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After sober reflection, it is clear that the quick verdict in the O.J. Simpson trial offers something for almost everybody.
Bleeding-heart liberals, for instance, can celebrate that an African-American man accused of murdering two white people could gain acquittal in a city often accused of institutional racism.
Middle-of-the-road types can note that the full panoply of American justice was employed -- major investigation, aggressive prosecution and defense, public trial, unanimous jury -- and that the system worked as it was presumably supposed to work.
Contract Conservatives can also point to Simpson with pride. Here was a man who grew up poor in the projects of San Francisco. And yet, thanks to hard work and his willingness to curry favor with major corporations, he rose to the pinnacle of American success: Just like T. Cullen Davis or dozens of other wealthy murder suspects, he was able to purchase enough legal talent to get the verdict he wanted.
This epic saga will doubtless replace those old Horatio Alger tales: America, the land of opportunity, where if you work hard and play golf with corporate executives, you can climb out of poverty and rise so high that you can buy a verdict. Stay at it, kid, and you might even own a senator or two.
Actually, that's not fair. What acquitted Simpson was not the talent of his hired legal counsel, but the sins of the Los Angeles Police Department.
Even though I believe he brutally murdered Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman, I probably would have voted to acquit, based on the evidence.
Why? Mark Fuhrman, the lead detective, clearly lied on the stand when he denied using That Word any time in the past ten years. The same tapes which demonstrated that lie also had Fuhrman bragging about how he and his fellows beat suspects and fabricated evidence -- a far more serious problem than his vocabulary, although most commentators focused on That Word.
Given that, all evidence collected and processed by the Los Angeles Police Department was tainted. No jury could fairly consider it.
The jurors were left with testimony like that of the limousine driver -- evidence which pointed to Simpson, but which did not prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. They didn't have much choice but to acquit. How else could they tell the LAPD that its conduct was worse than reprehensible?
This inspires contemplation of a possible legal reform: a trial jury could also serve as a grand jury.
That is, a jury would reach a verdict on the case before it. But if, in the course of that trial, the jurors observed that other breaches of justice might have occurred, they would have the power to issue indictments.
Thus juries would have the opportunity to make statements beyond the simple guilty or not guilty, and a jury could pronounce a defendant guilty, but also charge folks with perjury or the like.
This reform seems simple enough to implement, and since our society had to put up with eight months of O.J. trial, we ought to get something out of it.
But we won't get anything so useful. What we've received
so far is public acceptance of the N-word
as a
euphemism for nigger.
The problem with euphemisms is that they eventually
become as odious as the word they were supposed to replace.
Our word whore,
for instance, derives from the Latin
word for dear,
and it began as a euphemism to
replace some offensive term, now lost to history. Son of
a bitch
was originally a polite way to call a man a
dog,
which was about as vile as you could get in
Elizabethan England.
It isn't the combination of phonemes that offends; the
offense comes from the concept represented by the word. If
the current locutions stay in use, then you can imagine, a
century hence, a black child coming home from school in
tears because some bigot called her a nword.
And not all uses are offensive. On occasion I get called
a redneck
or an environmentalist,
and the
offensiveness of the epithet depends on the source. Not
being of color, I can only guess about the effects of That
Word, but consider one usage I heard recently.
A friend, who operates a construction company, provides his employees only one paid holiday each year: Martin Luther King Day. I inquired.
He told me that I want to remind everybody in the
company that in this country, about 10 percent of the
population owns and operates everything that matters. The
other 90 percent of us are just [Nwords], no matter how our
skin is colored, and we ought to start building some
connections with each other, instead of letting politicians
and marketers split us up. Seems to me that's what King was
trying to tell us, and I don't want that message to be
forgotten.
That's not quite how Fuhrman used the word, and maybe we can grow up a little, and consider context rather than mere vocabulary.
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