"Not Guilty"

The Verdict of the Century?

One thing I have realized over the course of the OJ trial is that what I believe doesn't really matter. I was not a witness, nor did I hear every minute of testimony. I did see the coverage and analysis ad nauseam. What the media has jumped on is that mistaken assumption that the jury voted OJ innocent. They did not. They felt there were too many holes in the testimony to convict. "Not Guilty" is not "innocent". But our system is set up as such; if the jury says "OK" then it's over. My thinking is that in any case, we will never know what the story was; we never could. There was no handy video camera standing by this time.

So who are the winners and losers now that it's over?

The Winners

• OJ - he cannot be tried again. He became an establishment figure through the case after being a B movie actor for so long. Book deals are sure to follow, and he has several years before the Goldman-Brown civil case comes to blows. Is the Naked Gun .45 coming?
• The Dream Team - Book deals, photo-ops, more book deals, publicity -- the whole shebang. They would have lost face if a conviction was handed down. The only partial loser here was Alan Dershowitz, who had to stop excitedly typing up the appeal papers when he found out the jury acquitted.

The Losers

• The Victims and the Families - but not for the reason that one would think -- not simply because Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman are dead. They lose twice Gil Garcetti has no leads on another murderer. He said as much in the press conference after the case. Although Mr. Goldman has said he was going to make sure this never happens again, the truth is that OJ cannot be tried on these charges again. Maybe the DAs could snag him on littering charges, but certainly not on section 187a, murder.
• The LAPD - this must be the seventeenth strike on the LAPD's - we should start a new card to hold their black marks. Makes me wonder if Garcetti is going to haul the Chief of the LAPD into an office and pull a "Picket Fences" on him. I have a feeling the Iowa retirement community for LAPD cops is going to start filling up faster.

"The Verdict is not In Yet"

• The Simpson Children - as of now, the Brown family has sheltered the children, being legal guardians. But with O.J. free and clear, and intending to raise his children, there may well be a fight for custody.
• The DA's office - Marcia Clark and Chris Darden may have lost face, but they won't lose their jobs. If the defense had lost, that would have hurt their credibility. Now Marcia and our District Attorney's office friends will go back to prosecuting less publicized cases.
• The United States Justice system- until the jury speaks, we won't know why they reached that verdict. Up until that time, conjecture will burn out of control. Oprah Winfrey strained vigorously to make it a racial issue on her show only hours after the verdict, speaking for both races in an attempt to incite her audience. The media has portrayed the verdict as a racially motivated one, and until evidence from the jury is revealed, it will continue to divide.

The OJ case is not a judicial question; it delves deeply into culture. We are not truly involved. Yet we each want so much to make the issues our own when they aren't. We see race and we see wife-beating and we see frame-ups and the 'n' word. As soon as we saw the case for these things, it stopped being a question of justice. As soon as we used the case as a vehicle for bigger issues, we divorced ourselves from the jury and the courtroom. Two cases were formed and tried, and the billion-person jury trying the second one may take twenty years to reach its verdict.

Lastly, I say this is not a negative thing. It is probably far better for us to take the issues away and not the verdict. The verdict doesn't directly affect us -- the issues do. The true case for the Judicial system was two innocent people, a football star, a missing knife, and a pair of expensive gloves. Our case is racism, violence and question about our judicial system as it stands. Forget about O.J. and keep the issues at hand; one verdict cannot change them.

©Trincoll Journal, 1995.