Yes, But.....

Every now and then I get the urge to re-investigate something I'd previously learned about and assessing how my age and experience has changed my perceptions about a certain static event from the past. In other words, I study things that haven't changed to see how I have changed.

So due to my nerdiness and my curiosity and my belief in the epistemological value of second looks, I found myself working through a 700 page analysis of the O.J. Simpson murder trial.

My previous sense of this case was that, just like the JFK assassination, the actors overshadowed the actions. In other words, the celebrity of the victim or the suspect served to overwhelm physical truths.

There was only one shooter and one gun found in Dallas, but because of JFK's stature, most people intuitively felt it could not possibly be that simple. There was only one person's blood found at the Simpson murder scene, but since O.J. is so nice and so rich and the LAPD is so racist, many people intuitively felt that the evidence must have been planted.

In each of these cases, all of the evidence collected pointed to one, and only one, person. In both cases, as in all cases, some of the evidence didn't make perfect sense. Why was Oswald's last shot so much more accurate than his first? How did O.J. slaughter two people with a knife and leave only and few individual drops of blood?

Some things don't make perfect sense. But that does not mean they are not true. In general, I still feel that this paradigm applies to the O.J. case. If the same evidence was brought against Joe Schmoe, a conviction would have been guaranteed. But that does not mean it would have been just.

There are two questions at play which, due to the nature of our judicial system, must be answered separately.

The first question is "did O.J. do it". The answer, were I forced to make one, is yes.

The second question is "should O.J. have been found not guilty", keeping in mind that "not guilty" is NOT the same as "innocent". The answer to that is yes, he should have been found not guilty.

There are many ways in which the Simpson case was unique. In its simplest terms, O.J. Simpson was the most famous man charged with murder in the history of this country. So what we had was something previously unseen: a man charged with murder who could actually afford the best defense available.

Most people charged with murder are poor. They are given public defenders who lack the time, resources, and expertise to adequately represent their clients even if their clients are entirely innocent.

When most people are charged with murder, the state can bring in an "expert" to explain how the defendant must be guilty. And that's usually more than enough. But O.J. could afford to hire experts of his own. And what did O.J.'s defense discover?

They discovered that the police officer who claimed to have found most of the incriminating evidence was a racist. And not the "I'd rather not live next door to black people" sort of a racist. No, Mark Fuhrman was more of a "the only good nigger is a dead nigger" sort of racist. The type of man that should have spent his life being arrested, not arresting other people.

They also discovered that Fuhrman and his partner knowingly lied to get a search warrant for Simpson's property, claiming he had fled without prior plans. So while O.J. was in Chicago, the LAPD was walking through his house, "finding" evidence.

There are several other such examples from this case. NONE of these things mean that O.J. Simpson did not butcher two people. But these thing DO mean that this man could not be found guilty in a legitimate trial, because the police planted and altered evidence. They framed a guilty man.

So the verdict in this trial was not about Simpson being innocent. It was about punishing the police and the state for their sins.

Black folks were generally elated by the verdict, while white people were generally appalled. Most observers, of course, reached for the simplest explanation for this: people side with their own race.

I don't think that adequately explains the dynamic, though. Black folks were happy with the verdict not because they necessarily identified with O.J. Simpson, who after all surrounded himself primarily with white people (including his murdered wife). If was also not because black folks don't care about white folks being butchered.

No, the reason black folks were happy with this verdict is that it was an affirmation of something that black people have experienced much more than most whites: some police ARE racists. Some police ARE criminals. Some police WILL frame people. Some people WILL beat the shit out of a defenseless man. Some police, in fact, are willing to kill.

The tragedy of this is that a guilty man may very well have gotten away with murder. The other tragedy is that the larger lesson regarding the dark side of police and prosecutors, was lost on most white folks, who still seem pre-programmed to agree with anything the police or the prosecutors say.

The largest tragedy of all, I suppose, is that it took a rich murderer going free to illustrate how easy it would be for the cops to frame a poor innocent man.