He got away with it. O. J. is free to drink his celebratory champagne, despite the mountain of circumstantial evidence that, one night in June 1994, he did corner and knife to death his ex-wife and a young man who chanced upon the scene.
Simpson is a black man, of course, and the question whether a mostly black, inner-city jury willfully ignored the evidence and voted to acquit solely on the basis of race — to “nullify” a case brought by what that jury believed to be an illegitimate, racist authority — is inevitable. It happens sometimes. More than sometimes, in fact, and more and more frequently. The Simpson jury’s formal consideration of nine months of testimony and argument took less than four hours. How diligently did they do their job there at the end, in that small chamber outside the courtroom?
At her Wednesday press conference, juror Brenda Moran needed a whispered interruption from her lawyer before she remembered to insist that her own vote wasn’t assured until after closing arguments. Gina Rossborough, appearing on $ IOprah, admitted that she entered jury service with a “reasonable doubt” of guilt and heard nothing — nothing! — that failed to reinforce that preconception. Another juror, Lionel “Lon” Cryer, is a former Black Panther party “member; he’s the man, left unchallenged by the prosecution during jury selection last November, who gave the Simpson table a raised-fist salute after the verdict was read. If Johnnie Cochran’s client had been white, could this jury have so quickly, even eagerly, dispatched the evidence and accepted as plausible the existence of a massive police conspiracy to frame an innocent man? No.
And yet. When the plea is innocent, the defense in a criminal trial always, at least implicitly, alleges that the state is engaged in a conspiracy of some sort. They have the wrong man, and — wittingly or not — they are attempting to convict him anyway. For a true-believing defense attorney like Alan Dershowitz, such “did he do it” questions recede in significance before the overriding responsibility of the sovereign power to demonstrate that its case against an individual is virtually perfect. In this purist view, the $ Iprosecution is principally on trial, not the defendant. And when the defense succeeds in persuading a jury that impeccably obtained evidence is the only salient measure of justice (thanks for nothing, Judge Ito) then that jury will be much more likely to acquit.
Which is what appears to have happened in the Simpson trial. The case for guilt was overwhelming and convincing. But it was not flawless. As only a very rich man’s multi-million-dollar defense campaign could have made clear, the original Los Angeles Police Department search of O. J.’s Rockingham Avenue estate may have been unconstitutional. The detectives’ claim that he was not a suspect at the time it was conducted, obviously asserted to protect crucial evidence, was unbelievable. The blood evidence was handled sloppily, and the chain of custody for that evidence was broken. Not to mention the fact that two men in that chain of custody seem to have perjured themselves during the trial.
It was not “reasonable,” i n our view, for the jury to have doubts about whether Orenthal James Simpson butchered two people in June 1994. Several jurors have now revealed that in their eyes Simpson is undoubtedly innocent, not just technically “not guilty,” a judgment that strikes us as the very opposite of reasonable. Ms. Moran, for example, says that she and her colleagues thought the uncontested evidence that O. J. Simpson was a vicious wife-beater, information clearly probative about motive and character, was a total “waste of time.” That’s disgraceful. And the idea that corrupted evidence was the product not of chaos in the aftermath of a brutal double murder, or of isolated offcial incompetence and dishonesty, but resulted from a deliberate conspiracy by the City of Los Angeles and the State of California — that’s what you have to believe if you think O. J. didn’t do it — is naive. To say the least.
But the fact remains that black juries in the United States send black men to prison for violent crimes all the time, without controversy. Even wealthy black men, like Mike Tyson, do not necessarily escape justice. Sad but true, it may simply be that a well-funded Simpson defense managed to turn the trial into a referendum on prosecutorial perfection, and the prosecution lost. Until we know more bout what went on in the deliberation room, the “race card” case against the Simpson jury is incomplete.
Not so the case against Johnnie Cochran and his millions of admirers, a clear majority of black Americans, according to all available polls.
Almost invariably these days, when a public spectacle is created by allegations of official conspiracy against a black person involved in a judicial proceeding, some section of black America can be counted on to stick its thumb in the eye of respectable opinion, which holds that the alleged conspiracy is groundless. Tawana told the truth,” remember? “Free Mike Tyson.” Until now, it has always been possible at least to pretend that this uncivic weaking of common sense — to say nothing of the horrifying tribalism and race hatred it suggests — is restricted to a tiny class of professional provocateurs, like Al Sharpton or Louis Farrakhan.
But no more. Comes now Johnnie Cochran, suddenly the nation’s leading criminal defense attorney. He uses Fruit of Islam bodyguards the night before Yom Kippur. He does legal work for Snoop Doggy Dogg and Reginald Denny’s rioting assailants. He invokes Hitler. He asks the Simpson jury — and his national television audience, more significantly — to help “send a message” about racism. He contends, on last Wednesday’s Larry King, that ” totalitarianism” is alive and well on this continent.
And he is not marginal. The people whose support and exultation he delights in are not some mob in Crown Heights. They are the Congressional Black Caucus. They are students at Howard and Morehouse, the cream of black America’s next generation, who explode in joy at a verdict that probably turns a murderer loose and, they think, ironically confirms their judgment that American justice is a racist fraud. Mr. Cochran, incidentally, says “I love America.” But he doesn’t. Do his fans?
All too typically, the suits and ties of institutional America are struck dumb by the meaning of the Simpson verdict and the black reaction it inspires. We must “respect the jury system,” we are told. The “best thing” we can do is put this behind us and move on. But how the hell are we supposed to do that? Move on to what?
There is an awful caution in all this for conservatives, so many of us full of yeasty bromides about restoring the stolen power of the federal government to its rightful owners in “civil society.” The Los Angeles Police Department, and the Simpson jury, and those whooping inner-city crowds and college students are civil society, too, after all.
“We know what to do out here, beyond the Beltway,” goes the devolutionary refrain. Maybe we do. But then again, in the aftermath of the Simpson verdict, maybe we really don’t.
David Tell, for the Editors
