Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, September 12, 1995 TAG: 9509120055
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
From a televised courtroom in Los Angeles, the nation has learned not merely about arcane legal procedures, from jury building to evidence exclusion. We have been taught anew things we already more-or-less secretly knew about:
About all-too-common spousal abuse, for example, and the inadequate police response to it.
About the cult of media celebrity, which causes some to believe they know a person merely because he is famous.
About the tenuous meaning of "justice" in a justice system that behaves differently if you have millions with which to employ the legal profession's top hired guns.
About endless trials filled with endless wrangling dominated less by the pursuit than by the obfuscation of truth.
About the precariousness of reason and common sense in a culture of televised image and paranoid distrust, in which scientific evidence, plain facts and rules of logic can be overwhelmed by what author Neal Gabler calls "epistemological impairment."
(You don't have to be a judge or juror to be appalled at the irrationality, on the basis of what has been seen and heard, of imagining that someone other than O.J. Simpson killed his former wife and Ron Goldman.)
Lately, we also have been learning anew about race - the most fundamental of fault lines dividing this nation since its founding.
Unless you were summering on Mars, you presumably know that Mark Fuhrman, the former Los Angeles police detective who retrieved a bloody glove from Simpson's estate, not only repeated the word "nigger" 41 times in a taped interview with a would-be screenwriter (directly contradicting earlier testimony that he had not uttered the "N" word in a decade).
Fuhrman also bragged on the tapes that beating blacks, fabricating and destroying evidence and making arrests without probable cause were par for the course in LAPD business.
Fuhrman is, fortunately, a special case. Yet whites are notably more likely to believe he is a lying braggart or rogue cop than are blacks, who are more likely to believe he is typical. The different reactions have presumably something to do with experience.
We would be closing our eyes, as we have throughout history, if we fail to acknowledge that racism is not a bizarre aberration. It persists in every field because many whites still harbor it, and too few have the gumption to confront it.
One balancing act is to root out the bigots carrying badges without making it seem as if all law enforcement officials are similarly twisted. They aren't.
Another balancing act is for the Los Angeles jury to put aside Fuhrman's evil and the racial resonance of this case, and consider only the evidence bearing on O.J. Simpson's guilt or innocence.
That is, after all, what this trial is supposed to be about.
by CNB