[Socialism Today, No 3, November 1995, p. 6]
The vast media coverage of the OJ Simpson trial sucked viewers and readers into discussion within the terms presented in the court soap opera – did he, or did he not, do it? Many got confused about where their sympathies lay in answering that question.
On the one hand, here was an apparently jealous husband and confessed violent abuser, whose wife turns up dead. On the other, here is yet another black man being tried by the notoriously racist LA police department, with a key prosecution cop caught on tape uttering racist abuse.
“Entering into the terms of dispute as they were presented in the court itself is pointless”.
Entering into the terms of dispute in the court itself is pointless. The US ‘justice’ system is incapable of rendering justice at any level. Legal process in the US is about money, class, power and race. Its procedures are grotesque, locking up tens of thousands of poor blacks for long periods and organising the judicial murder of alleged murderers. Against this background, the last thing the trial was about was whether or not OJ Simpson killed his wife and her lover.
What did the trial reveal? First, that money buys judicial clout. Everyone knows that Simpson’s acquittal was down to the several million dollars spent on the ‘dream team’ of lawyers. If he had been poor the case would have been over rapidly and he would probably have been convicted. Key defence lawyer Johnny Cochran has been involved in a series of high profile cases, defending Michael Jackson and Marlon Brando’s son, utilising batteries of lawyers and investigators to get them good results.
Second, the death sentence is reserved for the poor and oppressed. At an early stage, the prosecution decided not to press a charge which carried the death penalty.
Third, the LA police department is racist. Any American who didn’t know that, especially after the videoed brutalisation of Rodney King, has been living on another planet. The LA police department is racist, as are all US police departments, because American capitalism is racist to the core. Young black American men, brought before courts on drugs, robbery or violence charges, rarely get a ‘trial’ at all. In order to process their workloads, most big-city judges insist on a plea-bargain. The prosecution accepts a lesser charge in return for a guilty plea. Defendants know that to refuse the plea-bargain is to face the judge’s wrath and a huge sentence.
Sentences are incredibly harsh – robberies can result in ten to 15 years; a first bust on drugs charges will typically pull down a 3-5 year sentence. This is topped off in California by the ‘three strikes and out’ system – whereby someone convicted three times of felonies automatically gets life imprisonment – and by the obscenity of the death sentence. The result is a huge prison population of more than one million, of whom 60% are black or Hispanic. The response of the US ruling class to black unemployed youth is to brutalise them and lock them up.
Many US liberals, for example the editor of the liberal Democrat magazine New Republic and Nation, complained bitterly about Johnny Cochran’s use of the ‘race card’ to defend Simpson, as if it was ‘unfair’ to raise the deep-going racism of the LAPD in the courtroom. The racism of the police was not the issue, they argue. That viewpoint is incredibly naive. The racism of the police and legal system, as well as its class nature, is entirely the point.
Court-room drama is the stuff of mythology in Western societies. Endless TV series and films paint a glamorous picture of lawyers and the power of the legal system to right wrongs. In reality lawyers in capitalist society are for the most part utterly cynical and reactionary, and paid a fortune for the privilege. And in the end, the idea of a just legal system in an unjust society is a fiction. US capitalism is characterised by its huge disparities of wealth and the depth of its institutionalised racism – and by the brutality of its criminal justice system and prisons. While one rich and famous black man has been acquitted, tens of thousands of poor and unemployed black Americans will continue to be found guilty as charged. In the end, it is being poor, black and unemployed that they are charged with.
Phil Clarke
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