--Winston Churchill1
The most telling image from the most widely and closely watched criminal trial of our lifetime is itself an image of people watching television. On one half of the screen black law students at Howard Law School cheer as they watch the live coverage of a Los Angeles jury acquitting O.J. Simpson of the double murder of his exwife
and her friend. On the other half of the screen, white students as George Washington University Law School sit shocked in silence as they watch the same scene. The split-screen image captures in a moment the division between white and black Americans on the question of O.J. Simpson’s guilt. And that division in turn reflects an even deeper divide on the issue of the fairness and legitimacy of American criminal justice.
Before, during, and after the trial, about three-quarters of black citizens maintained that Simpson was not guilty, while an equal fraction of white citizens deemed him guilty. More people paid attention to this trial than any other in world history, but neither the DNA evidence nor the dubious reliability of Los Angeles detective Mark Fuhrman altered either group’s views on guilt or innocence. In some respects, the racially divided response to the verdict was understandable. For many black citizens, the acquittal was a sign of hope, or at least payback. For much of our history, the mere allegation that a black man had murdered two white people would have been sufficient grounds for his lynching. Until very recently, the jury rendering judgment on O.J. Simpson would likely have been all white; Simpson’s jury, by contrast, consisted of nine blacks, two whites, and an Hispanic. And the prosecution was poisoned by the racism of the central witness, Detective Mark Fuhrman, who had, among other things, called blacks “niggers” on tape and then lied about it on the stand. To many
blacks, the jury’s “not guilty” verdict demonstrated that the system is not always rigged against the black defendant, and that was worth cheering. The white law students’ shock was also understandable. The evidence against Simpson was overwhelming. Simpson’s blood had been found at the scene of the murders. The victim’s blood had been found in Simpson’s white Bronco and on a sock in Simpson’s bedroom. And a glove found at Simpson’s home had, as prosecutor Marcia Clark put it in her closing argument to the jury, “all of the evidence on it: Ron Goldman, fibers from his shirt; Ron Goldman’s hair; Nicole’s hair; the defendant’s blood; Ron Goldman’s blood; Nicole’s blood; and the Bronco fibre [sic].”2 The defense’s suggestion that the Los Angeles Police Department somehow planted all of this evidence ran directly contrary to their simultaneous (and quite effective) demonstration of the LAPD’s “keystone cops” incompetence. To many whites, it appeared that a predominately black jury had voted for one of their own, and had simply ignored the overwhelming evidence that Simpson was a brutal double murderer.
But there is a deep irony in these reactions. Simpson, of course, was atypical in every way. The very factors that played to his advantage at trial generally work to the disadvantage of the vast majority of black defendants. Simpson had virtually unlimited resources, a jury that identified with him along racial grounds, and celebrity status. Most black defendants, by contrast, cannot afford any attorney, much less a “dream team.” Their fate is usually decided by predominantly or
exclusively white juries. And most black defendants find that their image is linked in America’s mind not with celebrity, but with criminality. At the same time, the features that worked to Simpson’s advantage, and that occasioned such outrage among whites, generally benefit whites. Whites have a disproportionate share of the wealth in our society, and are more likely to be able to buy a good defense; white defendants generally face juries composed of members of their own race; and a white person’s face is not stereotypically associated with crime. Thus, what dismayed whites in Simpson’s case is precisely what generally works to their advantage, while what blacks cheered is what most often works to their disadvantage.
Had Simpson been poor and unknown, as most black (and white) criminal defendants are, everything would have been different. The case would have garnered no national attention. Simpson would have been represented by an overworked and underpaid public defender who would not have been able to afford experts to examine and challenge the government’s evidence. No one would have conducted polls on the case, and the trial would not have been televised. In all likelihood, Simpson would have been convicted in short order, without serious testing of the evidence against him or the methods by which it was obtained. Whites would have expressed no outrage that a poor black defendant had been convicted, and blacks would have had nothing to cheer about. That, not California v. O.J. Simpson, is the reality in American courtrooms across the country today.
In other words, it took an atypical case, one in which minority race and lower socioeconomic class did not coincide, in which the defense outperformed the prosecution, and in which the jury was predominantly black, for white people to pay attention to the role that race and class play in criminal justice. Yet the issues of race and class are present in every criminal case, and in the vast majority of cases they play out no more fairly. Of course, they generally work in the opposite direction: the prosecution outspends and outperforms the defense, the jury is predominantly white, and the defendant is poor and a member of a racial minority. In an odd way, then, the Simpson case brought to the foreground issues that lurk beneath the entire system of criminal justice. The system’s legitimacy turns on equality before the law, but the system’s reality could not be further from that ideal. As Justice Hugo Black wrote over forty years ago: “There can be no equal justice where the kind of trial a man gets depends on the amount of money he has.”3
to be continued....
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