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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Racial Quiet Reflects Weariness Some Say Blacks Felt They’d Won 2 Of 3: Criminal, Custody Cases

San Jose Mercury News

There was no Johnnie Cochran playing the race card. There was no Mark Fuhrman lying on the witness stand about the N-word. There were no TV cameras capturing every racially charged move or utterance.

And frankly, millions of Americans of all colors no longer gave a damn.

“I’ve OD’d on O.J.,” said Bill Edwards, a black sociology professor at the University of San Francisco.

No doubt, America was still racially divided about the seemingly unending case of Orenthal James Simpson, as opinion polls showed. Most whites wanted O.J. to finally get his due, while blacks couldn’t help but notice that Simpson was being judged by a mostly white jury for a crime he’d already been acquitted of by a mostly black panel.

But reactions to the civil trial in which jurors found the former football great responsible for the death of Ronald Goldman and the battery of Nicole Brown Simpson were muted compared to last time around.

“You didn’t have a flamboyant black attorney in this case who embodied the issues,” said Oakland civil rights attorney John Burris, who is black. “This was all white men who were not in the position of arguing those issues because they did not have the understanding or the experience.”

And because the case this time involved civil, not criminal, charges, the African-American community seemed to feel that it had less stake in the outcome.

“I think people have a more volatile reaction to the criminal justice system than to the civil system because of the track record of the criminal justice system and the overrepresentation of people of color in that system,” said Kim Taylor-Thompson, a black associate professor of clinical law at New York University.

In civil cases, she said, black “people have fewer concerns. … It involves money - not liberty or lives.”

Early on, Superior Court Judge Hiroshi Fujisaki excluded former detective Fuhrman’s testimony from the murder trial, severely restricting the defense’s ability to repeat the police frame-up theory set forth by Cochran and other Simpson attorneys in the criminal trial.

Polls taken during the civil trial showed that black and white views of the Simpson case were converging, although blacks were still far more likely to believe that he was innocent.

In a January poll, 53 percent of blacks and 41 percent of all respondents said that because Simpson’s defense was not allowed to introduce the racially charged statements of former police detective Fuhrman, Simpson’s civil trial was less fair than the murder trial.

“Blacks and whites don’t understand social issues from the same vantage point,” said Felicia Pratto, a white assistant professor of psychology at Stanford University who has researched racial attitudes. “But if they’re willing to listen to each other … to go beyond the ‘those other people are nuts,’ we might come to understand the other people’s point of view somewhat and temper our differences … So the narrowing of the gap doesn’t surprise me.”

That the first verdict was debated and dissected extensively in public forums may also have contributed to a less-heated response this time around, Pratto said.

Other observers say that many blacks felt that they had already won - well, at least two out of three. Simpson won the criminal case. He won the custody battle. So, many African-Americans figured, the other side can have this one.

“I think that the impact of the racial divisiveness is such that people who feel he was acquitted and shouldn’t have been the first time are looking for a redress in this case …,” Taylor-Thompson said. “… At a lot of levels, people of color are willing to give this case to them: ‘OK, you can have this one.”’

Some African Americans said they felt that Simpson - like many other black superstars - did little for their community - even after blacks rallied to his cause after his acquittal in the criminal case.

“He was never the black people’s hero,” said Loretta Payne, a black stylist at the Giant’s barbershop in San Jose. “He was a hero to white people. They put him up there. That’s why it was more of a hurt to them when he fell.”

But Payne and others said that they still felt strongly that a second trial - and the guilty verdict returned by a non-black jury - was unjust.

“He’s still a black man, he’s still a black brother,” said Kenneth Clay, who also works at Giant’s. “They want to take his money and bring him down.”

Johnny Thompson, a black minister at Emmanuel Baptist Church, said retrying Simpson was motivated by “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”

“They’re retrying the man to even the score,” Thompson said.

Victor Ochoa, vice president of the East Bay La Raza Lawyers Association, said overwhelming evidence, not issues related to race, led to the jury’s finding.

Ochoa also felt the racial makeup of the jury did not affect the outcome.

“I think it’s unfortunate the jury was not more diverse … but I don’t think that necessarily would have changed the outcome,” he said. “Any jury that did its job should be able to reach that conclusion.”

A male caller on KGO-AM’s Bernie Ward’s radio-talk show, who identified himself as white, said, “It’s a sense of closure. I work with a lot of blacks, and I think people believe he’s responsible but people felt justified in the first verdict.”

Ward, who is white, agreed. “Both trials served us well,” he said. “The first trial threw in white people’s faces the fact that blacks have no faith in the criminal justice system. The second trial then did what many thought the first trial should have done.”