Detective's Loss of Credibility Helped OJ Simpson's Defense

Mark Fuhrman, the former Los Angeles detective whose role in the murder prosecution of OJ Simpson collapsed under the weight of his own racist pronouncements, has died at 74. Fuhrman's manager said he died of throat cancer on Tuesday in northern Idaho. A Marine veteran who joined the LAPD in 1975 and became a detective in 1989, Fuhrman was part of the team that had previously responded to domestic violence calls from Nicole Brown Simpson, ex-wife of the former football star, before her killing in 1994. After she and Ronald Goldman were fatally stabbed outside her Brentwood home, the New York Times reports, Fuhrman helped collect evidence, including a bloody glove that became central to the prosecution's case.

Defense lawyers later alleged, without substantiating evidence, that the glove had been planted. Fuhrman's credibility came under withering attack, per the AP, when the defense raised the prospect of racial bias. On the stand in 1995, Fuhrman initially denied using racial slurs, only to be contradicted by tapes introduced by Simpson's defense that captured him doing so repeatedly. He then said the remarks were made while working on a screenplay. Other witnesses testified that he used such language in earnest, including one who recalled Fuhrman saying that if it were up to him, Black people would be "gathered together and burned."

In a second court appearance, he invoked the Fifth Amendment, and lead defense attorney Johnnie Cochran portrayed him to the mostly Black jury as a racist and a liar. Simpson was found liable for the killings in a civil suit later but was acquitted in the criminal case. Fuhrman pleaded no contest to perjury in 1996, receiving three years' probation and a fine; the conviction was later expunged. After leaving the LAPD that year, he moved to Idaho, worked briefly as an electrician's apprentice, then reinvented himself as a true-crime author and Fox News commentator, writing books on the Simpson case and other high-profile killings.

Fuhrman apologized for his slurs in interviews, insisted he had not planted evidence, and argued he had been made a scapegoat, while acknowledging that some of the police work in the Simpson investigation had been "sloppy" and that he was unlikely ever to change public opinion about him. Fuhrman was the only person to be criminally convicted in connection with the Simpson case. Simpson died in 2024. The same year, Fuhrman was prohibited from working as a police officer in California.