O.J. Simpson a ‘completely free man’ with end of parole in Nevada

LAS VEGAS —  O.J. Simpson is a free man.

The 74-year-old former football hero, actor, acquitted California murder defendant and convicted Las Vegas armed robber was granted good behavior credits and discharged from parole effective Dec. 1, Nevada State Police spokeswoman Kim Yoko Smith said Tuesday.

“Mr. Simpson is a completely free man now,” said Malcolm LaVergne, Simpson’s lawyer in Las Vegas.

Simpson declined an immediate interview, LaVergne said, and the attorney declined to talk about Simpson’s future plans, including whether he intends to remain in Nevada.

Simpson had told parole officials before his Oct. 1, 2017, release from prison that he planned to move to Florida.

Instead, he moved to a gated community in Las Vegas, where he plays golf and frequently takes to Twitter to offer opinions about college and pro sports, especially football.

Television

What life is like behind bars for O.J. Simpson, Prisoner 1027820

Prisoner 1027820 is treated in many ways like any other inmate at the Lovelock Correctional Center in Nevada: He gets the same standard issue blue uniform.

Sept. 15, 2016

“Life is fine,” he told the Associated Press during a June 2019 interview.

Simpson’s saga makes him, in the words of one of his Las Vegas trial lawyers, one of the most famous people on the planet.

He grew up in public housing in San Francisco, attended USC and won the Heisman Trophy as college football’s best player in 1968. He became an NFL Hall of Famer and the first running back to gain 2,000 yards in a season with the Buffalo Bills in 1973. He acted in movies and served as a car rental company pitchman and a football commentator.

In what many called the “trial of the century,” he was acquitted in 1995 of the double slayings of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman.

In a separate case more than a decade later, Simpson was convicted by a jury in Las Vegas and sentenced to prison for leading five men, including two with guns, in a 2007 confrontation with two sports collectibles dealers in a cramped room at an off-strip Las Vegas casino hotel.

Simpson insisted that he wanted only to retrieve personal mementoes and items stolen from him following his acquittal in the double slayings.

He had been found liable for the deaths in 1997 by a California civil court jury that ordered him to pay $33.5 million to the victims’ families.

Simpson served nine years in a Nevada prison for armed robbery.

His original parole discharge date was Sept. 29, 2022. By last summer, that date had been moved up for good behavior to Feb. 9, 2022. A majority on the Nevada Board of Parole then cut his term by about three more months for good behavior at a Nov. 30 hearing, which paved the way for his early discharge.

While on parole in 2019, Simpson sued a Las Vegas Strip resort that banned him two years earlier. He alleged that unnamed employees had defamed him by telling a celebrity news site he had been drunk, disruptive and unruly.

The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas argued that Simpson couldn’t be defamed because his reputation was already tarnished by his criminal and civil trials, and by his conviction and imprisonment in Nevada.

The two sides reached an out-of-court settlement March 31 on terms that neither disclosed.

LaVergne said in June that Simpson also would continue to fight court orders that he owes at least $60 million in judgments stemming from the 1994 killings.