Public’s Verdicts Often Differ From Juries’ : Society: If Simpson is shunned despite acquittal, he will not be the first.

If O.J. Simpson becomes a pariah despite the jury verdict that acquitted him, he won’t be the first.

Lizzie Borden ended up a much-reviled recluse after being acquitted in the ax slaying of her father and stepmother.

Claus von Bulow, the multimillionaire convicted of injecting enough insulin into his wife, Sunny, to send her into a coma, remained known as “Claus the Louse” even after another court cleared him.

Fatty Arbuckle was acquitted in the murder of a starlet but his career was ruined, his movies were banned and he changed his name to dodge scorn.

These people were free but they never regained their niche in a society that shunned them. Their shattered worlds could not be pieced together again, no matter what the jurors decided.

“The American public is ardent in its hero worship and quite as ruthless in destroying its idols in any walk of life,” Arbuckle would muse in his decline. “It elevates a man more quickly than any nation in the world, and casts him down more quickly.”

When do we forgive? When do we forget?

“There are two different senses in which you are exonerated,” says Mari Womack, a UCLA cultural anthropologist. “One is in the eyes of the law and the other is in the eyes of the public.”

Occasionally society sinks its teeth in and refuses to unclench its jaw. That reflex was on display again Thursday when a Beverly Hills gallery, responding to complaints from customers, removed three pictures of Simpson that were snapped on a movie set during his glory days.

“I thought they were beautiful photographs. I said, ‘This is history,’ ” said gallery director Molly Barnes. But buyers--four of whom canceled purchases after seeing the Simpson photos in the gallery--”said, ‘This is offensive.’ I was shocked. I’ve been in the gallery business 25 years and there’s always been freedom of expression.”

Experts say this reluctance to grant public exoneration is fed by our distrust of government and our secular suspicion that God may not punish those we believe are ne’er-do-wells.

Much of the black community seems to have welcomed Simpson after his acquittal on charges that he killed his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. However, the drumbeat of suspicion has been relentless in Simpson’s former social circles.

After the verdict, a sign tacked to a tree in Simpson’s neighborhood read: “Welcome to Brentwood, Home of the Butcher.” The president of the South Brentwood Homeowners Assn. told Geraldo Rivera’s national TV audience that she would like Simpson to move. “Anywhere other than Brentwood would be a better place to live,” Jackie Raymond said in a subsequent interview. Simpson was dropped by his talent agency, and his onetime golfing buddies at the Riviera Country Club spoke of ousting him.

Around Los Angeles, posters of Simpson’s police booking photo have been posted featuring the slogan, “100% Absolutely Guilty of Wife Beating.”

The concept of shunning Simpson has infiltrated some talk radio shows. Host Gloria Allred, for instance, pledged to her listeners that if she was at a party, fund-raiser or restaurant that Simpson entered, she would leave.

When Simpson recently traveled to Florida, he did not escape the hostility, according to East Coast newspapers. Planes trailed banners with messages like “Go Away O.J.” On the golf course, a pack of journalists caught up with Simpson at the third hole, where he posed for pictures and shook hands. But he fled as soon as reporters began peppering him with questions such as “Who murdered your wife?” and “Did you do it?”

*

At Canopies, a small Panama City, Fla., restaurant that Simpson visited, “normally civil people . . . felt no compunction about saying ‘Killer!’ between spoonfuls of crab soup and bites of sesame-seared tuna,” wrote one diner, St. Petersburg Times editorial writer Jeffrey Good.

When the public believes someone has committed a crime--even murder--it is capable of exonerating him, experts say.

“It has more to do with the criminal,” said Stuart Scheingold, professor of political science at the University of Washington. “We can forgive people whose crimes we either can or want to understand; we can’t forgive people whose crimes we can’t or don’t want to understand.”

During a preliminary hearing, Ellie Nesler of Sonora shot the 35-year-old shackled man who was accused of molesting her young son and three other boys.

In the days after the shooting, Nesler, a gold miner’s daughter, was hailed as a local hero for seeking vengeance for her son by killing the man who reportedly smirked at them as they walked into court that day. Two banks set up defense funds. T-shirts and bumper stickers pronounced: “Nice Shooting, Ellie.”

Some of the support evaporated after it was learned that Nesler was on methamphetamine at the time of the shooting. But Nesler also garnered sympathy when it was revealed, after her conviction, that she had breast cancer.

“The public will accept and forgive crimes that the public thinks are justified,” said Eric Monkkonen, a UCLA history professor who is studying murders committed in England and the United States over a 200-year period.

Monkkonen says the public sometimes has trouble accepting jury verdicts because Americans tend to follow trials as though they were well-crafted fictional stories, in which all the loose pieces will be tied together into a complete bundle.

As a result, he said, people are less inclined to accept an acquittal when they believe questions remain unanswered.

“We want stories to be tidied up at [the] end,” Monkkonen said. “It satisfies our emotional needs. Trials have closure but real life doesn’t.”

For many, the verdict in the case of Lizzie Borden was as unsatisfying as the Simpson verdict was to others.

Though Borden was acquitted of murder, an increasing number of people--including her own sister--came to believe Borden had committed the crime, killing her stepmother with 21 blows of an ax to her neck and head and her father with 10 blows.

*

The murders--committed on the hot morning of Aug. 4, 1892, in Fall River, Mass.--set the nation atwitter. The case quickly became a litmus test in a battle between the classes. Laborers and mill workers believed Borden was guilty; the rich, some of whom knew Borden’s father, a bank president, saw the young woman as being unfairly pursued by police.

After the trial, there were festering doubts. Borden had hated her stepmother. And her stepmother feared Borden would one day poison her, according to evidence excluded from the trial. Several times, Borden had apparently attempted to buy a potent poison. Evidence was also excluded that detailed how, since puberty, Borden had suffered attacks of temporal epilepsy, which included rages and partial amnesia.

Public skepticism about Borden’s innocence grew because her testimony posed several contradictions about the murder weapon (found after the handle had been burned), her whereabouts on the morning of the murder (she claimed to have been in the barn and in the pear orchard), and her burning of a dress splashed with “brown paint.”

After her acquittal, Borden “lived an empty life,” shunned and scorned by the people of Fall River, according to author George C. Kohn. Despite her claims of innocence, she became immortalized in a sardonic children’s jingle:

Lizzie Borden took an ax

And gave her mother forty whacks.

When she saw what she had done

She gave her father forty-one.

In part, society’s willingness to forgive depends on how the individual re-enters society.

“The prospects for readmission into society would depend on what, if anything other than the notoriety, they can claim,” said Alan Brinkley, a Columbia University history professor.

As an example Brinkley points to former President Richard Nixon, who resigned in disgrace after the Watergate scandal, but eventually was forgiven by a significant proportion of Americans as he rebuilt his reputation with a series of books and knowledgeable interviews about foreign policy and American politics.

In 1977, three years after Nixon resigned, 75% of the people in a Gallup survey said he had obstructed justice. In a poll two years later he was listed as one of America’s 10 most disliked people. But by 1986, almost 40% of those in a Newsweek poll said they would like to see Nixon in a public role, such as an ambassador or presidential adviser.

“People began to focus on what had been a long and extraordinarily visible career, of which Watergate was only a part,” said Brinkley.

Also contributing to Nixon’s redemption was his willingness to live the remainder of his life quietly, with few public appearances, making him more palatable in the eyes of a dubious public, said UCLA’s Womack. To Womack it illustrated a Chinese saying: If you sit by a stream long enough, eventually you will see the bodies of your enemies float by.

In other cases, the tainted individual has salvaged his reputation with his work. Filmmaker Woody Allen, for instance, was bloodied but not permanently damaged by the disclosure that he was romantically involved with his ex-lover’s adopted daughter.

So, too, a significant segment of the public seems willing to forgive fighter Mike Tyson, recently released from prison after serving three years for raping an 18-year-old beauty pageant contestant.

Maybe it was because the once-cocky Tyson seemed humbler. (“I was young, I was arrogant, I didn’t treat people correctly,” he said several months before his release.) Maybe it was because fans wanted to see him fight.

*

“Mike Tyson was not [merely] accused, he was convicted of rape and he came back a hero,” said Mickey Edwards, a lecturer in public policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. “There’s a hierarchy of what is forgivable and it depends on the mood of the moment and the issue of the moment.”

Few could forgive Roscoe (Fatty) Arbuckle.

In 1921, the silent-screen star was second only to Charlie Chaplin. After signing a lucrative three-year contract, the hard-drinking Arbuckle decided to celebrate with friends and hosted a Labor Day weekend party at a San Francisco hotel.

After two days, Arbuckle disappeared into a bedroom with a young actress, Virginia Rappe. The revelers heard screams and saw Arbuckle emerge from the room, his pajamas torn. They found Rappe lying in blood, moaning and crying: “I’m dying.”

Rappe was brought to the hospital three days later. There, she died, her bladder apparently ruptured. Arbuckle was charged with rape and murder. The first trial ended in mistrial. The second trial ended with a hung jury. Arbuckle was acquitted in the third trial after the jury deliberated six minutes--a flimsy effort in the eyes of the public.

“Six minutes doesn’t cut it just as three hours [the time the Simpson jury deliberated] doesn’t cut it,” said Womack. “The problem was the verdict came back so quickly, it wasn’t a satisfying conclusion for such a dramatic story.”

By the time of the acquittal, Arbuckle had already become a symbol of Hollywood decadence. His story had taken on a life of its own, fed by rumors and speculation about what happened in the hotel that fateful day. Banned from acting, he fell into despair. Changing his name to William Goodrich, he found work as a gag writer. It took him 11 years to get another acting job.

“When the paragon falls,” Womack said, “he falls with a heavy crash.”

* GAG ORDER SOUGHT: Simpson lawyer asks that pretrial proceedings in civil suits be kept secret. B1