OJ Simpson finally goes to jail

O.J Simpson was finally in jail last night, sentenced in Las Vegas to a term of nine to 33 years for armed robbery.

The American Football star known as 'the Juice' was led away to the cells in handcuffs 13 years after he was notoriously acquitted of double murder charges in the killing of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her boyfriend Ronald Goldman in a case which transfixed the world.

Orenthal James Simpson, 61, became the man who got away with it, and he knew it. After the so-called "trial of the century", his behaviour became increasingly erratic, low-life and apparently without conscience.

Judge Jackie Glass spoke for nearly everyone when she described him as "arrogant and ignorant" as she sentenced him. Simpson's final act came when he decided to take the law into his own hands and, with a "posse" of hangers-on, raided a sports memorabilia dealer's hotel room in a Las Vegas casino.

He accused him of being in possession of memorabilia stolen from him, shouting out that no one could leave the room as an associate produced a hand gun. Clarence Stewart was sentenced alongside Simpson to 7.5 years to 27. With his braggadocio gone, Simpson begged for freedom: "I didn’t want to steal anything from anyone... I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

'Sorry' was a word he never uttered after his ex-wife's death, one reason why Fred Goldman, the father of her slain boyfriend, took him back to court on civil charges. This time, the jury found him 'liable', and awarded damages which stripped Simpson of his assets.

By 2006, he was reduced to writing If I Did It, a book in which he shamelessly laid out how he would have killed Nicole and Goldman if he had killed them. This was too much: Rupert Murdoch halted publication and the pot-boiling publisher Janet Regan lost her imprint.

When after the murder trial OJ declared, "I'm absolutely, 100 per cent, not guilty," less than half the nation believed him. When he more recently said: "I think I've been a model citizen," there was nobody left to believe him at all. Simpson's sentence means that he will now be behind bars for at least 9 years, and will be 70 if and when he is freed.