After a hearing Thursday afternoon, the Nevada board of parole granted O.J. Simpson parole. He served nine years of a nine-to-33-year sentence for a 2007 robbery in Las Vegas.
During the hearing, which was broadcast live on YouTube and on NBC, Simpson argued that he wasn't a violent man. "I basically have spent a conflict-free life," he said. The 70-year-old, who was accidentally referenced as "90 years old" during the hearing, stated that he'd like to return to his children and his life.
During the 2007 incident, Simpson and a group of accomplices stormed the hotel room of Bruce Fromong, a sports memorabilia dealer, and collected various items from Fromong. Two of the men involved carried guns.
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At the hearing, Simpson insisted — as he did during the initial hearings in 2008 — that the property he took was his and had been stolen from him.
"It was my property," he said. "I wasn't there to steal from anybody." He added that he wasn't even interested in taking on this task until a friend of his made it clear that Fromong had Simpson's personal items, like "family photos and stuff." He denied that he ever saw a gun during the incident, though he claimed he now knows that there was one present.
"I would never, ever pull a weapon on anybody," he told the board.
Simpson has been held at the Lovelock prison in Lovelock, Nevada, where he took courses in victim empathy, alternative to violence, and computer literacy.
"I always thought I was pretty good with people," Simpson said when asked about the course in alternative to violence. This is when he added that he'd led a "conflict-free life." He added that the course helped him figure out "how to talk to people." As for the victim empathy course, Simpson recognised that his actions in the 2007 incident had affected Bruce Fromong.
"I would have done anything not to have that happen. If for no other reason, I regret that he had to have this guy point a gun at him."
Simpson could be released as early as October 2017. Watch the full hearing, below.