Almost half of the jurors who convicted O.J. Simpson at his robbery trial in Las Vegas believed that the former American football star should have been found guilty of double murder more than a decade ago, newly released court papers show.

Jury questionnaires made public after Friday's guilty verdict revealed that all but one of the jurors knew about Simpson's 1995 acquittal over the deaths of his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman. Five of the 12 jurors said that they disagreed with the verdict.

“I think he did it, but I wasn't there to see the case so really can't say,” a 41-year-old woman bank teller who served on the jury wrote on her questionnaire. “Too much publicity and hype around trial to make clear decision,” a 35-year-old male systems analyst on the jury wrote.

Simpson, 61, faces the prospect of spending the rest of his life behind bars after being convicted by the jury of 12 charges of armed robbery and kidnapping stemming from a hold-up in a Las Vegas hotel aimed at recovering sports memorabilia that Simpson claimed had been stolen from him. He will be sentenced on December 5.

Yale Galanter, Simpson's lawyer, said that jury bias would form the cornerstone of an appeal. “This was just payback,” he said of the verdict. “They were on an agenda.” The defence complained that black people had been excluded from the nine-women and three-men jury, which was all white but for one woman of Mexican descent.

Judge Jackie Glass found during jury selection, however, that prosecutors had “race-neutral” grounds for using peremptory challenges to remove two black people.

Mr Galanter said the defence was also hampered by the judge's decision to cut off questioning of jurors who said that they could be unbiased even though their questionnaires suggested they held strong opinions.

After the verdict, however, jurors insisted that their decision had not been influenced by Simpson's controversial previous acquittal.

Paul Connelly, the jury foreman, who wrote in his questionnaire that he agreed with the 1995 decision, told the Los Angeles Times that the murders “really didn't come up” in jury room discussions. “I honestly believe in my heart of hearts that it did not” affect the verdict, he said.

Nevertheless, a consultant who helped prosecutors to pick the jury said that the robbery and kidnapping case against Simpson was won the moment the jury was chosen.

“That was the best possible jury prosecutors could ever have,” said Howard Varinsky, who drafted the jury questionnaire used to select a panel of 12 and six alternates from the jury pool of more than 500. “I was surprised that we got all the counts,” he said. “But it wasn't an accident that the jury wound up looking like that.”

A lawyer for the family of Mr Goldman, the murder-victim, said that the legal pursuit of Simpson for years to collect the $33.5 million (£18 million) wrongful death judgment awarded in a civil trial had pushed him into a desperate attempt to retrieve sports memorabilia he had lost.

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