While we understand that you consider the verdict in this case a gross miscarriage of justice, your ranting and raving about the fact that this jury was either stupid or racist only serves to demonstrate that your sense of superiority is so deeply embedded in your psyche that you consider yourselves the only genuine arbiter of truth. What makes you think that you corner the market on truth - and assuming for the moment that you do, why is it that it always seems to slip from your grasp when it comes to truth and justice for others?
This jury, unlike anyone else in the world, was uniquely positioned to apply the law in this case. Therefore, for you to denigrate their judgement - especially after having your perceptions tainted over the past year - is the height of arrogance. You say, for example, that only an ignorant jury or flat-out racists could find O.J. not guilty. Maybe you’re right in that respect - Only a jury ignorant of the publicity surrounding the case, ignorant of the play-by-play “expert analysis”, ignorant of the political spin, and ignorant of public opinion. After all, wasn’t that the reason the jury was sequestered in the first place - to avoid these influences in order to come to an objective verdict?
One of your complaints is that the jury couldn’t possibly have gone through the mountains of evidence in this case in the three hours that they deliberated. In response, I’d like to point out that it’s not necessary to go through all of the evidence to find reasonable doubt. To Arrive at reasonable doubt it’s only necessary to find one essential element of the prosecution’s case that doesn’t stand up. Relative to that point, regardless to whether one comes in thinking O.J. was guilty or not, in order to come to a guilty verdict one would have to accept the prosecution’s position that after leaving a gruesome and bloody murder scene O.J. could clean himself up, get rid of the weapon and bloody clothing, get his emotions under control, and then casually step into a limo to go to the airport - all in five minutes. If you don’t think he can do that, that’s reasonable doubt.
Further, the glove “discovered” at Rockingham also provides reasonable doubt. Pictures of the scene where the glove was located showed that there were dried leaves in that area of the grounds. It would seem that a man who had just returned from a murder as bloody as the one in question would have had blood on the bottom of his shoes. In that case, dried leaves and debris would have stuck to the bottom of his shoes, then tracked into the house. The fact that there wasn’t - and the leaves surrounding the glove were undisturbed - was cause for reasonable doubt. Therefore, those two facts alone - which could have been considered in two minutes - were sufficient to not only allow, but force the jury to come to a verdict of not guilty.
Let me give you a scenario of how the jury could have come to a verdict in even less time than it did. Let’s say that the jury walked into the jury room and the foreman suggested that they take a preliminary poll to see where they stood. Then on the basis of the preliminary poll they found to their surprise that they were close to unanimity. They then addressed the issues of concern (in this case, the driver’s testimony) and then came to a verdict. Why would it take days to do that?
In addition to being wrong about so many other things in this case, many in the White community also misinterpreted the cheering after the verdict. The cheering was misinterpreted as an indication that African-Americans only wanted O.J. freed and didn’t care anything about Ron and Nicole. On the contrary, it was precisely because we do care so much for the victims that we invested so much passion in this case. We didn’t want to believe - and we don’t want America to believe - that one of our Black heros would commit this horrible crime. Therefore, the cheers were not so much that O.J. was freed, but because he - and the Black community - were vindicated.
In addition, after being told for two hundred years that we are something less than the intellectually inclined, and after being told that we fall at the lower end of the bell curve, and after being told that our professionals are somehow a little less competent than those of others, watching Johnny Cochran take the very system that has oppressed us over the years, and then playing it like it a fiddle, was quite gratifying. It was a classic case of David slaying Goliath - combined with the hope that Cochran’s performance would represent for many of our young people a new and different definition of what it means to be a Black man. That...was why we cheered.