Simpson In-Laws Face Tough Task in Custody Fight

O.J. Simpson’s former in-laws still face an uphill battle to regain custody of their grandchildren despite winning a new trial, legal experts said Wednesday.

The biggest hurdle the grandparents face is the fact that the children--Sydney, 13, and Justin, 10--have been living with their father reportedly without any violent incidents for the last two years, according to several family-law attorneys.

“There’s no evidence that I know of that [Simpson] has been violent to anyone else or violent to the children,” said Sorrel Trope, a Los Angeles family-law attorney. “If the children at this point are seemingly well-adjusted living with him . . . [a new judge] will probably come back with the same result as the original judge did.”

The 4th District Court of Appeal on Tuesday threw out a lower court’s 1996 decision giving custody to Simpson, saying the judge wrongly barred evidence suggesting that the former football great beat and later murdered his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson. Her parents, Lou and Juditha Brown of Dana Point, are seeking to regain custody.

Wednesday night, Simpson, in a televised interview on the cable news channel MSNBC, said he would fight to keep the two children living with him.

He repeatedly lashed out at the court for its ruling but agreed with the reasoning that a man who murdered his wife and left her body where the children could find it was not fit to raise their children.

“I would have to agree with them on that,” Simpson said. “To me, to commit murder is an unfit thing to do. There are circumstances . . . where relatively good people have done it, and it unfortunately punctuated their entire life. I do recognize that a situation like that can happen.”

But, Simpson added: “I’m innocent.”

He insisted that he was best qualified to raise his children.

“Whatever they decide about me when they are adults, they will have a solid base to work from,” Simpson said. “I don’t try to preach to them about what happened that night at all. I’ll let them make their own decisions.”

Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend, Ronald Lyle Goldman, were knifed to death outside her Brentwood home on June 12, 1994, as Sydney and Justin slept inside. Jurors in a criminal trial acquitted Simpson of murder in 1995, but jurors in the civil case later awarded the victims’ families $33.5 million in damages.

Despite the results of the civil trial, Simpson appears to have legal precedent on his side. Experts cite a 1976 case in which a San Diego man convicted of murdering his ex-wife later won custody of their four children because the murder was seen as a single act that was out of character for the father.

“The fine line is what we call the propensity toward violence,” Trope said.

Marjorie Fuller, the attorney appointed by the court to represent the interests of the Simpson children, mentioned the San Diego case to the appeals court last August when testifying that the children should remain with their father.

Fuller said Wednesday that she fears reopening the custody case will be detrimental to the children.

“It not only brings uncertainty, but it’s being thrown back into the maelstrom of publicity and fighting and litigation,” Fuller said. “It’s very bad for them. These children have had two years of peace and quiet, and they have probably started to heal. . . . This is destroying that process.”

Kimberly Knill, an attorney representing Lou and Juditha Brown, said Wednesday that the San Diego case is not binding in Orange County courts because it was made by a different appellate court division.

“There’s no need for any court in Orange County to follow that decision,” Knill said.

Others experts said the Browns’ case could be boosted by a recent unrelated appeals court decision. The opinion, released this summer, makes it more difficult for parents to regain custody of children being raised by grandparents. The court ruled that parents must justify disrupting the children’s lives by ending such arrangements.

“The burden was placed on the Browns [in the original custody case] to show there was continual detriment if the children stayed with their father,” said Marc Tovstein, an Irvine-based family law attorney. “The test now is what is in the best interests of the children.”

Still, Tovstein said the fact that the children have lived with Simpson the past two years “may be more relevant than anything that happened in years past unless a judicial officer is just so offended by the notion of a father having custody who purportedly has killed the mother.”

But Laurie Levenson, an associate dean at Loyola Law School, said the court could look beyond Sydney and Justin’s current situation. “The children are changing, and I think the court will be looking at the long term,” she said. “Is it a safe place for the children to be with Simpson as they enter the tumultuous teenage years?”

Attorneys for the Browns argued in the original custody case that Simpson’s history of violence made him unfit to care for the children. The grandparents should keep custody, they said.

The Browns were granted temporary legal custody of the children shortly after Simpson’s June 1994 arrest in the murders.

“The environment the court of appeal has created is extremely favorable for a victory at trial,” Knill said. “We feel there will now be a fair trial whereas before there wasn’t.”

Simpson can ask for the appellate court to reconsider its decision, then petition the California Supreme Court for a hearing, according to Max A. Goodman, a professor at Southwestern University School of Law.

“Assuming the rehearing is denied and the Supreme Court petition is denied, then the decision becomes final” and a second custody hearing will be scheduled, Goodman said.

Goodman, an expert in child custody cases, said that because of the notoriety of the case, there is a remote possibility that the Supreme Court might review it.

Fuller, however, fears another trial will only harm Sydney and Justin.

“You’re going to have O.J. Simpson murder trial No. 3,” she said.