‘The Gloves Didn’t Fit’ Jurors Cite Lack Of Blood, Sloppy Police Work As Reasons For Acquittal

The American public, fed a steady diet of O.J. Simpson for more than a year, got a fresh perspective on the case Wednesday as a few jurors emerged to defend their decision to acquit the former football star of double-murder charges.

Jurors Gina Rhodes-Rosborough and Brenda Moran said prosecutors failed to erase their doubts that Simpson killed his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman. They also questioned the motives of investigating police.

Moran borrowed a phrase and image from the trial, in which Simpson tried to put on a pair of gloves linked to the June 12, 1994, killings, to explain the jury’s decision.

“In plain English, the gloves didn’t fit,” Moran, 45, a South Central Los Angeles resident said in a news conference. Until Tuesday, after the jury announced it had acquitted Simpson, she’d been known only as juror No. 7.

Jurors also had a difficult time believing all the evidence Los Angeles police collected against the celebrity defendant, added Rosborough.

Formerly known as juror No. 10, Rosborough said she was suspicious after looking at small blood stains in the Ford Bronco which police said Simpson used to make the two-mile trip to and from his former wife’s condominium, where the killings occurred.

There wasn’t enough blood in the utility vehicle, said Rosborough, who’d viewed the blood-soaked crime scene.

“There was that one little speck of blood (on the door),” Rosborough said in an interview with Oprah Winfrey, broadcast Wednesday afternoon. “If he had committed such a bloody crime, there should have been more blood in that Bronco.”

The evidence didn’t add up agreed a third juror, Lionel Cryer. He gave a brief interview on Tuesday afternoon after Judge Lance Ito released the 12 jurors and two alternates from their sequestration at a downtown hotel.

Cryer, 44, became one of the many footnotes in the trial when he flashed Simpson a clenched fist of support after the former football star learned he would not be going to prison. Later that day, he also became the first juror to give the nation an inside look into the workings of the 10-woman, two-man panel.

“It was garbage in, garbage out,” Cryer, or juror No. 6, told The Associated Press. “There was a problem with what we were being presented to (prosecutors) for testing from LAPD.”

Those problems - questionable DNA evidence, police officers whose testimony didn’t quite jibe with jurors’ thinking and sloppy handling of evidence, to name a few - left jurors with no choice other than to free Simpson, said Moran.