Word: simpson
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STEPHEN GILLERS LAW PROFESSOR, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY "ONCE AGAIN, WE ARE REMINDED OF THE uncomfortably close relationship between justice and money. If Simpson were middle-class or merely rich, good defense lawyers confronting the mass of scientific evidence and 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...
...JOLTING TWISTS AND TURNS IN THE SIMPSON trial, none was more startling than the defendant's rebirth as a black man. What we tend to forget is that before June 12, 1994, the Juice was no hero to African Americans. His postfootball success was largely due to his ability to make whites comfortable as he played golf with ceos at country clubs from which other blacks were excluded or shucked and jived his way through goofy movies like some modern Stepin Fetchit. Never one to speak out about civil rights, he seemed to shed his racial identity, crossing over into...
...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 mistreatment by white authority. "We always reach out to another black person...
...between cynical appeals to their sense of racial injustice and valid pleas for the unjustly accused. What infuriates them is that whites often fail to make equivalent distinctions, dismissing blacks' protests against racist mistreatment as a tactic without bothering to investigate the mistreatment itself. And that is why the Simpson case is so divisive. Until blacks are convinced that the cops and the prosecutors are dealing fairly with them, they won't listen to anything else...
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...