Justice Delayed

I read today that O.J. Simpson is finally going to jail. I believe that is a good thing although I felt he was being punished by living his life on the outside, among people who could look at him and declare (if they chose to) " I know you killed Ron and Nicole." I watched the trial; nearly all of it from beginning to end for eight months. I believed the man who was walking his dog and saw the white Bronco speed through the alleyways. I believed Kato Kalin who said he heard someone scramble behind his guest house where they fund the glove. I believed them because they didn't have anything to hide. They were just there and told what they knew.

But there were flaws in the case that the defense made good use of. I may be one of the few that thinks the prosecution did a good job, but they were undermined by shoddy police work. And the critical point is that the detectives who traced O.J.'s vehicle to his house jumped the fence without getting a warrant. Right there, at that point in time, the case was doomed. All kinds of evidenced gleaned from the car and the blood stains gathered from the car were ruled inadmissible evidence. The prosecution could not convince anyone on the jury that it was O.J. who had done the deed.

If you don't believe in the power of the 4th amendment of the U.S.Constitution, look what it did for O.J. Simpson.

Of course, IMO, there was a fatal flaw in jury selection as well. O.J.'s peers were not the African Americans from Alameda, or Compton as was asserted since he was a black man; they were the people of Bel Air and his social circle where he, as a million dollar sports hero lived his life. A jury of his peers did not decide his guilt or innocence, but a jury of individuals who had their own tales of injustice before the bar. The verdict of acquittal was the jury's response to other injustices that reverberated throughout the trial - that of color, and class, and privilege, and marrying across color lines, and all that. All the evidence, including the DNA evidence presented couldn't make a dent in the pre-conceived desire to let him go free despite anything he may have done.

The glove over the latex glove was a travesty. "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit."

The prosecution was outmaneuvered.

I was teaching a class at a high school in the San Diego area at that time - the day the verdict came in - I was covering a history class for a teacher who was going to be a week late. With a television in the room and a national trial filling the airwaves every day for nearly a year, I had to let them watch the verdict come in. There were a large number of African American students in the room. They cheered. They were unmistakably glad that he had beat the rap.

I shut off the television and redirected the class's energy the best I could, but I knew justice had not been served. It made me wonder just how many people actually understood that fair trials and solid evidence could also protect them in a court of law, and that it was important to maintain the integrity of police procedures, constitutional protections, and the chain of evidence. But we were not dealing with objectivity here, only an emotional response that one of their own had been set free, even though he may have committed murder. How many blacks over the past centuries in the US had been condemned to death unfairly in just such a proceeding? Thousands, I would guess. This victory was a symbolic one.

As a fatalist of sorts and a believer in poetic justice, I had to content myself with the civil trial and his public flogging in the press and public. It comes as no surprise to me that he tripped up. Perhaps it was a subconscious set-up whereby, failing to heed his own internal survival instincts, he let himself be governed by his feelings of being wronged again take over. Who knows?

This time, there was no midnight flight to Chicago to dump the bloody evidence. No melting ice cream to tell the time. This time no long drawn out slow freeway chase. Just a charge of armed robbery he could not escape.

The grist mill of the gods grinds slowly but it grinds very fine.