'People vs OJ Simpson' Series: District Attorney Gil Garcetti Regrets Marcia Clark's Involvement?
Gil Garcetti may be retired from his position as the Los Angeles District Attorney but he still has plenty to say about the O.J. Simpson trial.
With renewed interest in the Simpson case (a.k.a. "The Trial of the Century") due to FX's recent miniseries American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson, Garcetti is speaking out about the details of the case.
Garcetti spoke with the New York Post in a new interview about how he did not want attorney Marcia Clark on the case.
"She wasn't my choice - I didn't pick her," he admitted. "Marcia is a very good lawyer, but one of the things with her was that she didn't heed the advice of our trial consultant who told her not to pick African-American women - particularly black mothers - for that jury."
The former D.A. went on to explain that because of this, "there was no chance that we'd get a guilty verdict, although I still thought we'd get two or three jurors to hold out for a hung jury."
He spoke on how Clark insisted upon taking the lead in this case, and eventually he agreed to it. Garcetti noted that the FX miniseries isn't totally accurate to how things went down.
"I've watched the first three episodes, but the rest of it I've recorded," he said, adding, "They are making up the dialogue; it's very misleading."
Garcetti also told an anecdote about being at a Hollywood function and realizing that the prosecution probably wasn't going to win this case.
"I went to a function, a Hollywood agents' function and everyone there was talking about the O.J. trial. Now, there was this one African-American couple, an agent and her husband, who is a Ph.D. Naturally, I steered clear of the trial talk, but what the Ph.D. told me was that he thought O.J. was guilty but he'd still vote not guilty and that floored me," he explained. "I asked him how he could vote not guilty if he knew he was guilty . . . I asked him how he would explain that to his kids and he just dropped his head and said he didn't know. That's when I knew I had a big problem."
