For the young folks who don't remember the enormity of the first OJ Trial.
5 Reasons Why We’ll Never See Anything Like the O.J. Simpson Verdict Again
Despite the fact that the event took place at 10:00 AM PST on a Tuesday, a record number of people tuned in to see the jury’s decision. Adults abandoned their work and students left their classrooms as
150 million viewers—57% of the country—gathered around TV screens. By comparison, only 37.8 million tuned in for Barack Obama’s historic inauguration in 2009 (also midday on a Tuesday) and 114.4 million watched the highest-rated sporting event in U.S. history: the 2015 Super Bowl. But if the verdict were to be announced today, most American workers and students wouldn’t gather together around a TV or a huge screen in
Times Square. Most would be hunched over personal devices checking Twitter or Facebook or watching some kind of streaming video for the latest update. That’s how most of America
watched the rescue of the Chilean miners in 2010
While the number of people watching back in October 1995 is staggering, it’s far from the most astonishing statistic from the day. In his 2004 book
America on Trial, O.J. Simpson legal adviser Alan Dershowitz outlined how all across the country people froze to watch the verdict.
AT&T reported that phone usage dropped by 60% and electric consumption surged as Americans turned on their televisions. According to Dershowitz,
water usage decreased because people skipped the bathroom rather than miss the verdict. Supreme Court justices—in session at the time—arranged to have notes with news of the verdict passed to them. Trading volume on the New York Stock Exchange dropped 41%, a meeting between the secretary of state and the director of the CIA was postponed, and
President Bill Clinton left the Oval Office to watch the verdict with his staff.
Work halted in factories, post offices, and hospitals. Dershowitz writes that it was “the most unproductive half hour in U.S. business history, costing $480 million in lost output.” And in Israel, Dershowitz claims, even Jewish people unplugging their electronic to honor the holy day of Yom Kippur, turned on their TVs to watch. The
global reaction wasn’t very flattering to the U.S. judicial system, but people
were watching.