The murder trial of O.J. Simpson in Los Angeles, California, arising from the 1994 deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, became the most watched criminal proceeding in American television history. The trial centred extensively on contested DNA and blood evidence, with defence attorneys successfully arguing that evidence had been contaminated or planted by the Los Angeles Police Department. The acquittal in 1995 transformed public and literary understanding of forensic evidence's fallibility and the role of race in the American criminal justice system.

The Simpson trial generated an enormous volume of immediate and ongoing literary, journalistic, and cultural response. It exposed the fault lines of race, privilege, and police evidence practices in American society in ways that reverberated through the poetry and fiction of the 1990s and 2000s. The trial made forensic evidence itself — DNA in particular — a contested cultural text rather than a neutral scientific fact, permanently complicating the genre conventions of crime fiction.