"Back on the record in the Simpson matter." — Judge Lance A. Ito
The Simpson Matter is a searchable digital archive of the complete trial transcripts from People of the State of California v. Orenthal James Simpson (Case No. BA097211) and Rufo et al. v. Simpson (Case No. SC031947) — the criminal and civil trials of O.J. Simpson.
The archive contains 512,000+ utterances across 4,500+ proceedings spanning 230+ trial days, organized and searchable for the first time in a structured digital format.
All transcript text is sourced from walraven.org, the work of Jack Walraven, who began archiving Simpson trial transcripts in real time during the 1995 criminal trial — one of the earliest comprehensive legal archives on the web. His collection remains the most complete publicly available source of these transcripts nearly thirty years later. This project would not exist without his work. The original transcripts are official court records from the Superior Court of the State of California, County of Los Angeles, Department 103.
This project does not alter the transcript text. All utterances are preserved exactly as they appear in the source material. Any errors in the original transcriptions are carried forward.
The raw transcript files were processed through a four-pass pipeline:
For trial days where courtroom video is publicly available on YouTube, the archive aligns every transcript utterance to the second it is spoken on tape. Clicking an utterance's ▶ marker opens a docked video player on that page and cues the YouTube video at the right timestamp. A "Sync transcript" toggle keeps the transcript scrolled to the currently-playing utterance at 250ms resolution. This covers the OJ depositions (43 video parts), the criminal trial, and the preliminary hearing — roughly 290,000 aligned utterances across ~460 video parts.
Alignment is deterministic, not AI-driven. YouTube auto-caption tokens are matched against the court reporter's utterances using an anchor-project-interpolate algorithm; where the match is weak or the tape does not cover the transcribed moment (off-video recesses, dropped minutes), the utterance is explicitly marked as having no playable slot rather than being guessed into the nearest video frame.
The AI analysis is designed to help readers navigate and contextualize lengthy proceedings. It may contain errors in interpretation, miss important nuances, or reflect biases present in its training data. The transcript text itself is always the authoritative source.
This archive is provided for educational, research, and historical purposes only. It does not constitute legal advice, legal analysis, or legal opinion of any kind.
Court transcripts are public records. This project organizes and presents those public records in a searchable format. No claim is made regarding the completeness or accuracy of the transcriptions — refer to the official court records for authoritative text.
The AI-generated analysis represents automated interpretation and should not be cited as authoritative commentary on the proceedings.
When citing transcript material from this archive, we recommend referencing both the original court record and this digital archive. Below are suggested citation formats for common styles.
Original transcript source: Jack Walraven, walraven.org. Court transcripts are public records of the Superior Court of the State of California, County of Los Angeles.
Found an error in the transcripts? Have a question about the data? Want to use this archive for research? We'd like to hear from you.
Email: contact@thesimpsonmatter.com
You can also use the "report an issue" link at the bottom of any page to flag specific data corrections or bugs directly from the page where you found them.
A Court Daemon archive, built by Trice Digital. The visual design references the Windows 95 desktop aesthetic, placing the trial in its temporal context — this was the first major trial of the internet age, unfolding in Department 103 while the web was being born.
Python + SQLite (pipeline) • Astro (static generation) • Pagefind (search) • Cloudflare (hosting)
© 2026 Trice Digital. Transcript data sourced from public court records.