Browns Face Uphill Fight to Regain Custody

O.J. Simpson’s former in-laws still face an uphill battle to regain custody of their grandchildren despite winning a new trial, legal experts said Wednesday.

The biggest hurdle the grandparents face is the fact that the children, Sydney, 13, and Justin, 10, have been living with their father reportedly without incident for the past two years, according to several family law attorneys.

“There’s no evidence that I know of that [Simpson] has been violent to anyone else or violent to the children,” said Sorrel Trope, a Los Angeles family law attorney. “If the children at this point are seemingly well-adjusted living with him . . . [a new judge] will probably come back with the same result as the original judge did.”

The 4th District Court of Appeal on Tuesday threw out a lower court’s 1996 decision giving custody to Simpson, saying the judge wrongly barred evidence suggesting that the football great beat and later killed his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson.

In a televised interview on the cable news channel MSNBC Wednesday night, Simpson said he would fight to keep the two children living with him.

He repeatedly lashed out at the court for its ruling, but agreed with the reasoning that a man who murdered his wife and left her body where the children could find it was not fit to raise their children.

“I would have to agree with them on that,” Simpson said. “To me, to commit murder is an unfit thing to do. There are circumstances . . . where relatively good people have done it, and it unfortunately punctuated their entire life. I do recognize that a situation like that can happen.”

But, Simpson added: “I’m innocent.”

He insisted that he was best qualified to raise his children.

“Whatever they decide about me when they are adults, they will have a solid base to work from,” Simpson said. “I don’t try to preach to them about what happened that night at all. I’ll let them make their own decisions.”

Nicole Simpson and her friend, Ronald Lyle Goldman, were knifed to death outside her Brentwood home on June 12, 1994, as Sydney and Justin slept inside. Jurors in a criminal trial acquitted Simpson of murder in 1995, but jurors in the civil case later awarded the victims’ families $33.5 million in damages.

Lou and Juditha Brown of Dana Point were granted temporary custody of the children shortly after Simpson’s arrest.

Despite the results of the civil trial, some legal experts contend that Simpson has legal precedent on his side. Experts cite a 1976 case in which a San Diego man convicted of murdering his ex-wife later won custody of their four children, because the murder was seen as a single act that was out of character for the father.

“The fine line is what we call the propensity toward violence,” Trope said.

Marjorie Fuller, the attorney appointed by the court to represent the interests of the Simpson children, mentioned the San Diego case to the appeals court last August when testifying that the children should remain with their father.

Fuller said Wednesday that she fears reopening of the custody case will be detrimental to the children.

“You’re going to have O.J. Simpson murder trial number three,” she said.

The Browns’ efforts to regain custody, however, could be aided by an appeals court decision released this summer. That opinion makes it more difficult for parents to regain custody of children being raised by grandparents.

“The burden was placed on the Browns [in the original custody case] to show there was continual detriment if the children stayed with their father,” said Marc Tovstein, an Irvine-based family law attorney. “The test now is what is in the best interests of the children.”