O.J. Simpson will go before a Nevada parole board Thursday, hoping to secure his release after almost nine years in a state prison. Simpson, a former football and movie star, received a 33-year sentence in 2008 for armed robbery and kidnapping stemming from a failed attempt the previous year to recover sports memorabilia from two collectors at a Las Vegas hotel.
Related: O.J. Simpson: Inside the memorabilia trade
Although the hearing will not create quite the media frenzy that surrounded his double-murder trial 22 years earlier, there will be extensive coverage, with CNN and ESPN among the networks carrying it live, starting at 1 p.m. EST. A live stream can be viewed below.
Simpson has come storming back to the forefront of the American public's consciousness in the past year. A five-part ESPN documentary, O.J: Made in America, traced the roots of Simpson's rise and dramatic fall, along with the racial environment that surrounded both, and won an Oscar for best documentary feature. Meanwhile, a dramatized version of his 1995 trial on FX, The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, won nine Emmy Awards.
In the most publicized trial in American history, Simpson stood accused of murdering his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman. While Simpson was found not guilty, in a subsequent civil trial the jury decided he was responsible for their deaths and ordered him to pay the victims' families tens of millions of dollars.
Simpson's later legal trouble started on September 13, 2007, when he and some associates burst into a hotel room to retrieve heirlooms that, he claimed, were rightfully his. At least one gun was drawn, and the judge at the time emphasized the potential violence of the situation, saying someone could have been killed.
In a 2013 hearing, Simpson was paroled on five of the lesser charges against him. If he is granted parole Thursday, he will be eligible for release on October 1. For that to happen, the four-member parole board panel must be unanimous in their decision. Simpson will remain at Lovelock Correctional Center, about 100 miles away from the hearing in Carson City, Nevada, where he will be allowed to make an opening statement. Further testimony is limited to his representative, one family member or supporter and the victims of the crime.
Simpson's case is expected to be helped by supporting testimony from the only surviving victim of the armed robbery, Bruce Fromong. Also potentially counting in his favor are accounts of his model behavior while in prison.
"He's still an inmate, but he definitely wasn't a problem child like some of the other ones were," Craig Arnett, a former guard at Lovelock Correctional, told ABC News. "I think he has a strong chance of getting out. I think he hasn't really been a problem in prison."
However, Christopher Darden, who was a prosecutor in the 1995 trial, is adamant that Simpson, whom he labeled a "narcissist," should not be released.
"The fact that he's a model prisoner doesn't mean he's a model citizen," he told NBC's Today show.
Simpson's past murder charges cannot be cited against him at the parole hearing. Still, Darden has one question he would love the parole board to ask: Did you kill Ron and Nicole?
"That's the one question everybody would like to ask," Darden said.
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