Word: simpson
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...risk of producing exaggerated lessons. In response to the abduction and murder of Polly Klaas, California and other states rushed to pass "three strikes'' sentencing laws with little thought for their effect on prisons and the courts. Now many legal observers worry about what changes, intended and unintended, the Simpson spectacle may engender. "Reforms will come speedily and without great caution or thought,'' predicts Brandeis professor Jeffrey Abramson, who wrote We, The Jury: The Jury System and the Ideal of Democracy. Says Yale Kamisar, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School: "If I were teaching criminal law tomorrow...
...different than it was 12 months ago." Already overburdened courts are bracing for the prospect of more criminal defendants who refuse to cop a plea, opting instead for an O.J. dash for daylight before a jury. Potential jurors may be loath to perform a duty that in the Simpson case proved to be a kind of medieval torture...
Other lessons will be drawn as politicians, police and the justice system propose steps to prevent some of the excesses of the Simpson trial from recurring. Just what those lessons should be, however, is a matter of debate--a prosecutor's needed reform may be a defendant's constitutional grievance. Among the points of contention...
...against them, the glaring injustice for O.J. was police negligence, not to mention Detective Mark Fuhrman's bigotry. Investigators came off looking like Keystone Kops, which will certainly prompt a new skepticism about police testimony in all sorts of proceedings. Suggests prominent San Francisco trial lawyer John Martel, a Simpson prosecution consultant: "Perhaps an enlightened society has to pay a price like that to learn of the depth and cost of police misconduct, not just in Los Angeles but elsewhere...
...says. "I've never seen a sequestered jury treated this way. I think the message they got was that neither their time nor they were important." Motions should be heard "before court starts, and after court, and on Saturdays," says Babcock, who believes that in the Simpson case "the jurors became a little band with their own agenda, in opposition to the court and the system." Kamisar agrees that Ito "simply didn't take charge. There's no way you should let a witness stay on the stand for eight days...