THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 16, 1997 TAG: 9702150022
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J5 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: OPINION
SOURCE: Perry Morgan
LENGTH: 73 lines
Some ordinarily sensible people have seized on the civil-trial verdict against O.J. Simpson as a wedge to push cameras into courtrooms. Their view, despite much evidence to the contrary, is that televised trials, and Supreme Court hearings as well, would be a Good Thing.
Had the Big Eye been on the case, says The New York Times, blacks and whites alike would have seen the holes in Simpson's alibi; consequently, there would be less racial division over the justness of the verdict.
Columnist William Raspberry thinks we would have learned more and believed more in the integrity of the judicial system ``if we could have seen (the second trial) for ourselves.'' The unstated assertion here is that ``we'' have left some civic duty unfulfilled, which in fact isn't so.
Both The Times and Raspberry put the cart before the horse. The overriding question about a justice system is not whether its verdicts are popular, but whether its trials are fair. Little else matters much in the long run.
A public obsessed with what it thinks of a verdict has little regard for what the jury thinks. And it is to that very obsession that television plays. The jury, after all, must attend to all the dull stuff - bits and pieces of evidence that may fit into a pattern persuasive of guilt or innocence. The television audience gets the juicier morsels of testimony but sups also on gossip, prophecy, hunches, hearsay, guesstimates and oracular pronouncements from far-flung lawyers, special pleaders and reputed experts prattling 'round the clock.
Free of the disciplines surrounding a jury and of the burden of flesh-and-blood deciding, the audience-as-jury can be as cocksure and as righteous in its judgments as it chooses - including its judgments on the judicial system.
These should not be encouraged. Celebrity trials - the kind that get gavel-to-gavel coverage - are not representative of the system. And these anomalous trials are changed even more by the mere presence of the cameras as lawyers and judges begin to play to their audience of millions. Lance Ito's robe hid a judge pretty well seduced of his dignity. The talk of television as tutor to the nation on the state of the justice system is, for the most part, twaddle.
What interest have citizens of other states in the courts of California? Other than ordinary curiosity and a desire for diversion, they have no interest. Who runs the courts and how well, and how much is paid for their support, is California's business. Outsiders will find their own courts doing business and open to the observation of the civic-minded who wish to make informed judgments about the offices dispensing justice in their name.
Regarding black-white division of opinion, what's new? Or important? Both groups reacted rationally to both verdicts but looked through the lenses of different experience regarding police and courts. Had the two groups swapped moccasins, most among them might have changed opinions as well. Televised proceedings cannot bridge this gap or correct distortions arising outside the proceedings.
For example, the view persists among some black citizens that Simpson was put into double jeopardy. But Rodney King, like the Goldman and Brown families, found justice in a second trial of those who had wronged him. And second trials on different charges have been the traditional means of federal intervention against abuses of civil rights in the South. Nobody knows this better than black leaders who have kept a discerning and conspicuous silence about the Simpson case. It's unlikely they would have been silent or that the tumult could be expected to subside had the trials been perceived as unfair.
Toward fair trials, which are crucial, the country has made great strides. So much so that class can be a greater obstacle to equal justice than race. O.J. Simpson, ironically, seems to have benefited from both class and race.
This is not unusual, but is unremarked in commentary focused on second-guessing jurors and picking at the scabs of race.
President Clinton, sadly, has horned in with a suggestion that the verdict be accepted. Until he spoke, there was no notion that it wouldn't be. We should get out of the faces of jurors and let them do their work. MEMO: Mr. Morgan is a former publisher of The Virginian-Pilot.