NEARLY two and a half years after his ex wife and her friend were murdered, O J Simpson is expected to take the witness stand for the first time today and tell a court what he was, doing the night of the killings.
"This will be the defining moment of the trial," said Mr Peter Arenella, a law professor at the University of California.
The former football star and actor is facing civil charges in a wrongful death case brought by the victims families. He never gave evidence in the criminal trial that ended last year with his acquittal on double murder charges.
When he takes the stand in a Santa Monica courtroom where the trial has been underway for more than two months, Simpson will have to tell jurors his alibi for the night of June 12th, 1994.
He has already given a sworn deposition saying he flew to Chicago that night and was notified there by Los Angeles police that his ex wife Ms Nicole Brown Simpson had been slashed to death outside her home. Her friend Mr Ronald Goldman was also killed.
Simpson is being called by the families' lawyers, who hope to catch him with inconsistencies about his movements on the night of the murders.
"Everyone wants to hear from O J," said Ms Laurie Levenson a professor at Loyola University Law School. But she said putting a defendant on the stand was always a risk for either side.
"He is a dangerous witness. He has a natural charm that he has used effectively. The plaintiffs need to show he was capable of such rage that he could kill two people," she said.
"It is not likely he will snap," she added.
Earlier an FBI expert told the court that the dark shoes photographed on O J Simpson's feet at a 1993 football game match an expensive Italian pair that left bloody prints at the murder scene,
In the most incriminating new piece of evidence yet in Simpson's wrongful death trial Mr William Bodziak used computer enhancement to show that the soles of the shoes in the new picture were identical to those of rare size 12 Bruno Magli Lorenzos.
He then used vinyl overlays to show that the bloody footprints fit the grooves of the Magli shoe sole, and demonstrated how a unique shoe print could be discerned from blow up pictures of footprints leading away from Ms Nicole Brown Simpson's crumpled body.
Simpson, who wears size 12, has denied that he ever owned such's shoes, saying they were too ugly for his taste.
But jurors leaned forward to seed the photo of a smiling Simpson striding across the ground at a Buffalo Bills football game.