Still, for all the coverage and outrage it generated, the enduring lessons of Simpson’s never-ending tale are anything but obvious. In fact, much of conventional wisdom concerning that story turns out, upon reflection, to be fiat-out wrong-myths rooted in the desire to find deep significance in a story that, unfortunately, has none; one that, at base, is depressingly banal.
The Simpson trials, especially the criminal trial, opened a serious racial breach in American society. In reality, neither the trials nor the verdicts tore the races apart. The breach the trials brought to light existed long before the murders in Brentwood-reflecting, among other things, a black-white gap in experience with and expectations of police that has been a source of friction (and occasionally violence) for decades. Whites and blacks who were normally on dose and friendly terms, however, did not suddenly become enemies during the legal proceedings. Those who saw each other as stereotypes to begin with were perhaps even more inclined after the first verdict to indulge their proclivity for bigotry; but Simpson’s trials had nothing to do with creating their prejudice. Indeed, as writer Stanley Crouch has noted, the first trial was all but an advertisement for interracial collaboration, with its racially integrated defense and prosecution teams, with its Asian-American judge and with its casual acceptance of the interracial union that lay at the heart of the tragedy.
The outcome of the two cases, with the “black jury” voting one way and the “white jury” another, represented a settling of racial accounts. It would be ridiculously naive to say that race was not a factor in either trial. It is equally simplistic, however, to see it as the only factor, and to conclude, on that basis, that some monumental racial chess game was at stake.
Obviously, the predominantly black first jury set Simpson free and the predominantly white second jury chained him to a mountain of debt. A radically altered racial mix in the jury box conceivably might have changed either result; but so many other factors were at work (new evidence, different lawyers, different burdens of proof, radically different judges) that such a conclusion would be foolhardy. Yet the temptation is so strong to see the case in merely racial terms that even those who condemn such thinking often fall into the trap. In the aftermath of the second trial, television personality Geraldo Rivera endorsed a burying of the racial hatchet. Blacks, he suggested, should declare victory in one case and whites in the other. (Talk-show host Charles Grodin, while reveling in the verdict in Simpson 2, took the truly bizarre–not to mention offensive-step of expressing sympathy for the agony African-Americans presumably were feeling.) Yet, the very notion that there could be such group victories, that blacks and whites as races won (or lost) anything by those proceedings, is an absurdity. As. John Handy, a 36-year-old black construction worker from South-Central Los Angeles, complained: “It really angers me that the white media is telling me that I am going to be upset [with the verdict finding Simpson liable] because I am black. Who gives a damn? It’s not my money.”
Also, the theory that blacks and whites come to juries with fundamentally different justice agendas is far from established fact. A much-touted study of the Center for Equal Opportunity, suggesting the possibility that black jurors were disproportionately letting black criminals go free, simply could not bear up under critical examination. Roger Parloff, who debunked the report for The American Lawyer, concluded that the study was so flawed as to constitute “junk science.” One of its most startling conclusions, that jurors favored black defendants in rape cases, he wrote, was a finding “based on a five-year-old database of five cases” and didn’t even take into account the racial composition of juries. Certainly, different jurisdictions vary in acquittal rates, and the rates in some predominantly black areas seem particularly high; but at this juncture, no one can confidently say what that means.
The Simpson saga exposed deep flaws in the American system of justice. The justice system may, in fact, be deeply flawed, but Simpson’s situation is not much of an indication of that, if for no other reason than that the Simpson case is such an aberration. It islargely because Simpson’s predicament and the cast of characters surrounding him were so out of the ordinary that they became a continuing source of fascination. Nonetheless, screams for reform of the justice system became pervasive after the first jury delivered its verdict. But changing the justice system because of the Simpson results makes roughly as much sense as changing the rules of golf because Tiger Woods hits the ball so far.
Shortly after the Brentwood murders, the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics generated numbers showing that very few men (just over 1 percent) charged with murdering their wives are acquitted. And virtually none of them are adored, glamorous celebrities with sufficient assets to justify a civil suit.
The Simpson turmoil helped us to understand the growing problem of domestic violence. Here conventional wisdom is largely right. The Simpson case certainly focused some much-needed light on the crisis of battery within families; but even in that area it very likely left people with an erroneous impression. For while murders of passion occur far too frequently, that is one area of violence, in a relative sense at least, where society seems to be making some progress. Since the mid-1960s, the proportion of all murders attributed to romantic triangles and lovers’ quarrels has dropped roughly 50 percent- in part, it must be said, because murders of other types have risen so sharply. In the last few years, however, the overall murder rate has also begun to drop.
O. J. Simpson symbolizes something larger than himself The temptation is strong to see the Simpson saga as a murky parable for our times-all the more so because the murders of Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman occurred when Americans were feeling particularly vulnerable to violence. For the last three decades, the nation has, in some respects, become a progressively scarier place. The odds of being murdered at random and the odds of the assailant’s going unpunished have risen astronomically. In 1965, according to FBI statistics, more than 90 percent of murders resulted in a suspect’s arrest. Currently, more than one third of all murderers elude apprehension, fading anonymously into the woodwork. The Simpson case-however inappropriately-be-came symbolic of the larger problem of murderers in America going unpunished. If Simpson could be convicted, many people (most of them white) felt that justice could still be done.
For many blacks, the issues were somewhat more complicated, and the Simpson symbolism more problematic. For he not only symbolized a possible killer of innocent people, but the plight of an ever-growing number of black men being carted off to prison. Given a legacy in black communities of brutal and disrespectful police, there is deep suspicion among blacks that the justice system is far from fair, and a tendency, therefore, to view the uncorroborated testimony of police with a sharply skeptical eye. Johnnie Cochran tapped into that sentiment and made Simpson-also inappropriately-into a symbol of every black man wronged by America’s system of justice. A number of people took the symbolism to heart, convincing themselves that somehow they, and all of black America, had a stake in Simpson’s fate, that somehow if Simpson could beat the forces arrayed against him, the prospect of justice in the world might be a little closer.
The problem, of course, is that Simpson as symbol simply doesn’t work-whether he is held up as a symbol of justice-system failings or of the oppression of the black male in America. His shoulders never could carry that weight; his situation was simply not that universal. In literature symbolism can lead to deeper truths; in real life it often merely leads to self-delusion. If we learn that from the Simpson case, maybe, in the end, it would have been worth our attention.
