Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, October 4, 1995                   TAG: 9510040103
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-12   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

WHAT WAS THE TRIAL ABOUT?

Found guilty instead were the Los Angeles Police Department, the criminal-justice system and, more than anything else, contemporary race relations. Which fulfilled, of course, the Simpson dream-team's dream: to change the subject from murder to something else.

That "something else," insisted defense attorney Johnnie Cochran with evident success, was the evil embodied in retired Detective Mark Fuhrman. Send the racists a message, Cochran implored the jurors. And send they did.

As for the victims . . . well, too bad. As for the proposition that sifting evidence ought to have nothing to do with race . . . well, too bad, too. These matters didn't figure in the message. The challenge now is to move on, to keep before us the dream of a society that transcends ethnicity.

Because a trail of DNA-analyzed blood led directly from the victims to O.J. Simpson, the only way he could possibly be innocent of the crimes, his defense team as much as acknowledged, would be if he was intricately and massively framed by police. (Sorry: Sloppy procedure and contamination of evidence don't produce exact DNA matches, and there's no way Fuhrman could have framed Simpson alone.)

Never mind that the defense showed enough police incompetence to render a conspiracy unbelievable.

Never mind that no actual evidence surfaced to support a conspiracy, as Judge Lance A. Ito noted last month when he excluded portions of the Fuhrman tapes having to do with allegations of planting evidence in other cases.

Never mind that the defense team never credibly explained why police would plant evidence against a wealthy, popular sports hero who had been allowed to get away with beating his wife for years, and who was allowed to escape when anyone other than O.J. would have been arrested.

Never mind that Simpson was caught, on television no less, trying to flee with money, passport and a disguise.

All this was beside the point, the jury decided in just a few hours deliberating after a year-long trial.

No, this was a referendum on racism.

The L.A.P.D. deserves a considerable share of the blame for the tangled outcome. Fuhrman's lies and blatant racism made Cochran's effort to shift the trial's focus that much easier. On prosecutors' sagging shoulders hung the albatross of a department that harbored not just Fuhrman but untold numbers of racists like the officers who beat Rodney King.

Too, the burden of history trumped the burden of proof. Cochran asked the jury to weigh its decision in the context of a past crowded with blacks denied justice. It may be reasonable to wonder whether those celebrating Simpson's acquittal would feel differently if he were a white man and his dead wife had been black. But visceral reactions are conditioned by a history in which whites have regarded police as protectors, and blacks for hundreds of years were the ones victimized by race-conscious verdicts.

In the absence of a murder weapon or eyewitnesses, the jury's capacity to find reasonable doubt shouldn't be entirely dismissed. But the conclusion seems inescapable that this outcome has less to do with the facts of the case than with racial chickens coming home to roost.

A trial for the murder of two innocent people isn't the place to right society's wrongs. A message was sent, but was justice done?