I was working in a very rough high school when the verdict came - I don't know if it was lunch or just at the end of school but most students instantly celebrated the verdict of not guilty, in full glory - not an inch of exaggeration. It was something to see.
I was in high school at the time (not a "rough" school). As a student, our feelings on the matter were...complicated. I think, that, for one, we didn't want to believe he did it - he was a guy many of us liked. It was easy for us to see it as an overzealous prosecution - young people are prone to that. Considering that DNA evidence was new and didn't make sense to us, the very believeable idea that the LAPD would plant evidence (even if they didn't need to), and the generally messy prosecution case, it felt like a vindication. Really, despite the fact that it seems pretty clear that he did it, I think that to this day, if I were on that jury with
that exact case presented, it'd be hard to convict. Many people feel that the jury got it wrong, but it was the prosecution that botched it.
On a side note, as this was going on, we were Seniors reading Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. The project culminated in the before lunch and after lunch AP Senior English classes enacting a mock trial using evidence from the book. My class was the defense, and we patterned everything off of OJ's defense. Another class served as the jury, and we won, much to the teacher's chagrin. She didn't like our class because while we were smart, we were that kind of "lazy smart" where things came easily so we didn't work hard. I'm not even sure we all read the book in it's entirety. We still won. Take that class with valedictorian and saludttorian!