Word: verdicts
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After the ceremony, Washington's relief was palpable. "This was an immensely difficult negotiation," was the understated verdict of U.S. special Middle East coordinator Dennis Ross, the diplomatic midwife whose intensified ministrations during the past several months included a three-hour session by telephone hours before the draft agreement was initialed. "It will mean," he added, "that the Israelis are no longer going to be ruling Palestinians...
...summation with the chilling sounds of Nicole Brown Simpson's pleading 911 calls to police. While a screen flashed pictures of Nicole's bruised face, followed by her and Ronald Goldman in death, the families of the victims wept. But what may make more of a difference to the verdict is what happened when defense attorney Johnnie Cochran Jr. gave his summation a day earlier. When he reminded the mostly black jury of how often African Americans have been mistreated by racist police, one of the black jurors seemed on the verge of tears...
...racial fury. But Cochran set off his own kind of racial tempest when he used his closing arguments to call Fuhrman and another Los Angeles officer, Philip Vannatter, "twin devils" and to compare Fuhrman to Adolf Hitler. More than that, he urged the jurors to see a not-guilty verdict as an opportunity to send a message against racism and police misconduct. "Fuhrman is a nightmare, but he's America's nightmare, not just black people's nightmare," Cochran told Time last week. "And everybody needs to understand that...
Even before the verdict, it was plain just how passionately the Simpson case pressed upon the sore spots of the American racial psyche. On Thursday Bill Clinton said he was "concerned" about Cochran's play to racial feeling in his final arguments: "I hope the American people will not let this become some symbol of the larger racial issue in our country...
There may be no verdict that can reconcile feelings so sharply polarized. Never mind that the jury has nine African Americans--a guilty verdict will infuriate many blacks outside the courtroom. An nbc poll last week showed just 2% of blacks would convict Simpson of first-degree murder, which requires proof of premeditation and could send him to prison for life without parole. Only 15% would support even a second-degree verdict, the one appropriate to killings that might be called crimes of passion, which in California would carry a prison term of 15 years to life. Fifty-nine percent...