Word: acquit
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...MAYBE NOT. I cannot imagine that I would have voted to acquit the officers who beat Rodney King to a pulp. Like everyone else, I saw the famous videotape played on the news countless times. And I expected the jury to convict--even if it was an all non-Black jury drawn from an adjoining county that's a world apart from downtown L.A. I was shocked by the acquittal...
...SEEMED IMPOSSIBLE THAT ANY jury could acquit the four officers who were accused of beating Rodney King. How could anyone discount the brutal vision of King being clubbed and kicked on videotape for 81 unforgettable seconds? It seemed like an open-and-shut case...
...eyes of many people, both white and black, it appears that the jury simply chose to nullify the evidence -- to put it aside in making their decision -- which American law allows. "The jury wanted to acquit, despite the fact that the evidence was very clear," says Jerome Skolnick, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. "They could not see putting those nice, white policemen in jail...
White opinion, like black, also is divided -- even among policemen. Like other whites, hardly any cops will say flat-out that they approve of the verdict, or of the conduct of the policemen who were acquitted. Some, however, do express relief and opine that the public got a distorted impression of what happened from the tape. There was -- there must have been -- other evidence that led the jury to acquit. "The trial was much more than 81 seconds of tape," says Houston burglary sergeant Doug Elder. "The media and politicians took the tape and indicted, tried and convicted those officers...
...jury managed to acquit the accused officers...