Will the Juice Stay Loose?

On Sept. 8, one Orenthal James Simpson will return yet again to a courtroom to plead for his freedom. This time, there are few of the ingredients that made his earlier ventures into legal territory such blockbusters-no bloody glove found by a cop with a racist past, no attractive young people stabbed to death in cold blood. This drama is set in a Vegas hotel and involves middle-aged alleged victims whose livelihoods are made partly by profiting off the notoriety of others. A curious public will be hard-pressed not to wonder: Will things end differently this time?

"People ultimately want to see if he's going to finally end up in jail," says Marlene Dann, executive vice president for TruTV, which plans live gavel-to-gavel coverage of the latest O.J. Simpson trial. "It's not a murder trial, so in that way this is different. But it's still O.J., and there's still an ongoing public fascination."

That fascination may be tempered by the low-rent nature of the Sept. 13, 2007, incident that led to the dozen criminal charges against Simpson, ranging from felony kidnapping to assault with a deadly weapon. Here are the undisputed facts: Simpson gathered five acquaintances at a hotel bar and plotted to enter a room at the Palace Station Hotel-Casino near the Las Vegas Strip to retrieve hundreds of pieces of O.J.-related memorabilia he claimed had been stolen from him, and that was now in the possession of sports memorabilia dealers Bruce L. Fromong and Alfred Beardsley. The meeting between O.J.'s crew and Fromong and Beardsley was arranged by go-between, Thomas Riccio, as a setup to record the anticipated confrontation, which he sold to tabloid celebrity Web site TMZ.com for a reported $165,000.

With all that posited, legal analysts say Simpson's courtroom fate rests on areas of dispute. Were these items rightfully his? Did he or his group make violent threats or physically harm anyone? Did Simpson know about or see the brandishing of the weapons carried by two of his companions, Walter Alexander and Clarence Stewart? Oh, and one more intangible: Will jurors want to nail the 61-year-old football Hall-of-Famer as much for this incident as for the 1994 murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman, of which he was acquitted in this generation's biggest legal spectacle?

(Four of the five men who joined Simpson in the raid have struck plea deals with the district attorney. The fifth, Clarence "C.J." Stewart, is scheduled to be tried alongside Simpson this month but has appealed to the Nevada Supreme Court to receive a separate trial.)

"With O.J., you have this added undercurrent," says Jean Rosenbluth, a former federal prosecutor and professor at the University of Southern California School of Law. "A lot of people think this guy got away with something heinous and horrible in the '90s, and they think he should only get one get-out-of-jail-free card."

Or conversely, jurors may find the case to be much ado about little and resent Clark County District Attorney David Roger's efforts to get Simpson on such serious charges as kidnapping and robbery with a deadly weapon, both of which carry potential life sentences, for an incident in which nobody was physically harmed.

Vegas defense attorney Dayvid Figler, a TruTV commentator for this case, predicts jurors could be offended by being forced to consider a case that, were it not Simpson, would be tried in six days rather than six weeks. "I expect there's going to be one or two on the jury who are going to say, 'Seriously? This is what this is all about? This is why I'm stuck here for all these weeks?'"