Word: spousal
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...They didn't want to listen," Cochran said. He said that Deputy District Attorney Christopher Darden's depiction of the Simpsons' marriage as full of violence was "not exactly true." He said there was no evidence his client had hurt Nicole after 1989, when he pleaded no contest to spousal battery. Furthermore, he asserted that experts would testify that the murderer would have been covered with blood afterwards...
...Simpson "beat me for hours as I kept crawling for the door" and forced her to have sex while he went on smacking her. The box also held Polaroids that show Nicole's face badly bruised, news clips about O.J.'s 1989 plea of no contest to charges of spousal abuse and three letters from him asking her forgiveness...
Prior crimes can be used, however, to show motive, intent or planning. More recently the law has carved out a further exception for sexual assault, spousal murder and child molestation by bringing forward evidence that a pattern of past offenses in those areas is an especially good indicator of guilt. That reasoning exasperates some legal thinkers. "You can't infer murder from abuse," insists Columbia University law professor George Fletcher. "Homicide may imply abuse, but abuse does not imply homicide." All the same, the crime bill that was recently passed by Congress allows prior behavior to be used as evidence...
...many other states, appeals courts have issued rulings that have a similar effect. One of those states is California. In a 1986 spousal-murder case, People v. Zack, which could have serious implications for Simpson, the California Supreme Court upheld the conviction of a man accused of killing his wife, ruling that prosecutors could offer evidence that he had assaulted her repeatedly in the past. In the Simpson case, Deputy District Attorney Scott Gordon told the court, "This murder took 17 years to commit...
...that prosecutors drilled out the lock on Nicole Brown Simpson's safe-deposit box and seized photographs of her with a bruised forehead and injured left eye. The pictures show injuries Ms. Simpson had after police were summoned to the Simpson home in 1989. Simpson pleaded no contest to spousal battery in that incident. Prosecutors are expected to argue that the photos show a pattern of spouse abuse by O.J. Simpson. The defense is likely to try to block use of the photos since they were taken well before the 1994 killings and because Nicole Simpson can't be cross...