Word: cochrans
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...CIRCUS, IT'S A DISGRACE, and the sooner it's over the better for Los Angeles. This trial is increasing people's cynicism about race in this city, and the defense attorneys are playing to wounds in the black and Jewish communities. Johnnie Cochran is the best defense O.J. could buy. But it will be terrible for the criminal justice system if it works. The jury is being asked by him to do politics, and it's a recipe for disaster. Juries have to realize they're not political leaders and they're not an audience on Oprah. The most...
...police testimony against him would have pressed for a plea bargain. Although the Simpson trial is to trials like Mount Everest is to a child's sand castle, unrealistic defendants may not appreciate that their court-appointed or bargain-basement lawyers lack both the talent of a Johnnie Cochran and the investigative resources of an O.J. Simpson. An acquittal in the Simpson case will give other defendants false hopes that their cases can be beat as well. As a white man with a healthy skepticism of authority, I was nevertheless stunned that a Mark Fuhrman could have remained so long...
...become black again, thanks to Mark Fuhrman, who treated him like a "nigger," and Johnnie Cochran, who made sure nobody forgot it. Once again, blacks and whites are glaring at each other across the color line in mutual incomprehension as yet another trial of American race relations unfolds in the City of Angels. To whites, the central issue is whether Simpson is a murderer, while to blacks it is whether the process that brought him to trial was fatally contaminated by racial bias. Simpson is still no hero to most blacks, but he has become an indelible symbol of their...
Blacks seethe when Cochran's attack on Detecttive Fuhrman is denigrated in the white-controlled media as merely "playing the race card." Such a tactic could hardly have been avoided in a case that, in Hacker's phrase,"was dripping with race" from the start. How could it have been otherwise when a black man stood accused of cutting the throats of two white people in a city that exploded just 3 1/2 years ago after four white cops who beat Rodney King were set free by a jury from which blacks were conspicuously absent? Few would disagree with Thelma...
Moreover, Simpson's choice of Johnnie Cochran as his lead lawyer made the race factor inevitable. Cochran's career was built around suing the L.A.P.D. for racially inspired misconduct--some of it even more horrendous than that revealed in the Simpson trial--and he is no fool. Still, prosecutors, knowing Fuhrman's history, decided to have the detective testify. That gave Cochran the opening to cast the trial in racial terms, which worked because Simpson was wealthy enough to hire lawyers and investigators to dig up proof of racially motivated police misconduct. It is no more unethical for Simpson...