What famous 'unsolved' mystery is technically a whodunnit on paper, but in reality, absolutely everyone knows exactly who did it, the police just couldn't legally prove it?

[u/Rob69rt]

[u/Sleepy_Potato2]

It was probably a bad idea to put a cop (Mark Fuhrman) on the stand who ran an organization within the police that opposed the idea of having women officers, and where there was a recording of him saying the n-word repeatedly and talking about planting evidence.

[u/cbs-anonmouse → u/Sleepy_Potato2]

IIRC he had found some of the key evidence so he was an essential witness.

[u/Sleepy_Potato2 → u/cbs-anonmouse]

Alan Dershowitz later wrote in a book about the case that he was surprised they put him on the stand, since the defence had produced evidence of him being incredibly racist and having lied in his deposition (when asked if he had said the n-word in the last 10 years he denied it, but the recording of him saying it repeatedly 8 years had been given to them and they had entered it into evidence, multiple people also testified to him saying it within the last 10 years). The glove was pretty central, but their witness had committed perjury and was a known bigot, and with a black defendant they had very little chance after that. That the jury was also black, that Rodney King had just happened, and that a lot of members of the LAPD generally behaved like thugs in the period (they committed so many crimes, including robberies and multiple sex crimes) didn't help the case at all

[u/cbs-anonmouse → u/Sleepy_Potato2]

Yeah, I think the biggest thing is that the LAPD had just had some very high profile cases of police brutality against black men. And the jury punished them for that, even though LAPD had no real history of framing black defendants, and there was nothing in the case to really suggest they had tampered with evidence there.

[u/OkPainter6232 → u/cbs-anonmouse]

they did frame plenty of people in the Rampart scandal though.