THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, October 12, 1995 TAG: 9510110004
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A12 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Another View
SOURCE: By MARY ADAMS-LACKEY
LENGTH: Long : 169 lines
Camp O.J. is gone. O.J.'s gone home. And lots of angry white people, including Gil Garcetti, district attorney for Los Angeles County, are going to town on the verdict. And the jury.
Why? Evidently, this was supposed to be a prosecutorial slam-dunk.
Why else would Garcetti say the jurors weren't smart enough to understand scientific evidence, comprehend reasonable doubt or reach the correct verdict. Their verdict, he said, was ``emotional.''
Others say it came ``too fast.'' Compared with what? The length of the trial?
Looks as though after nine months this baby was overdue. And the labor was short.
Forbidden for months to discuss what they heard daily, these jurors, when near freedom from their virtual imprisonment and finally allowed to deliberate, must have become sharply focused. Conclusions they didn't know they had reached must have leapt from their subconscious minds. And they found themselves in agreement.
Outside the jury room, however, vehement disagreement continues between the ``guilty'' and ``innocent'' groups. What they have in common is that their fiercely held opinions are not likely to be based on sober and objective consideration of evidence but on television sound bites, newspaper headlines and discussions with others as ill-informed as they.
Chances are that few could describe evidence collection and analysis. And fewer still could correctly explain DNA testing.
Some complain that the trial wounded the country, but the wounds aren't new - just newly exposed. There's racism, for example, both covert and overt.
Many whites say O.J. was perceived as neither black nor white, that he transcended race. Isn't that a thinly veiled way of saying being white is more desirable than being black? Have you ever heard it said that a white man transcended race? What would you think about this case if Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman had been black, and O.J. Simpson, white?
And there's the talk about ``buying an acquittal'' and how the common man couldn't afford a legal team as expensive as O.J.'s. But the common man would never face a $9 million, nine-month assault from a high-powered legal SWAT team. Faced with that would you defend yourself with a peashooter? Or would you hire tanks?
So money talked. And other money talked back.
What was O.J. Simpson to do after professing his innocence? Belly up and play along with the prosecution so it would look good and Garcetti would be re-elected, so Hank Goldberg would quit whining and Chris Darden would quit pouting and Judge Ito would stop telling O.J. jokes at sidebars?
Was O.J. supposed to make Marcia Clark patron saint of battered women? Not in this trial. All Clark's domestic-violence evidence was a waste of time, said juror Brenda Moran. This wasn't about that, she said. This was a murder trial.
Now a murder trial is serious business, a search for the truth, the law says. Truth dug out of dirty evidence, however, isn't as pure as you might like it to be. It might, also, just be different from what you thought it would be.
And this time the truth was that 12 jurors found the prosecution's evidence inadequate to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
Besides that, Simpson said he didn't slash and stab his ex-wife and her young friend to death. Couldn't have. Wouldn't have.
Maybe we should believe him.
The jury found no evidence for a motive.
Given that, and an impossible time-line, a detective with what Judge Ito called ``a reckless disregard for the truth,'' a racist cop with an old score to settle, the fuzzy memory of an ailing nurse, an incompetent coroner, undertrained and careless criminalists and dubious chains of custody, is it surprising the jury saw the prosecution's ``mountain of evidence'' as being made of trash and old dirt?
So if you didn't like the verdict, don't fault the jury. Blame faulty evidence. Blame a politically ambitious district attorney's office for rushing to judgment with evidence tainted and unreliable. Blame it for an incomplete murder investigation.
But don't blame ultraconscientious Court-TV or excoriate equally responsible CNN or even Entertainment-TV. They gave us courtroom seats and legal experts.
That remote-controlled, inconspicuously mounted camera let us witness the trial (which the U.S. Constitution requires be public) of one of our global village's most famous citizens. The biases of print and electronic media were eliminated.
We saw what the jurors saw. And more. What they saw were the holes in the prosecution's picture. The jury, said juror Lionel Cryer, felt things were missing.
Or as Dr. Henry Lee, world-renowned forensic expert, said, ``Something is wrong here.''
He was right.
Camp O.J. is gone. O.J.'s gone home. And lots of angry white people, including Gil Garcetti, district attorney for Los Angeles County, are going to town on the verdict. And the jury.
Why? Evidently, this was supposed to be a prosecutorial slam-dunk.
Why else would Garcetti say the jurors weren't smart enough to understand scientific evidence, comprehend reasonable doubt or reach the correct verdict. Their verdict, he said, was ``emotional.''
Others say it came ``too fast.'' Compared with what? The length of the trial?
Looks as though after nine months this baby was overdue. And the labor was short.
Forbidden for months to discuss what they heard daily, these jurors, when near freedom from their virtual imprisonment and finally allowed to deliberate, must have become sharply focused. Conclusions they didn't know they had reached must have leapt from their subconscious minds. And they found themselves in agreement.
Outside the jury room, however, vehement disagreement continues between the ``guilty'' and ``innocent'' groups. What they have in common is that their fiercely held opinions are not likely to be based on sober and objective consideration of evidence but on television sound bites, newspaper headlines and discussions with others as ill-informed as they.
Chances are that few could describe evidence collection and analysis. And fewer still could correctly explain DNA testing.
Some complain that the trial wounded the country, but the wounds aren't new - just newly exposed. There's racism, for example, both covert and overt.
Many whites say O.J. was perceived as neither black nor white, that he transcended race. Isn't that a thinly veiled way of saying being white is more desirable than being black? Have you ever heard it said that a white man transcended race? What would you think about this case if Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman had been black, and O.J. Simpson, white?
And there's the talk about ``buying an acquittal'' and how the common man couldn't afford a legal team as expensive as O.J.'s. But the common man would never face a $9 million, nine-month assault from a high-powered legal SWAT team. Faced with that would you defend yourself with a peashooter? Or would you hire tanks?
So money talked. And other money talked back.
What was O.J. Simpson to do after professing his innocence? Belly up and play along with the prosecution so it would look good and Garcetti would be re-elected, so Hank Goldberg would quit whining and Chris Darden would quit pouting and Judge Ito would stop telling O.J. jokes at sidebars?
Was O.J. supposed to make Marcia Clark patron saint of battered women? Not in this trial. All Clark's domestic-violence evidence was a waste of time, said juror Brenda Moran. This wasn't about that, she said. This was a murder trial.
Now a murder trial is serious business, a search for the truth, the law says. Truth dug out of dirty evidence, however, isn't as pure as you might like it to be. It might, also, just be different from what you thought it would be.
And this time the truth was that 12 jurors found the prosecution's evidence inadequate to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
Besides that, Simpson said he didn't slash and stab his ex-wife and her young friend to death. Couldn't have. Wouldn't have.
Maybe we should believe him.
The jury found no evidence for a motive.
Given that, and an impossible time-line, a detective with what Judge Ito called ``a reckless disregard for the truth,'' a racist cop with an old score to settle, the fuzzy memory of an ailing nurse, an incompetent coroner, undertrained and careless criminalists and dubious chains of custody, is it surprising the jury saw the prosecution's ``mountain of evidence'' as being made of trash and old dirt?
So if you didn't like the verdict, don't fault the jury. Blame faulty evidence. Blame a politically ambitious district attorney's office for rushing to judgment with evidence tainted and unreliable. Blame it for an incomplete murder investigation.
But don't blame ultraconscientious Court-TV or excoriate equally responsible CNN or even Entertainment-TV. They gave us courtroom seats and legal experts.
That remote-controlled, inconspicuously mounted camera let us witness the trial (which the U.S. Constitution requires be public) of one of our global village's most famous citizens. The biases of print and electronic media were eliminated.
We saw what the jurors saw. And more. What they saw were the holes in the prosecution's picture. The jury, said juror Lionel Cryer, felt things were missing.
Or as Dr. Henry Lee, world-renowned forensic expert, said, ``Something is wrong here.''
He was right. > by CNB