O.J. Simpson to be free man after Nevada board grants parole

Former NFL standout O.J. Simpson will soon be a free man after he was granted parole during a hearing at a Nevada prison on Thursday.

Simpson was expected to be released as soon as Oct. 1, at which point he will have served the minimum of his nine-to-33-year armed-robbery sentence for the bungled attempt to snatch the memorabilia he claimed had been stolen from him.

The former football star, looking trimmer than he has in recent years, walked briskly into the hearing room dressed in jeans, a light-blue prison-issue shirt and sneakers. He laughed at one point as the parole board chairwoman mistakenly gave his age as 90.

Simpson, 70, said he never pointed a gun at anyone nor made any threats during the crime that put him in prison, and he forcefully insisted that nearly all the memorabilia he saw in two collectors’ hotel room belonged to him.

“In no way, shape or form did I wish them any harm,” he added, saying he later made amends with those in the room.

Simpson also said he has often mediated conflicts among inmates and took an alternative-to-violence course behind bars.

His defenders have argued, too, that his sentence was out of proportion to the crime and that he was being punished for the two murders he was acquitted of during his 1995 “Trial of the Century” in Los Angeles, the stabbings of ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman.

Several major TV networks and cable channels — including ABC, NBC, CNN, Fox, MSNBC and ESPN — carried the proceedings live, just as some of them did two decades ago during the Ford Bronco chase that ended in Simpson’s arrest, and again when the jury in the murder case came back with its verdict.

An electrifying running back dubbed “The Juice,” Simpson won the Heisman Trophy as the nation’s best college football player in 1968 and went on to become one of the NFL’s all-time greats.

The handsome and charismatic athlete was also a “Monday Night Football” commentator, sprinted through airports in Hertz rental-car commercials and built a Hollywood career with roles in the “Naked Gun” comedies and other movies.

All of that came crashing down with his arrest in the 1994 slayings and his trial, a gavel-to-gavel live-TV sensation that transfixed viewers with its testimony about the bloody glove that didn’t fit and stirred furious debate over racist police, celebrity justice and cameras in the courtroom.

Last year, the case proved to be compelling TV all over again with the ESPN documentary “O.J.: Made in America” and the award-winning FX miniseries “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story.”

In 1997, Simpson was found liable in civil court for the two killings and ordered to pay $33.5 million to survivors, including his children and the Goldman family.

Then a decade later, he and five accomplices — two with guns — stormed a hotel room and seized photos, plaques and signed balls, some of which never belonged to Simpson, from two sports memorabilia dealers.

Simpson was convicted in 2008, and the long prison sentence brought a measure of satisfaction to some of those who thought he got away with murder.

The now-retired district attorney who prosecuted Simpson for the heist, David Roger, has denied Simpson’s sentence was “payback” for his murder acquittal. He has also said that if Simpson behaved in prison, he should get parole.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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