Word: convicted
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Cambridge's Most Wanted: A couple rents a car and sneaks away for the weekend without informing either set of parents. They get rear-ended in Vermont by a drunk escaped convict and have to call their folks from a police station...
...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...
...whites, said they thought before the verdict that the policemen would be found guilty. On many other questions, a majority or plurality of one race agreed with a much larger segment of the other: 62% of whites, but 92% of blacks, thought they would have voted to convict if they had been on the jury. The riots that followed were condemned as completely unjustified by 63% of whites and 42% of the blacks; an additional 20% of blacks and 14% of whites found them somewhat unjustified (though 15% of blacks and only 4% of whites thought they were completely justified...
...guaranteeing that a jury excluding blacks would be chosen (Simi Valley is not only almost exclusively white but also has a relatively large population of policemen and other civil servants) and that such a group of jurors was desired specifically because it would be almost certain not to convict. Not a few white observers, including some legal scholars, are inclined to agree with that judgment, at least partly. Says Douglas Colbert, a professor of criminal law at Hofstra: "I don't believe it would have mattered what evidence was presented or not presented." But again, white sympathy does little...
...jury was "not the end." He ordered federal authorities to speed an investigation with a view toward starting a federal prosecution of the four cops for violating King's civil rights, utilizing a law enacted specifically to apply in cases where state courts and juries could or would not convict. That move might help convince skeptical blacks that they can after all get fair treatment from the judicial system. Better late than never -- but it remains to be seen whether the racial chasm that the King case and the riots revealed and widened can be bridged...