What is casually still called the “trial of the century” began 30 years ago today, and its legacy remains open to debate.

Long after the O.J. Simpson double-murder case went to trial in downtown Los Angeles in January 1995, such questions still resonate, if ever more faintly given the passing of time:

Was the case, the People of California versus O.J. Simpson, a revelation about racial division in the country? Was it reaffirmation that criminal justice can favor wealthy celebrity-defendants like Simpson, an African American football star turned movie actor and pitchman? Was the trial’s lasting contribution the introduction of forensic DNA evidence to mainstream America?

And in the end, did the Simpson case really qualify as the “trial of the century”?

The proceedings were televised and unspooled for months, driven by plot twists and signature moments before ending Oct. 3, 1995, in an extraordinary and impromptu national vigil. At the hour designated for reading the verdicts in court, Americans of all walks of life stopped what they were doing, waiting to learn whether Simpson would be convicted in the gruesome fatal stabbings of his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman, both of whom were white.

On both counts of murder, the verdict was not guilty, an outcome that seemed to reveal fissures in America along racial lines. Blacks largely cheered, many of them considering the verdicts a rebuke to police misconduct; whites mostly reacted with disgust and dismay, believing justice had been cheated.

Race and policing figured inescapably in the Simpson case, which unfolded amid still-fresh memories of

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