My 'angle' on this is that the original incident was so mucked up by poor and in some cases flat out illegal behaviour on the part of the state that there is NO WAY to know the real truth.

*IF* he really did do everything that the original indictment claimed (and it's a pretty big if) then yeah, he should have been hit a LOT harder than he was.

However people who do things like that don't usually do them just once - which, given the benefit of hindsight (which we happen to have) makes that seem kind of questionable, at least to me.

There's pretty much no doubt in my mind that OJ Simpson is a murderer. However, given the utter hack job that the police and prosecutors made of his case, it was also right that he went free. Probably not right ethically, but because no solid case could be made for proof and that has to be a high standard to avoid jailing innocents.

This case has a lot of parallels. An investigation that seems messy and half ass (and was, in fact, headed up by the very same guy who botched the OJ case!) and clear evidence of prosecutorial and judicial misconduct.

That queers the whole thing.

As to all the 'you think it's okay for some guy to rape some teenager' yadda yadda yadda - I don't. But teenage starlets trying to sleep their way to the top in Hollywood (and frequently lying about their age to do so) is a long long long tradition. And yes, it gets lied about by all parties. A lot.

That reality makes me take any case like this with a grain of salt. HOW many false rape accusations have we seen in the media lately? They do happen.

Yes, if you believe the indictment testimony unreservedly it was a heinous crime. But if you do that, then you wind up with so many dead innocents it's not even funny. People do NOT always tell the truth, and that includes both judges, prosecutors and cops.