








iversity of Maryle School graduate.
The Josephites  national hi ters and residence are in a fo brownstone in the 1100 block o vert St. downtown. Their retirem dence is on Lake Avenue neai Park.
In Baltimore, there are eigl priests, 10 administrators and 1 members. Many of the order s 1: priests are in Deep South pai Texas, Louisiana and Mississipi
Most Josephite priests and are white, typically Irish-Americ major East Coast cities, but mo: seminarians are black, said W the former Josephite superior Despite the difference in r< Josephites bond with African-Ai to the extent that some even themselves as being black.
 I never thought of myself i after becoming a Josephil McManus, who still has a trac native Brooklyn, N.Y., accent. 7 of the people I worked with we I was working for black causi thought of myself as black. 
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Article 32
 
i
From Scottsboro
to Simpson
IGAIL THERNSTROM & HENRY D. FETTER IGAIL Thernstrom is a senior fellow at the Manhattan In ite and author of Whose Votes Count? HENRY D. FETTER dices law in Los Angeles.
Depressing episodes in American r
  come and go, but this one may s i  	is
the news of the verdict in the O. J- P . .
1 fresh, though a new drama has quickly tep ac  eme one. Race not crime and punishment is its goober He the long-running show that ended on the t ir te^ev js^on s Part soap, part sporting event (with an a"a> ' forgettable adits keeping score), this one is no fun at al. cheers, ages have flitted across our television screen: gs, and high fives among black crowds; o racis atwood, the white, traditionally liberal, uPwaie !ations 0,1 in which O. J. and Nicole both lived. Are we  ne? The question long a staple in the r e o
t mst now be taken seriously-	Hence of guilt ^as
A man confronted with overwhelming	happ60 aBa^ 
w gone free. It has happened before, 1	1994 this
 t, from day one a Friday evening m   aCt. a dou-15 a tale like no other. Remember the ope
e-murder suspect on a leisurely cruise, wi ^y^pters w and an armada of law-enforcement an black ghetto, Bering overhead. Simpson the Pro^^  . o League staI  ^ter of the Heisman Trophy, Nationa 00
and nationally known actor, sportscaster, and commercial spokesman was a man on a jog from the law. Along the route taken by Simpson and a long-time friend, spontaneous crowds formed, chanting  Free the Juice.  (The suspect had already become a victim.) Only at his Brentwood home was Simpson finally taken into custody. The charge was first-degree murder: His ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Ronald L. Goldman, a waiter at a neighborhood restaurant, had been found dead in the blood-spattered courtyard of Nicole s condominium. Both had been stabbed repeatedly; Nicole s throat had been slashed through to the spinal bone.
Simpson quickly assembled a self-described  Dream Team  of lawyers, with Johnnie Cochran, Los Angeles s most prominent black attorney, as lead trial counsel, backed up by a nationally renowned battery of experts. Millions of dollars were available and committed to the defense. With a judge scrupulously attentive to the rights of the accused and the desires of the defense, the trial proceeded at a leisurely pace in a courtroom dominated by Cochran. Outside there quickly gathered a caravan of television trailers, mobile studios, and souvenir sellers, dubbed  Camp 0. J.,  all of whom set up shop for the year-long stay. Business in Simpson memorabilia boomed, and the flood of bestsellers spawned by the case still shows no signs of abating.
Simpson is not the most prominent American ever to be charged with murder. (That  honor  still belongs to Vice President Aaron Burr, charged with the killing of Alexander Ham-
151

Public inters ^'e,'"6'PP'
dhors and The
5. AFRICAN AMERICANS
ilton.) And yet the trial was unique. The courtroom proceedings were televised live; in making their closing and other arguments, lead lawyers for the opposing teams often turned their gaze from the jurors to the cameras. Anyone with a computer and modem could read the daily transcripts. If print and broadcast tabloids were consumed by the case, much the same was true for National Public Radio, the New Yorker, and other  quality  media. Numerous law schools based courses on the case, although only Harvard believed that memoranda prepared by its first-term students warranted the trial judge s unsolicited attention. Every conceivable angle of the case was explored at length, including a not-uninteresting piece in a golf magazine which assessed the charges against Simpson in light of his  Jekyll and Hyde  conduct at the prominent Los Angeles country club at which he played. And, as the verdict came in, an estimated 100 million television viewers watched an audience larger than that for the first night of the Gulf War, the resignation of Richard Nixon, or the Apollo 11 moon walk.
The cult of celebrity
Race is what makes the case significant, but it was actually fame that determined much of its handling by the authorities. Although he had been charged with two brutal murders, the police made no effort to take Simpson into custody, instead, negotiating a  surrender  at a time and place of his choosing, in a manner more akin to a prosecution for insider trading than a double homicide. Then, when he violated that agreement, the officers did not intervene by force; instead, they languidly escorted Simpson to his house and watched while he sat in his car for an hour, telephoned his mom, and drank a glass of orange juice.
Once in jail, the mantle of celebrity remained firmly in place. There, Simpson was allowed a privileged regimen that lasted until public disclosure reportedly curtailed it. He was allowed to sleep later than other inmates, shower more often, exercise or watch television during more  free  hours, receive hot meals at irregular hours, enjoy unlimited visits with his girlfriend, use a special pillow, and, on weekends, receive dozens of friends, who were listed on an extraordinarily lengthy  material witness  list. On Christmas day, he was the only inmate permitted to have visitors.
Considerations of celebrity informed the formal trial proceedings as well. Prospective jurors had to complete an unprecedented 60-plus-page questionnaire in which they were asked a mass of not especially pertinent questions that ranged far beyond those necessary to elicit prior knowledge, bias, or prejudice.	 	 
Where celebrities roam, the media follows, and trial Judge Lance Ito proved more than willing to lend his presence to the hoopla. Early on, he appeared in a week-long series of television interviews. He went out of his way to welcome into his chambers such celebrity figures as Geraldo Rivera and Larry King. A number of discharged jurors became part of the
show. Appearing at press conferences and on televisic about their experiences and offering opinions about they became a regular adjunct to the proceedings in ter the verdict, jurors who lasted emerged on Opral and other shows. Money for talking was theirs for tl
Bit players in the drama attained their 15 minutes of fame, most notably Kato Kaelin, the unemployed lived in O. J. Simpson s guest house and baby-sat f After giving equivocal and inarticulate testimony Kaelin became the host of a Los Angeles radio progr reviews were quite favorable. Meanwhile, his old, pom films turned up on various cable networks.
Then too, the televised trial opened up new caree: lawyers, a notoriously frustrated group. Whereas lax have once aspired to judgeships, their star is now on that ne plus ultra of contemporary life: the talk-! They became sportscasters, recruited in droves to f stant analyses of the trial-as-Super-Bowl by a b< broadcast outlets, including E! (Entertainment) Net erwise best known for the Howard Stem Show. A the most prominent lawyer-sportscasters were elevai time status as the new hosts of regularly scheduled having nothing to do with the trial or even the notably, Gerry Spence, Leslie Abramson (defense Eric Menendez in his televised trial and perhaps the created by this still relatively novel process), and ( regular trial watchers, Greta Van Susteren and Rogt Two of the defense lawyers have found their new lebrity to be a useful vehicle for pitching screenplaj had been toiling on, without success, before the t have now also begun work on a CBS drama series, one thinks of the verdict, it is clear that at least tht had a good trial.
But what made the often tawdry spectacle that the case most truly representative of the celebriO exemplified was the lack of substance at its core, all, was Simpson? His great feats on the college ; sional gridiron were almost 20 years in the past, career had fizzled out after some embarrassing app grade-B movies, and his life as a sportscaster was it had been almost a decade since he had appearec prime-time Monday Night Football. As a corporati most notably for Hertz, he had become the prototy rity someone famous for being famous, or what C stin has called  the human pseudo-event. 
Indeed, nothing better illustrated Simpson s relai rity   than the lack of attention paid, at the time, viction for wife beating in 1989. In a culture that for the most minor peccadilloes of the truly famou passed almost without notice. And in the five year murder, the only extended mention of Simpson in geles Times was in a 1993 piece marking the twei niversary of his Heisman Trophy. It was really n< that lead prosecutor Marcia Clark had never heard until that day in 1994 when she was called by the needed help in applying for a warrant to search i
160
The race card
npson was rich and famous, and he wore his racial iden-, exceedingly lightly. He had black friends, but his life s not notable for involvement in black issues or causes, lived in a largely white neighborhood, his murdered ex-fe was white, as is his former girlfriend. The black media d largely ignored his activities in recent years. Apart from ?it part in the television miniseries  Roots,  almost two cades ago, it is hard to think of any connection between n and anything race-related. Booked for murder, however, became a racial cause.
Black defendants in criminal cases are, alas, common ough, and, most of the time, the prosecutors have the upper nd. But celebrity status shifts the balance of power. All eyes : on highly visible black defendants particularly all black es. Every move, from arrest to trial, is watched with deep spicion. And, while in an earlier era authorities could ignore : deeply felt emotions stirred by such cases, in 1995 es-cially in Los Angeles they cannot.
In the city of Rodney King, the authorities were from the tset on their racial toes. Despite the brutality of the crime, ; apparently overwhelming evidence of Simpson s guilt, his ght from arrest, and a sordid history of domestic abuse and olence, the prosecutors chose not to seek the death pen-ty. Rather than try the case in the largely white locality here Simpson lived and the crime had been committed, e Los Angeles district attorney selected a downtown nue. A conviction by a mostly white jury drawn from the :st side of Los Angeles would  lack credibility,  he pri-tely explained.
In the prosecution of Los Angeles police officers for the ating of Rodney King, the initial verdict of acquittal was wed as lacking credibility because white jurors sat in judg-ent of the beating of a black man by whites. In the Simpson so, the logic was reversed: The victims are white, the de-ndant black, but racial fairness demands (the D.A. con-lded) a heavily black jury.
The original jury consisted of six black women, two ack men, two Hispanics, one white woman, and one juror "  Ratified himself as half white and half Native Ameri-n- (No white male was selected as either a juror or alter-Alternates replaced many of those initially selected, t -suit that the final breakdown was one black man, S t black women, two white women, and one Hispanic an.
Th
tl Q6 was thus three-quarters black. Even for
