his estranged wife, Nicole Brown, and her friend, Ron Goldman in Los Angeles.
His trial was called “The Trial of the Century” and garnered worldwide attention following his arrest that began with a slow-speed pursuit by police while his friend drove him in a white Ford Bronco.
He was eventually acquitted of the murders in 1995, his trial creating a circus-like atmosphere outside the Los Angeles County Criminal Courts building and spawning a seemingly endless public debate over about whether he had gotten away with murder.
Simpson didn’t help the quash the speculation, authoring a controversial book in 2007 called “If I Did It.” The proceeds from that book, however, were required to go to the victims’ families, who had won a multi-million-dollar civil suit against Simpson.
The Goldman family had remained outspoken about their belief that Simpson killed Ron Goldman, and sister Kim Goldman wrote a book in 2015 called “Can’t Forgive” that laid out the anger and pain she felt over the murder of her brother.
The parole board in Nevada, however, was not allowed to consider the events of 1994 in their deliberations and instead considered the facts around the case in Nevada in 2007, when Simpson was accused of leading a group of men into a Las Vegas hotel and casino to steal sports memorabilia at gunpoint.
Read more at Los Angeles Times.
