We formed our opinions early. And, facts and testimony be damned, we stood our ground. That was as true of whites, according to the polls, as it was of blacks. (Pollsters have not shown much interest in the opinions of Latinos, Asians and others on the matter.) The only difference was that, for the most part, the races came down on different sides. In July 1994 a Gallup poll commissioned by USA Today and CNN found 68 percent of whites saying Simpson was guilty and 60 percent of blacks calling him innocent. That was less than a month after the murders and before a scintilla of evidence had been presented at trial. It was even before Los Angeles Municipal Court Judge Kathleen Kennedy-Powell found sufficient evidence to try Simpson. The opinions of blacks and whites, in short, rested on something other than deep knowledge–and they were not much subject to change.
The trial therefore became, for many of us, not a search for truth, or even for justice (in the limited legal sense of the word), but a test of whether the system would verifywhat we thought we already knew. Worse, it became a litmus test for questions it could not conceivably answer. Can black jurors be impartial? Will wife-beaters be punished? Can the courts be fair to a black man? Can murdered innocents find justice? No single trial could carry that weight.
Common sense should tell us that the Simpson trial says roughly as much about the ability of black jurors to render justice as the William Kennedy Smith and Lorena Bobbitt trials (both had all-white juries) say about the ability of white jurors to understand the law. Or as the John De Lorean trial (where there were videotapes, for God’s sake) tells us about the competence of California jurors to evaluate evidence. But common sense has been in short supply in O.J. land. Hence all the speculation about what the Simpson case says about the quality of U.S. justice–as if your proto-typal accused killer has access to a battalion of big-bucks lawyers with their fancy experts and mind-bending sophistry. In fact, the typical defendant is more likely to end up with an overworked public defender with no budget and barely time enough to learn the client’s name.
Though the Simpson case raises some interesting and important questions, it is so unusual as to be useless in answering them. Just over 1 percent of men charged with murdering their wives are acquitted, according to a study of large urban counties released last year by the U.S. Justice Department. Nearly 90 percent are convicted or plead guilty, with the remainder of the eases either dismissed, rejected for prosecution or otherwise disposed of. It is not so easy for a husband to get away with murder, whatever we may believe happened with O.J.
Nor is it clear that race was the most relevant reason for Simpson’s ex-oneration. (Few people seem to remember that the two Whites and one Latino on the jury also quickly made up their minds.) Larry Stephen, chief of the special prosecutions division for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Newark, thinks that the jury’s lack of sophistication was the key. The Simpson jurors, after all, were not particularly notable for accomplishment–presumably, in part, because highly successful people are generally reluctant to spend a year away from their regular work. In a circumstantial-evidence case, says Stephen, he always looks for people who are smart and well educated, who understand, among other things, that beyond reasonable doubt does not mean beyond any doubt.
This is not to say that race is irrelevant to juror behavior. Georgetown University law professor Emma Jordan believes a history of lynchings, biased white juries and police harassment has given blacks a jaundiced view of American justice. And the enactment of drug laws that fall more heavily on blacks than on others, she believes, has aggravated the sense of injustice.
A report released last week by the Sentencing Project, a Washington-based advocacy group that promotes alternatives to prison, brought home the reason many blacks are frustrated. Nearly one third of black males in their 20s are either in prison or jail or on probation or parole, the study says. One reason, concluded the authors, was that blacks had become cannon fodder in America’s war on drugs. In 1992, the most recent year for which statistics were available, nearly 90 percent of all defendants sentenced to state prisons for drug possession were either black or Hispanic. The statistic is even more stunning whenset next to surveys by the National Institute on Drug Abuse that indicate blacks constitute only 13 percent of monthly drug users.
Though Attorney General Janet Reno has advocated evenhanded treatment, the Justice Department has resisted changes in the mandatory-sentencing guidelines that require much higher penalties for use of crack (considered an inner-city drug) than for possession of powder cocaine (which is more popular among the affluent). Consequently, a dealer holding less than $1,000 worth of crack can receive the same sentence as someone with $50,000 worth of powder cocaine. And if a crack trafficker is black, he may be more likely to be arrested and convicted than his white counterpart. A Los Angeles Times investigation last spring reported that though many whites use crack, not a single white had been convicted of a crack offense in an L.A.-area federal court in nearly a decade.
Michael Tonry, a professor of law and public policy at the University of Minnesota, claims that the disproportionate impact was intentional. “Crime-control politicians wanted more people in prison and knew that a larger proportion of them would be black,” he asserts in his book, “Malign Neglect: Race, Crime and Punishment in America.” Whatever politicians’ intentions, the result is that more and more blacks are finding their sons, brothers and lovers in prison.
Despite that, many prosecutors dispute the notion that black jurors coddle other blacks. If the evidence is “tight” and her presentation is credible, “I get convictions with juries that are predominantly African-American and Latino,” says Patricia Gat-ling, an assistant district attorney in Brooklyn, N.Y., and past president of the National Black Prosecutors Association. Stephen, who is also black, concurs. “I prefer black jurors,” he says. Though they are often more suspicious of police testimony than whites, he believes their suspicions are generally well founded. Blacks are more likely to know “how cops really are outside the sterile environment of the courtroom,” explains Stephen.
Even if black jurors believe police have been abusive, a not guilty verdict is far froma foregone conclusion. For as suspicious as many blacks may be of police, they are even more fearful of malevolent thugs. Black communities are “most impacted by crime,” points out Stephen; so law-abiding residents are eager to put miscreants behind bars. As one big-city prosecutor put it, “African-Americans understand what it’s like to live in a neighborhood infected by drug dealers.” Nonetheless, Gatling fears that some white prosecutors will take the Simpson ease as evidence that blacks don’t belong on juries. “If they knew my 71-year-old mother from Mississippi,” she says, “not a prosecutor out here wouldn’t want her.”
In the rush to judgment that has followed the Simpson trial, however, some people are having a huge problem seeing not only black jurors but blacks in general as individual human beings. Many have also lost track of an important fact: that we have a 0.J. mania: Celebrating at a Wyandanch, N.Y., beauty salon. But was race the most relevant reason for Simpson’s acquittal? legal system that, in order to ensure that the wrongly accused go free, ends up exonerating some people who are guilty: Many Americans clearly believe the Simpson team took unfair advantage of that system. Others believe a black man finally made it work the way whites have all along. Wherever one stands, we should be able to agree on two things: that the verdict and the way it was arrived at were anything other than typical; and that the real sources of racial tension in this country lie not with the O.J. jurors or even with his attorneys but in our inability to see racially charged events through anything other than a racially polarized lens.
