Word: simi
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That left Ventura County, and the town of Simi Valley, which is just 2% black. A large part of the local citizenry moved there to escape Los Angeles and all it represents to them: gangs, crime, high housing prices and minorities. The place is home to a large number of police and fire fighters. The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library is there. Even if Simi Valley could not be counted on to yield an old-fashioned, Alabama-style jury, any panel chosen from there was more likely to identify with the four white officers who had held the nightsticks than with...
...unsympathetic audience, it may not have been an advantage to Terry White, the soft-spoken, studious-looking lead prosecutor, that he was black. (Alan S. Yochelson, his co-prosecutor, was white.) Though the prosecutors objected strongly when it was first suggested that the trial be moved to Simi Valley, the pair acknowledged that they were powerless to reverse the judge's decision once it had been made. But they could take comfort from the fact that juries in Ventura County had decided against the police in three of the five police-brutality cases conducted there since 1986. And besides...
...civil rights. And the videotape will go on to haunt the nation with its scene of what still looks like sanctioned sadism. For most Americans, no legal argument about the stages of police procedure can explain away those images, though legal argument may have worked for 12 jurors in Simi Valley who were disposed to heed it. To most Americans, black and white, in this case good lawyering triumphed over justice itself...
...blacks (though it did have one Asian and one Hispanic) virtually proves that the criminal-justice system is ruled by bias and that they cannot look to it for fair treatment. They dismiss as a sham the official contention that the trial was moved from Los Angeles to nearby Simi Valley to guard against prejudicial publicity influencing the jury. In their view, the move was made precisely for the purpose of 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...
...this time the President also pronounced the tape of King's beating "revolting" and spoke of the "anger" and "pain" he had experienced watching it. More important, he at last announced that the verdict of the Simi Valley 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...