O.J. Simpson and accountability

Why the former football star is going to prison, and why America no longer cares

Times have certainly changed, said The Philadelphia Inquirer in an editorial. Hardly anybody blinked Friday after former football star O.J. Simpson was sentenced to nine to 33 years in prison for his part in a “bungled armed robbery” in Las Vegas. Simpson’s 1995 acquittal in the murder of his former wife, Nicole, and her friend, Ronald Goldman, “gripped the nation and divided it on racial lines,” but we have bigger things to worry about now.

Call this "karmic justice,” said the Los Angeles Times in an editorial. Simpson's lawyers plan to appeal and say that their client got an extra tough sentence because so many people think he got away with murder in his first trial. But Simpson showed himself to be a “remorseless liar” who thinks that, as a celebrity, he can do anything he wants, so the sentence seems “cosmically just.”

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