LAS VEGAS, Nevada (AFP) — Jurors were Monday due to hear opening arguments in the trial of former football star and actor OJ Simpson in a robbery and kidnapping case that could send him to prison for life.
The first witnesses are also due to appear in the trial which gets underway in earnest this week after four days of jury selection that resulted in a panel of three men and nine women, all of them white.
Simpson, 61, faces 12 charges stemming from a confrontation in a hotel room in September 2007 after which he and a gang of gun-toting cohorts left with pillow cases stuffed full of sports memorabilia.
The charges against Simpson and one of those men include kidnapping and armed robbery, both of which carry potential life sentences in the state of Nevada.
Simpson and his group allegedly stormed the room at the Palace Station Hotel-Casino on September 13, 2007 to retrieve memorabilia largely related to the football star's career that he has insisted was stolen from him.
Simpson later said he did not know that two of the men with him would be carrying guns and did not see them brandish their weapons.
Four of the gang, including the two who carried weapons, have struck plea agreements for reduced sentences in exchange for testifying against Simpson.
Simpson's latest ordeal comes 13 years after he was acquitted of killing his former wife and her friend.
In 1995, Simpson, who is African American, was acquitted in Los Angeles by a jury that included nine blacks of the 1994 murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown and her friend, Ron Goldman.
At the time, with Los Angeles struggling to recover from race riots three years earlier, the defense painted Simpson as the victim of a racist police force.
The outcome of that trial, one of the most publicized murder cases in American history, remains controversial.
Judge Jackie Glass has taken great pains to separate the current case from Simpson's racially charged murder trial.
"If you are here thinking you are going to punish Mr. Simpson for what happened in Los Angeles in 1995 this is not the case for you," Glass said at the start of jury selection last week.
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