Episode 21 - Thirteen Years After the O.J. Verdict: Former LAPD Detective Mark Fuhrman's Stunning Revelations

Mark Fuhrman

Recap
It's been over 16 years since the murders of Nicole Brown, ex-wife of Heisman Trophy winner and NFL star O.J. Simpson, and her friend (and possible love interest) Ronald Goldman were brutally murdered, and nearly 13 years since O.J. Simpson was shockingly declared not guilty of the murders. Today, Oprah is sitting down with Detective Mark Fuhrman, a man who played a pivotal role in the case.

We start off seeing a clip of Fuhrman in 1997 on the Oprah show, apologizing for lying about using derogatory racial slurs. Now he's back in the studio and revisiting the whole situation. He says he would never have answered the phone call 16 years ago to come investigate the crime scene because it would have ruined his career even without the racism controversy. He says that everyone, even suspects, wants to talk about the O.J. Simpson case, which means you don't get taken seriously, regardless of the N-word drama.

Oprah pursues the issue of whether or not Fuhrmann is a racist; he essentially says that he heard the N-word used a lot by older cops that he was watching and learning from early in his career, but that was never a word that he would use in his daily vernacular. He says that part of the reason he lied about using the word is that he didn't want it to be true that he did it, didn't necessarily remember recently using it, but on the other hand, it's not a way he wanted to be seen. No one wants to be portrayed to the world as a racist.

After a break, Oprah tells us that she dreams about interviewing O.J., and that in the dream he confesses to the murder. She asks Fuhrman if he read "the book" (as you may have heard, Simpson wrote a book, purportedly fiction, called If I Did It, the premise being that if he had committed the murders, that's how he would have done it). Fuhrman says yes, and that he beleieves O.J. read his book, Murder in Brentwood, and used it to write the story. He tells Oprah that if he could talk to O.J., the first thing he'd say is he knows O.J. didn't intend to kill two people that night, that it wasn't pre-meditated first degree murder. Secondly, he'd ask what actually happened since no one has ever heard O.J.'s account of that evening. Oprah asks Fuhrman what he thinks happened. He says that O.J. had been stalking Nicole, that she probably saw O.J.lurking in the bushes, thus confronting him, and it became violent.

After another break, Oprah asks Fuhrman how he thought the prosecutors, Marcia Clark and Chris Darden, handled the case, and he uses multiple reasons why (the murder weapon, DNA, etc) he feels they bungled and mishandled the case. He says the case was air tight, and that the (predominantly Black / African American) jury was influenced not only by the bungling of the case on the part of the prosecutors, but also by the fact that the jurors were people from a neighborhood where a guilty verdict could put their lives in danger for condemning a neighborhood hero.

An interesting point made later that this trial turned murder into entertainment; if you look at the slew of real-crime / CSI type shows, plus the huge popularity of real crime novels, that have become mainstream since the O.J. trial it's astounding.

At the end of the show, Oprah asks Fuhrman if he's fulfilled. He says no, that he feels like the last 16 years have been a waste because he would love to still be solving crimes (he plea bargained out of a perjury count, for lying on the stand, and thus was a convicted felon which meant that he could no longer serve as a detective in most states). He wishes he could be anonymously living out the normal, blue collar life of being a detective. She asks how he hopes he'll be remembered, and he said that the headline he sees the media playing is, "The Disgraced Detective from the O.J. Simpson Case Died Today". She asks what he would want the media to say, and he says he would want them to say nothing, that he doesn't want to be somebody.

Gospel Filter Review

There are a few things that I could say, but I have to be careful to keep this to issues that the Bible speaks about and not just my own opinions. For example, as a 15-year-old teen I thought that O.J. was totally being framed. Granted, that was without things like the internet to dig into anything beyond what was on the nightly news regarding the trial. I mean, the gloves didn't fit! Now, with resources to read the evidence and know more about the case (such as blood-soaked leather gloves shrink when they sit in an evidence locker for a few years), plus with the time and wisdom that comes with realizing celebrities are just people who are every bit as capable of doing bad things as the average person, I feel rather certain that O.J. absolutely got away with murder. The Bible doesn't say much about my opinions, but it does say that if O.J. did kill Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman then he didn't get away with it, because either Jesus took the punishment for his sin and he has repented and sought forgiveness (it doesn't sound like he has, for the record, though he still can) or he will suffer for his sin for eternity because God is a just and mighty God.

There is one issue that stood out to me early on and I want to address it now. It's an issue that I am passionate about, and the Bible makes it clear that God is passionate about it too. The issue is racism--a key point in the defense of O.J. Simpson was that the LAPD was filled with bigoted racists who hated seeing a Black guy be rich and successful and even formerly married to a white woman, so there was a widespread conspiracy to frame him. Mark Fuhrman lied on the stand, saying he hadn't said the N-word in ten years and that he wasn't a racist; the defense produced witnesses and tapes of Fuhrman talking about gang members, calling them the N-word and speaking in a horrible way about them as people (you can Google it if you want to know; it's depressing stuff). This helped convince the jury that Fuhrman was part of the conspiracy, that he even might have planted evidence.

First, I am not here to call Fuhrman a racist. That is not my goal. Secondly, Fuhrman has admitted that he was wrong and publicly apologized many times over for his "immature, irresponsible ramblings". My desire is not to condemn him. The one thing that struck me, though, was his reasoning to Oprah that, when he was young and impressionable and trying to emulate the senior guys in the force, he saw them use the N-word in volatile situations and so he learned from them. Again, he has apologized for what he said, but it also feels like he's making excuses and shifting blame, and still trying to convince everyone that he's not a racist.

The Bible makes it clear that racism isn't ok. I wrote about that at length in this post, so you can refer to that for further study. The Bible also makes it clear that sin and ugliness is in our hearts, and that what we say reflects that ugliness.

The heart is deceitful above all things,
and desperately sick;
who can understand it?
  Jeremiah 17:9


The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.
  Luke 6:45


How many times have you heard the phrase "out of the goodness of their heart"? Our hearts are not good. They are bent on evil continuously, and they are hardened and wicked and deceitful because they are broken by sin. Only God can create in us a clean heart (Psalm 51:10, Hebrews 10:22) , give us a new heart that is soft toward him, leading us by His own Spirit (Ezekiel 11:19, 36:26); don't be mistaken and think that the Luke verse means some hearts are good if people are good. Only through the grace of Jesus and living reliant on Him for His strength can we ever do good out of a good heart because He's given it to us. And even then our old hearts rear back up and we choose the old, sinful ways. We must continuously seek Jesus for the grace to see our sin, to see our hardened heart, and for the Holy Spirit to convict us so we can repent and keep being cleansed to live out of the new heart. This never ends, never gets easier--the battle between our flesh and our Savior, our old heart and our new heart, will continue until the day we die and are with Jesus in heaven and sin is completely dead in us.


That is the heart; now for the mouth. People commonly say, when they apologize for something said before, that they "didn't mean it". The verse above makes it very clear that nothing comes out of the mouth that isn't in your heart. You might be sorry that you gave into what was in your heart, but your heart meant what you said. This might seem hopeless, but the Bible promises that if we know Jesus Christ then, just as it was said above, He doesn't just change our old heart, but he transforms us by giving us the new one.

My husband and I have a rule in our household. We are not allowed to ever say that we didn't mean something. Instead, we own up to the sin, ask Jesus and then the other person for forgiveness, and pray that Jesus would change us and root out that ugly, sinful heart-thought pattern. We pray for clean hearts, new hearts that will hate the things that are offensive toward God, because of our own proclivity we secretly love those things. Our hearts are wicked; only Jesus is good and so we rely on Him to love one another well.

So, then, with regards to racism, Mark Fuhrman meant what he said. No excuses. It was racist, bigoted, ugly, and sinful. It doesn't matter why he said it, how he learned the behavior, or what the circumstances were when he said it. He can be sorry that he said it, even on a deeper level than just worrying about what people think. It doesn't change the fact that racism was in his heart and it came out of his mouth and, too bad for him, the entire country saw the hidden things of his heart displayed for all of us to judge him. I don't envy the position he was put in.

I hate racism and sometimes I find myself thinking thoughts that are horribly ugly and racist--racism is in my heart even though I don't want it to be and it deeply upsets me to see it coming out of my heart. However, the answer is not to lay out in my mind why I don't like racism, or to convince myself that I'm not a racist because ______ (something I said or did that a good, non-racist would do), or to just convince myself that I didn't mean it. When those things are in my heart, and by the grace of God I realize it's there, it's not the time for excuses. It's time to ask the Holy Spirit to convict me, to lead me in repentance, and to confess to Jesus that He was brutally murdered on the cross because of the very ugliness that just came out of my heart. I need to ask the Holy Spirit for a clean heart, a new heart that sees all people (not just racism issues, but anything that demeans someone else) as God sees them--His image bearers, whom He loves so much that He gave His own Son to die in their place so He could spend eternity with them.

This goes beyond racism, of course. I don't much see people as image bearers of God when I'm driving, or when I'm at Costco at noon on a Saturday. One person cutting me off rudely often leads to me taking in their appearance and judging them by it. Shopping is the worst, because a rude and impatient person will do something, and so my heart will decide it's ok to judge them because, you know, they started it. And then I look in their cart at what food they are buying and feel good about myself because my food is mostly produce, and it's organic, and it's healthy, and so clearly I am a better person than them, and that is why they are rude and cutting me off, and clearly they're pagans, but I'm good and clean and belong to God even. That is some ugly, Jesus-killing, horrible sin right there, and yet my heart feels absolutely justified in doing things like this. I am desperately in need of a Savior who can get me out of myself.

Mark Fuhrman is desperately need of a Savior who can get him out of himself. With Jesus, he would find true forgiveness and experience the joy of being cleansed of all of the guilt that has plagued him for the consequences of his actions. To be sure, others messed up in the O.J. trial, but you can see Fuhrman's heart trying to downplay his role--the racism controversy, the fact that his racist remarks seemed to lend credence to the defense's assertion that he was a racist who planted evidence to frame Simpson--by overstating how other people screwed up worse. I pray that he would know Jesus, that he'd believe the truth that he's somebody that Jesus died for, that he'd know true freedom and joy in forgiveness, and that the next time someone asks if he's fulfilled he says yes, because a life lived loving Jesus--no matter how late you start--is never a wasted life.

Up Tomorrow
Love Story Reunion - Ali MacGraw and Ryan O'Neal