Word: verdicts
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Acquitted? For the majority of white Americans who think Simpson did it, a cynical reading of that verdict--and cynical readings would be common--would mean that a millionaire jock who beats his wife, then butchers her and another man, can still walk, provided he buys the best lawyers around and they play the race card. For that majority, an acquittal would be the mirror image of the outcome in the first Rodney King beating trial, in which a mostly white jury acquitted four white police officers of what looked to most people like a blatant act of brutality...
...awaits the verdict, Los Angeles has been gloomily revisiting some of its worst memories, the ones formed during the riots that followed the first Rodney King trial. The L.A.P.D., which was accused of responding too slowly to the first disturbances that followed the King verdict,will be on low-level alert on O.J.'s verdict day. After Cochran's summation, police chief Willie Williams declared he would hold the entire defense team responsible for heightening tensions in his city: "When this trial is over, they're going to go back to their homes. [But] we're going to have...
...murder is a gender crime, and I have been fascinated that everyone--the media, the public, law-enforcement personnel--has fallen into the defense-sprung trap of looking at it as a racial episode. In the process, of course, it has become one. But as we wait for the verdict, I feel exactly the way I did that weekend back in 1991 when Anita Hill testified: we absolutely knew who was telling the truth, but the bad guys...
...Everyvictim, and Mark Fuhrman is not Everyracist. When we create these false archetypes as a culture, we avoid confronting the very real systemic issues and problems that are elements of the trial: violence toward women; racism; and our national obsession with celebrity, race, sex and money. Whatever the verdict, I don't think the O.J. Simpson trial will have a deep, profound or lasting resonance in American culture. It will not be transformative. It's a bad miniseries gone out of control...
Colin Powell finally gave his views on the Simpson verdict in London, where he is promoting his book, in an interview with the BBC. The verdict, he said, "is not a metaphor for all race relations in the U.S. There is an enormous chasm. And sometimes we forget, when we see some progress and some blacks doing well . . . what we have left behind in our inner cities." Powell admit that racial tensions could present problems for him if he runs for president. "There are some people who see me as an American who happens to be black. But there...