kalikshama
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Posting in its entirety as New Yorker articles are only available during the current issue:
O.J., GEORGE ZIMMERMAN, AND THEIR LAWYERS
Was the press conference held Tuesday by lawyers who may or may not have been representing George Zimmerman, the man who shot Trayvon Martin, the most farcical in the recent history of the criminal-defense bar? Not even close, despite the sight of two lawyers pouting for the cameras about a client who confided in Fox News while failing to send them text messages. On the absurdity scale, it is dwarfed by the show staged on June 17, 1994, by O. J. Simpson’s lawyers, at which Robert Kardashian (father of Kim, Kourtney et al.) read out a supposed suicide note from Simpson, who had not yet been arrested for the murder of his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Ron Goldman, a waiter who had stopped by her house. Simpson had been told to surrender himself to the police that morning, but had gone missing; a psychiatrist hired by the defense speculated that he might have gone to the U.S.C. football field, where he had earned a Heisman Trophy, to shoot himself in the end zone. Another lawyer, Robert Shapiro, looked at the camera and begged Simpson to surrender.
Then as now, an alleged killer’s lawyers summoned the press to say that they had no idea where he was. There are other resonances, too; most significantly, in both the O. J. Simpson and Trayvon Martin stories, a homicide became a set piece in the larger, longer drama of race and the American criminal-justice system, with every aspect magnified by media exposure. For that broad reason, the Simpson case has been invoked in recent days in efforts to explain how a seventeen-year-old boy with candy in his hand ended up lying dead on the sidewalk in Florida—or, from a different perspective, why the man who shot him has been so reviled. And yet these cases are fundamentally different, to the point of being diametrically opposed. One involved a very famous man, and his televised murder trial. The other is about an unknown boy who came close to being entirely forgotten, and whether his killer should go on trial at all. Their differences—and the way they have nevertheless been grouped together—are more instructive than their similarities.
There are some cultural constants in the pictures of 1994 and now. Jeffrey Toobin, in his reconstruction of the press conference in “The Run of His Life,” his book on the Simpson case, notes that the defense team’s hunger for publicity was made worse, in Kardashian’s case, by his resentment at seeing his former wife, Kris, with her new husband, Bruce Jenner, every time he turned on the television, “in a frequently played infomercial for a thigh-exercising device.” (Kardashian died in 2003, too early, sad to say, to witness his daughter’s relationship with another U.S.C. Heisman winner, Reggie Bush, or her briefer marriage.) The pandemonium that followed the lawyers’ press conference—a multi-hour slow-motion car chase, with O.J. in a white Bronco with a friend and a gun—proves, too, that we Americans don’t need any Twitter for a real-time, all-eyes, mass viewing-and-gossip spectacle. We’re just good at that.
And our national tendency toward amateur criminology has been, once again, engaged. The Skittles of the O.J. case was the cup of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream Nicole had with her. (The flavor became a point of contention in determining the timeline—was it only partially melted, or did it just appear that way because of cookie-dough lumps?) In neither case, however, is there ultimately much mystery about the identity of the killer. Zimmerman’s lawyers managed, however sputteringly, to affirm that he will, one way or the other, make a claim of self-defense. Simpson was acquitted in a criminal trial that became a carnival, but found responsible for the deaths in a civil suit. His own lawyers thought he was guilty from the start.
Both the Simpson and Martin cases also show the press as its fine and its fallible. How harmful was NBC News’s editing of the tape of the conversation between George Zimmerman and the police, which made it sound like he was volunteering that Martin was black, to explain why he thought that he looked suspicious, rather than answering a question about his race? Apart from its pure wrongness, the edit has the potential to be an enduring point of anger and confusion. (There were a lot of those in the O.J. trial, from the comments of the detectives to the clumsiness of the crime lab to Kato Kaelin.) Meanwhile, the local Florida press, which picked up the case—it was, as William Finnegan has written, the devotion of his parents that saved it from being lost in the memory hole—and journalists like the Times’ Charles Blow, who helped bring it to national attention, have provided real public services.
Blow explicitly connected the Simpson and Martin cases—while noting that “the cases are miles apart in the details and circumstances”—in a column this week on one truly striking parallel: the way that race affects how people view the case. A USA Today Gallup poll found that while seventy-two per cent of black respondents thought that Zimmerman was definitely or probably guilty, only thirty-two percent of whites did. (Sixty-one per cent said that they didn’t know enough, or had no opinion.) As Blow points out, Gallup polls during the Simpson trial revealed a similar breach.
Race, then, has mattered in both cases. But to what end? Here, again, the differences are what matter most.
Simpson had a long history with Nicole—she was his wife, the mother of two of his children—and he was a familiar star, instantly recognizable from the football field, movies, rental-car commercials. Whatever the actual quality of our insight, we thought we knew him; he thought he knew her, and she him. As Toobin writes, Simpson’s lawyers made a deliberate decision to bring race into the courtroom—belatedly, artificially, depressingly effectively—because they had nothing else going for them. It was a disco ball of discord, rolled in to distract, without illuminating. (If one simply wanted to explain why Nicole was dead, gender and domestic violence would be the right rubrics.) The crime itself was one of intimacy. In contrast, one of the central questions in the Trayvon Martin case is what happened—what happens—in an encounter between strangers. It forces us to confront the ways race can still be used to conjure up a character, and a whole frightening narrative, out of nothing.
This doesn’t apply only to Zimmerman, whose motives and moves have yet to be sorted out, but also to law enforcement. The Los Angeles police and district attorney’s office first approached O. J. Simpson as an old friend, then later as a big catch; they were, at turns, remarkably solicitous and opportunistically grandstanding—conscious, either way, of how his celebrity might benefit them.
In Sanford, the police didn’t even really look at Trayvon—didn’t bother to find out who might be waiting at home for an unarmed child—until they were made to. His parents had to come find him, after a long, silent night. The extent to which his blackness made the police careless or lazy is not an idle or a gratuitously divisive question. It is one that needs to be asked.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/04/o-j-simpson-trayvon-martin.html#ixzz1rlhqCngc
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Speaking of quitting, Zimmerman's attys bail - 
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