Rico's rants: OJ’s knife recovered

05 March 2016

OJ’s knife recovered

Slate has an article by Ben Mathis-Lilley about yet another idiot policeman:

Just as FX is halfway through airing The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, a miniseries about Simpson's murder trial, TMZ has reported that Los Angeles, California police are performing tests on a knife that was found on Simpson's property "years ago", which a traffic cop had been keeping in his personal possession. The knife, TMZ says, came to the attention of higher authorities only when the traffic officer told another friend on the force he planned on having it framed.
TMZ's reporting, while presented hyperbolically, is usually reliable, and the Los Angeles Times has confirmed the basic details of the story. This is what TMZ says:

We're told a construction worker found the knife years ago. We have heard several different stories, ranging from "several years ago" to 1998, when the house was demolished.
The weapon is a folding buck knife. Our law enforcement sources say the construction worker took the knife to the street, where he saw an LAPD cop. He told the officer where he found the knife, and the cop took it. Turns out the cop, who worked in the traffic division, off duty at the time, was working security for a movie shoot at a house across the street. Our sources say the officer took the knife home and kept it for years.
A Buck knife is a type of folding knife whose blade can be locked open. Police and prosecutors never recovered a murder weapon in Simpson's case; he was found not guilty by a jury on charges of killing Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman, but was later found liable for Goldman's death in a civil trial. Simpson was then convicted of armed robbery and kidnapping in Las Vegas, Nevada in 2008, and is eligible for parole beginning in 2017.
The knife is now in the process of being tested for hair, fingerprints, DNA, and other potential evidence. Simpson, of course, cannot be retried for murder because he's already been acquitted.