Simpson attorney questions jury selection, asks high court to overturn convictions

Allowing white jurors who believed O.J. Simpson got away with double murder in the killings of his ex-wife and her friend in 1994 and keeping off two black jurors who agreed with the acquittal in that case was one of the key issues Simpson's Florida-based attorney raised Friday morning before a Nevada Supreme Court panel.

District Attorney David Roger disagreed. "The jury issues were non-racial," he told justices Michael Cherry, Mark Gibbons and Nancy Saitta at the Regional Justice Center. Rather, the two black jurors were left off the jury due to their religious beliefs and negative prior experience with the criminal justice system.

Simpson attorney Yale Galanter, who wants the high court to overturn his client's convictions in a robbery case, also alleged that trial judge Jackie Glass was prejudicial to the defense and inappropriately allowed the jury to hear evidence that was inadmissible.

Roger again disagreed, saying Glass was more than fair and impartial during the four-week trial.

Roger also refuted defense attorneys' arguments that the state went after Simpson and his co-defendants as "payback" for the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman on June 13, 1994.

Simpson and four other men were convicted of robbery, kidnapping and assault charges following an incident inside a Palace Station hotel room in 2007 in which two sports memorabilia dealers were robbed at gunpoint. Simpson's defense was that the items were his to begin with and he simply reclaimed them.