The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour

MR. MAC NEIL: Good evening. I'm Robert MacNeil in New York.

MR. LEHRER: And I'm Jim Lehrer in Washington. After our summary of the news this Tuesday, we'll explore the legal and other impacts of the O.J. Simpson "not guilty verdict. NEWS SUMMARY

MR. MAC NEIL: "Not guilty." The jury in the O.J. Simpson double murder case found the ex-football player not guilty of killing his ex-wife, Nicole, and her friend, Ronald Goldman. The jury rendered its verdict yesterday, after only three hours in actual deliberations. The verdict remained sealed overnight and was read by the court clerk, Deirdre Robinson, while the courtroom television camera was trained on Simpson.

JUDGE ITO: All right. Mrs. Robertson. All right, Mr. Simpson, would you please stand and face the jury. Mrs. Robertson.

MRS. ROBERTSON: Superior Court of California, County of Los Angeles, in the matter of People of the State of California versus Orenthal James Simpson, Case Number BA-097211: "We the jury in the above-entitled action find the defendant, Orenthal James Simpson, not guilty of the crime of murder in violation of Penal Code Section 187-A, a felony upon Nicole Brown Simpson, a human being, as charged in count one of the information. Superior Court of the State of California, County of Los Angeles, in the matter of the People of the State of California versus Orenthal James Simpson: "We the jury in the above-entitled action find the defendant, Orenthal James Simpson, not guilty of the crime of murder in violation of Penal Code Section 187-A, a felony upon Ronald Lyle Goldman, a human being, as charged in count two of the information." "We the jury in the above-entitled action further find the special circumstance that the defendant, Orenthal James Simpson, has in this case been convicted of at least one crime of murder of the first degree and one or more crimes of murder of the first or second degree to be not true." Signed, this 2nd Day of October, 1995, Juror 230. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is this your verdict so say you one, so say you all?

JURY: Yes.

MR. MAC NEIL: Judge Lance Ito ordered Simpson released forthwith. He was transported in a sheriff's department van which drove him to his home on Rockingham Drive in the exclusive LA suburb of Brentwood. He was met by his friend and former teammate, Al Cowlings. News helicopters followed the van, a scene reminiscent of Simpson's freeway chase in a white Ford Bronco the day he was arrested more than 15 months ago. Jim.

MR. LEHRER: Simpson's mother, Eunice, described the last 24 hours waiting for the verdict to be announced. She spoke at a news conference.

EUNICE SIMPSON: I was always in prayer. I knew that my son was innocent, and I had the support of so many people all over the world. And I know that prayer of the righteous prevaileth much. And I believed in that.

MR. LEHRER: The father of murder victim Ronald Goldman repeatedly criticized defense attorneys during the trial. Fred Goldman spoke at a news conference held by the prosecutors.

FRED GOLDMAN: This prosecution team didn't lose today. I deeply believe that this country lost today. Justice was not served.

MR. LEHRER: Los Angeles Police Chief Willie Williams said his department would not reopen the murder investigation. He said the verdict did not mean there was another murderer. Juror Brenda Moran told reporters the panel did the right thing, adding, "We were there for nine months. We didn't need another nine months to decide." President Clinton watched the verdict on television at the White House. He then issued a statement saying the American system of justice requires respect for the jury's decision. We'll have much more on this story right after the News Summary.

MR. MAC NEIL: Also today, the President apologized to the unwitting victims of human radiation tests carried out by the government between 1944 and 1974. He promised to seek monetary compensation for some of the victims. Mr. Clinton made the apology after receiving a 900-page report from the advisory panel which investigated the secret tests. The panel said some 4,000 experiments were purposely concealed to avoid potential liability and public embarrassment. The President spoke at a White House ceremony.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: While most of the tests were ethical by any standards, some were unethical not only by today's standards but by the standards of the time in which they were conducted. They failed both the test of our national values and the test of humanity. The duty we owe to one another to tell the truth and to protect our fellow citizens from excesses like these is one we can never walk away from. Our government failed in that duty, and it offers an apology to the survivors and their families, and to all the American people who must, must be able to rely upon the United States to keep its word to tell the truth and to do the right thing.

MR. MAC NEIL: The President said he would name a national bioethics advisory commission to shape research policy and prevent future medical abuses. He also ordered a government-wide review of all research involving human subjects. Later today, Mr. Clinton vetoed a spending bill that appropriated money to run the Congress. White House Spokesman Mike McCurry said the President would not approve the legislature's budget until Congress completes work on 13 pending appropriations bills.

MR. LEHRER: The United Nations today accused the Bosnian government of violating the exclusion zone around Sarajevo. A UN spokesman said four heavy weapons were fired from inside the 12 1/2 mile zone at rebel Serb positions. He called the action outrageous. NATO air strikes forced the Serbs to withdraw their weapons from around the Bosnian capital in September. The president of Macedonia survived an assassination attempt today. A remote-controlled car bomb exploded as President Kiro Gligorov's car drove by. His driver was killed, and three by-standers were seriously wounded. Doctors said the 78-year-old president had suffered head injuries but was conscious. Police arrested two suspects. They have not been identified. Macedonia seceded peacefully from Yugoslavia in 1991.

MR. MAC NEIL: Hurricane Opal is simmering in the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. A hurricane watch has been issued for the Gulf Coast region from Louisiana to the Florida Panhandle. National Hurricane Center officials said Opal is heading North, with top sustained winds of 100 miles an hour. The storm is expected to intensify and reach the U.S. mainland around noon tomorrow. Heavy rains brought on by Opal have caused extensive flooding in Southern Mexico. The storm is being blamed for the deaths of at least ten people. Twenty others are reported missing. Mexican officials said more than 100,000 residents have been evacuated from their homes. And that concludes our summary of the news. Now it's on to the O.J. Simpson verdict and its impact. FOCUS - JUDGMENT DAY

MR. MAC NEIL: After 265 days of sequestration, 133 days of testimony, 126 witnesses, 857 exhibits, 433 motions, more than 50,000 pages of transcript, it took less than four hours for ten women and two men to determine that O.J. Simpson was not guilty in the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. We devote the rest of the program to this remarkable case that has obsessed much of the nation for a year and a half. We begin with this report by Correspondent Jeffrey Kaye of public station KCET in Los Angeles.

JEFFREY KAYE, KCET-Los Angeles: An obviously relieved O.J. Simpson clutched members of his defense team as jurors confirmed their verdicts. Ron Goldman's sister sobbed as the jurors spoke. Nicole Brown's family looked on blankly. Simpson's son, Jason, cradled his head in his hands. Outside the courthouse, a crowd of O.J. Simpson supporters cheered wildly. [cheering] Simpson thanked the jury of ten women and two men, which included nine blacks. They announced through the judge they would not provide interviews to the press. Judge Lance Ito warned them that the media would be eager to track them down.

JUDGE ITO: The news media will probably seek you out at your home, or at your place of business. And I would implore that the news media act responsibly to avoid harassing you or identify you without your consent, or otherwise causing you concern.

MR. KAYE: The Simpson defense team and family praised God for the "not guilty" verdicts. Jason Simpson read a statement from his father.

JASON SIMPSON, O.J. Simpson's Son: "I'm relieved that this part of the incredible nightmare that occurred on June 12, 1994, is over. My first obligation is to my young children, who will be raised the way that Nicole and I had always planned. My second obligation is to my family and to those friends who never wavered in their support. But when things have settled a bit, I will pursue as my primary goal in life the killer or killers who slaughtered Nicole and Mr. Goldman."

MR. KAYE: Attorney Johnnie Cochran attributed the verdicts to a prosecution case that could not prove Simpson had the time to commit the killings.

JOHNNIE COCHRAN, Simpson's Lawyer: If you didn't believe the time line, if you didn't believe that O.J. Simpson had enough time to commit this crime, that he couldn't go upstairs, change clothes, bathe, throw away all the clothes, the gun, the knife, the weapon, the shoes and all that stuff, Ms. Clark gave him five minutes to do all that. You think about that. Think about that reasonably, and then tie that into the circumstantial evidence. Is that reasonable?

MR. KAYE: This afternoon, news organizations which had been encamped across the street from the courthouse fanned out across the city to try to find jurors who could explain their verdicts. Defense Attorney Cochran has his own explanation as to whether or not race played a part in their decision.

JOHNNIE COCHRAN: This stuff about playing a race card is preposterous! It would be malpractice if a man has racist views in a case and a lawyer doesn't pursue that. Anybody who says that doesn't know how to try cases, doesn't know anything about anything. So you have to pursue it, because that's your job. So they introduced Fuhrman, and we dealt with it.

MR. KAYE: Emotions were high when prosecutors and members of the victims' families assembled. Deputy District Attorney Christopher Darden was unable to complete his thoughts.

CHRISTOPHER DARDEN, Deputy District Attorney: I accept that verdict. Uh--we came here in search of justice. You will have to be the judges, I expect, as to whether or not any of us found it today. But I'm not bitter, and I'm not angry. But I'd also like to thank the lawyers on our prosecution team. I am honored to have--[pause - leaving room] --

MR. KAYE: LA District Attorney Gil Garcetti said he was angered by the verdicts which he said were also triggered by emotion.

GIL GARCETTI, Los Angeles District Attorney: We are--all of us- -profoundly disappointed with the verdict. We want to hear from the jurors before we make any other comments concerning their decision today. But it was clear--at least it is to me and I think other members of the prosecution team--that this was an emotional trial, and apparently their decision was based on emotion that overcame the reason.

MR. KAYE: Prosecutor Marcia Clark urged the public not to lose faith in the system, and she said her office had done its best.

MARCIA CLARK, Deputy District Attorney: Everyone here has put in 110 percent, given their all, for everyone, for justice, for the families of the victims, in the effort to see that the lives of Ron and Nicole were not thrown away.

MR. MAC NEIL: Some perspective now on the verdict and the impact this trial will have, if any, on the criminal justice system. We're joined now by four law professors and a district attorney. John Langbein teaches at Yale University, Patricia Williams at Columbia University, Kathleen Sullivan at Stanford University, and Susan Estrich at the University of Southern California. Jeanine Pirro is a former judge, district attorney for Westchester County, New York. Susan Estrich, was this a good day for justice in America?

SUSAN ESTRICH, USC Law School: [Los Angeles] I don't know. I guess that depends on your perspective. I wasn't very surprised by the verdict, but I was disappointed. And my great fear, quite frankly, is that too much will be read into this case and this verdict. I mean, I'd never seen anything like the media circus we've had in Los Angeles over the Simpson case. And my fear is that we're going to try to draw lessons from a case that is absolutely unlike anything that has come before or come since. I suppose if there's any lesson it's that we shouldn't expect the criminal justice system to solve the problems of racial division in our society.

MR. MAC NEIL: Kathleen Sullivan, this trial was watched all over the world. Should Americans be proud of the system others have been seeing?

KATHLEEN SULLIVAN, Stanford Law School: [Stanford] Well, a lot of people who agree with this verdict will say he was an innocent man and he was framed. And a lot of people who disagree will say he did it, and he got away with it because he was a rich celebrity. But I think what the jury said is something much more complex, and it gives us reasons for a mixed message about the American justice system. I think what this verdict might have said is it doesn't matter so much whether he did it, because the state was the one that was on trial here. The state was on trial by the defense, and it was found guilty of racism in the police force and the danger that the police had put themselves above the law, searching without a warrant, being casual with evidence, not playing by the rules. And that may be a very important message. The message that the American criminal justice system may flout the Constitution, may flout people's individual rights is an important message. It's a message that we've seen in other contexts, a message that came out of the beating of Rodney King, a message that came out of the Warren Christopher Report studying LAPD in the wake of that incident. But the real question is: Was the jury the right messenger for that message? Maybe the courtshave rolled back defendants' rights. Maybe our system has ignored the danger to black men in the streets of Los Angeles at the hands of the police, but for the jury to try to say all that in a verdict of guilt or innocence may be to confuse the issues of truth and justice. And the danger is that there may be backlash that hurts both, backlash both in the criminal justice system, as Prof. Estrich says, a rollback of defendants' rights, an over-response in which celebrity cases make bad law, a rollback of unanimous juries which are basic to our system, a rollback of jury selection rights defendants now enjoy. And if that happens, the next time a black kid gets picked up on the streets of Los Angeles, he's not going to get the benefit of what the jury was saying in this case. And there may be a backlash too in terms of racial polarization in society, a backlash against affirmative action. And if those are the results of this trial, then the defense may have won the battle but may well lose the war.

MR. MAC NEIL: Do you see, Patricia Williams, a danger of a backlash from this verdict?

PATRICIA WILLIAMS, Columbia Law School: I do. I think that there were actually two trials going on here. One was the trial of public opinion and one was that went on in the courtroom before a sequestered jury. And the extent to which the media coverage of this made it--sort of tested our notion of what a public trial is and, and while we certainly want public scrutiny of the court system, the extent to which the boundary between the inflamed public passions which are the essence of vigilante justice against which the trial system was supposed to protect, that boundary got broken down a little bit, I think, and required not just a sequestration of the jury but literally almost an imprisonment of a jury system in, in ways that, again, I think call into question our--not just the jury system but the relationship between the notion of a public trial and, and the procedures of trial, itself, that we haven't seen perhaps since the Sam Shepherd case, to use an example, that perhaps takes it a little bit out of the racial cult. And this is not just about race but about the spectacularization of trials.

MR. MAC NEIL: Spectacularization. Yeah. John Langbein, is this a good day for justice in America?

JOHN LANGBEIN, Yale Law School: This is a terrible day for justice in America. This was a transparently easy case of overwhelming evidence, and what you saw was the ability of a very wealthy defendant to use his money to hire the adversary tricksters, to bring in the slippery witnesses, cast the doubt, do the abusive cross-examination, do the adversary tricks that a rich guy gets to do to manipulate the outcome in our system.

MR. MAC NEIL: You mean, the message is that this is not the kind of justice that people without that kind of money can buy or afford or receive, is that--

MR. LANGBEIN: Absolutely. It's so important for the American public to understand two things about the Simpson trial. One is that what you saw on the air really happens; that is to say, when you've got the money you can get your Johnnie Cochrans and your Henry Lees and all the other characters who can get in there and create doubt when it really doesn't exist. That's for the rich guys. But it's very important to understand that that represents one or two percent of the cases. Those are the ones that go to trial. For all the rest of us, for shrimps like Langbein, if I were accused of anything, I would wind up being plea-bargained in a system in which my colleague here essentially has complete power over me with--in an almost no-safeguard system.

MR. MAC NEIL: Do you agree with that, Judge Pirro? Has that been your experience?

JEANINE PIRRO, Westchester County [NY] District Attorney: What I believe is that this trial has tremendous ramifications for all of us. As a prosecutor, this is the kind of case that will impact my job in the assistant DA's and my office and around the country for years. The seeds of mistrust have been planted. There are those who believe as a result of this trial that racism exists in all law enforcement agencies, when the reality is that police officers put their lives on the line every day of the week to protect us. I am concerned for victims of domestic violence. I am concerned for those victims who believe now or have the perception that the system cannot help them, that battered women who are caught in domestic violence situations will be afraid to come forward for fear that no one will help them and that a defendant can get away with it, for whatever reason, but get away with it for reasons that are based not on the evidence, not on the facts, but on some other social issue.

MR. MAC NEIL: Susan Estrich, what is your comment on what we've just heard, that women--and this was a fear expressed by the--by the DA in his press conference today--that victims of domestic violence would be--particularly women--would be afraid to come forward.

MS. ESTRICH: Nicole Brown's worst fear was that her husband would kill her and that he would get away with murder, and if you look at the evidence as I do--and I have to agree with John Langbein-- I think this was on the evidence an overwhelming case--it looks like Nicole Brown's worst fear came true. Now, I think it's important for all of us to emphasize that this is not a typical case, that there is help available, and the like. But the bottom line is we've got to stop letting everybody get away with murder. I mean, you know, we have so many cases in which women come forward and say, I killed my husband, I had no choice, he was abusing me. What do we say then? We have cases--we had the Rodney King case here two or three years ago--where the cops came forward and quite frankly, they got away with, if not murder, then a terrible beating. I mean, I think the only way we end up living together, whether it's women and men or blacks and whites or across the racial and gender divide is if we all live by the same set of rules that says that nobody gets away with murder and that the job of the jury is not to send messages about corrupt police departments, about abusive spouses. We've got the Menendez boys still on trial down the street playing the abusive parents game. The job of juries ought to be just to find the facts and apply the law, not to solve these much larger social problems which we need political leadership to address. We've got a black police chief here in Los Angeles. We've got a black president of the Police Commission here in Los Angeles. We didn't need this jury to send the message. We need to resolve those problems separately and let juries do the job of guilt and innocence.

MR. MAC NEIL: Judge Pirro.

JUDGE PIRRO: Until we speak to these jurors, we will not know the reason that they acquitted this defendant. It's one of three options; either jury nullification, where they believe that the people proved the evidence in the case, that the defendant was guilty, but for some other larger social issue, they made the decision to acquit. They may believe that the defendant was probably guilty but the people didn't prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. Or the third scenario is they may believe that he is clearly not guilty. And until we speak to these jurors, we don't know, and we can't know how to read their verdict.

MS. ESTRICH: But what we do know from every single public opinion poll, and what I know from spending a year on the radio here in Los Angeles every week talking to people is that the racial divide is huge, and that the way I looked at this evidence as a woman and as a white woman in particular was completely different than the way most blacks in the city looked at the evidence. I just returned from a class at USC where it was right along racial lines, who thought he was guilty, who thought he was innocent. It isn't just the jurors who made this judgment, as others have pointed out. It's the public as well.

MR. MAC NEIL: Patricia Williams, it's--in the past and not very recent past and maybe in the present still--it's been impossible for a black man, virtually impossible for a black man charged with killing a white woman to be acquitted. So what does this verdict say about where we've come in that--or does it say anything about that?

MS. WILLIAMS: I don't know what this verdict says. I mean, I--we have not yet talked to the jury. I have heard nothing coming out of the jurors' mouths just that. And that's why I think I need to reinforce, based on what Prof. Estrich just said, what she said is, we know that there are great racial divides from public opinion polls and from classes. That's why I say this trial is being handled on two levels. That's the trial of public opinion about this case. That's not what happened in this jury room. And it shouldn't be forgotten that this was an interracial jury. They came back in record time with a guilty of not--a verdict of "not guilty." So something else has happened in the jury room.

MR. MAC NEIL: And an African-American prosecutor, who has been vilified a lot and, and threatened and everything for prosecuting O.J. Simpson.

MS. WILLIAMS: Again, I think that the sense of almost free- floating angst about wanting something to be done about two murders is what always happens in the wake of an acquittal. "Not guilty" means either that they got the wrong person, or that somebody is, is going free who might have done it. But, again, the process--what serves justice is to put the prosecution to its burden. It shouldn't be forgotten what trials are about, which is that they have to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.

JUDGE PIRRO: And that is an incredibly difficult burden for us, especially when the seeds of distrust and mistrust have been planted, as they have been here. We as prosecutors face an incredible burden of proving beyond a reasonable doubt. Now, within this frame of reference and even though it's only one case, the whole--the whole country views it as a frame of reference.

MR. MAC NEIL: The seeds of doubt were planted, but were they irresponsible seeds? If you'd been on the defense team, John Langbein and you had a witness and you knew what was known about Ronald Mark Fuhrman, would you not have used those--used that information to the hilt?

MR. LANGBEIN: I'm not critical of questioning the credibility of Fuhrman. I don't think that's the black spot here. I think the disgraceful behavior of the defense in this case was from the earliest point hatching this idea of a plot on the part of the Los Angeles Police Department to scatter the defendant's blood samples around at the scene of the crime and also to--to do it again, to scatter the victims' blood samples at the defendant's home. Now, this plot wouldhave had to have been hatched in a few minutes by people who've never worked together for no particular motive with the threat of awesome sanctions if they are detected, including federal as well as state sanctions and federal investigation against the background of the Rodney King outcome. It's preposterous that this plot would have been launched, and, therefore, what you have is willful prevarication by the defense. Put differently, what you're seeing is that the defense in this case saw no obligation whatsoever to the truth. It was combat, not truth; trickery, not truth.

MS. ESTRICH: But that's the way the system works.

JUDGE PIRRO: In addition to that, when Johnnie Cochran talks to this jury and says, "I don't care what the evidence is, if you vote to convict, you're part of the conspiracy," the message there is: ignore the facts, base this decision on anything other than the evidence.

MR. MAC NEIL: Kathleen Sullivan, what is your comment on the tactics that we've just heard John Langbein excoriate?

MS. SULLIVAN: Two points about the defense. First, this is not just a case about money and rich lawyers whose high-flown rhetoric bamboozled the jury. Their rhetoric couldn't have worked with this jury unless it resonated, unless it called on some mistrust that even public employees of lesser means could relate to. So it isn't just about money. It was about race, that strategy. And second, I don't think the solution here is to roll back on defense lawyers or the assertion of civil liberties or the role of defense lawyers in being adversaries against the state. We need those protections historically in America. We're not France; we're not Germany. We are a very heterogeneous culture. We have many different kinds of people, many different races living together in this country. And unless we have strong rules about civil liberties and civil rights, we can't all live together. So I don't think it was just about money, but I don't think the solution is just to stop defense lawyers from doing what they did. What we need to do is--

MS. ESTRICH: It shouldn't have worked.

MS. SULLIVAN: --make sure the juries can reach the truth, because they trust the system.

MR. MAC NEIL: Would you say, Kathleen Sullivan--and then I'll move on to the others--would you say, on balance, this, this case has corrupted the system or has served it by exposing various flaws?

MS. SULLIVAN: Well, I hope that in the long run it will serve the system. If the message gets out that we've got to make people trust the police, we've got to have courts and prosecutors and police forces do their job in making the community trust the way the system works, trust that constitutional rights and liberties are being protected, then I hope for a better day in which juries can simply address the truth and not have to send out any other kind of social message.

MR. MAC NEIL: Corrupted the system, or served it, Patricia Williams?

MS. WILLIAMS: Certainly not this case alone. I think one has to be--have one's head in the sand to, to divorce Mark Fuhrman's testimony from the history of the Los Angeles Police Department, which has been a vivid one around police corruption, from what's going on in many other cities during the course of this trial, from Los Angeles to the Mullen Commission indictments in Harlem and the Bronx in New York to Philadelphia.

MR. MAC NEIL: A recent case in Philadelphia.

MS. WILLIAMS: To Philadelphia. And, again, I think that those signal not just news items but also very different experiences of different communities. And it's testament perhaps to the sad legacy of segregation, of residential segregation, in particular I think that a large number of blacks have very different experiences with some, not all, of the police.

MR. MAC NEIL: Let me ask you in the few minutes that remain, addressing yourself to questions of how juries are selected and used by the court, TV in the courtroom, how do you think--what effect do you think this trial is going to have, John Langbein?

MR. LANGBEIN: TV in the courtroom has been vindicated. Those television cameras have been a godsend, finally showing the American public how perverse our trial procedure is and the level of trickery and truth-defeating practice that we tolerate in these trials, so it's been a blessing.

MR. MAC NEIL: Let's just go around on that before we get to the jurors, for a moment. Susan Estrich, TV in the courtroom and what effect this trial will have.

MS. ESTRICH: You'll see less and less TV in the courtroom. I think, there's--part of the backlash will be--and we've already started to see it in a number of high-profile cases--judges saying, I don't want to be the next Lance Ito, and even worse, I don't want to have the next Johnnie Cochran in front of me. I think, unfortunately or fortunately, we'll see less and less TV in the courtroom and, again, that will be one of the "lessons" from a case that bears no relationship to anything else.

MR. MAC NEIL: Judge Pirro, less TV in the courtroom?

JUDGE PIRRO: Well, I think that I've always believed in cameras in the courtroom to the extent that a trial is a public process, and cameras are nothing more than a reflection of the technological age within which we live; however, there is no question that the cameras in this courtroom prolonged the trial. Both sides played to the cameras. I believe the judge played to the camera, as well. I think that had the cameras not been in there, then things might have certainly been shorter. I also think--

MR. MAC NEIL: A different verdict?

JUDGE PIRRO: I don't know if there would have been a different verdict. The jury decides based upon the facts, and I still trust them. But what I also think is that this--by cameras being in the courtroom, whatever the verdict was, as a public, the American people could say, we know what happened, we saw what happened, this didn't go on behind closed doors.

MR. MAC NEIL: Already in other trials recently, quite a few other trials, cameras have been excluded. Patricia Williams, do you see this coming as a trend?

MS. WILLIAMS: I would be sorry to see cameras excluded across the board. I actually think what we need are more cameras in more courtrooms in the more ordinary cases. For example, a camera in the courtroom of a gentleman who was arrested or a man who was arrested the same day that O. J. Simpson was, two weeks later, he was sentenced, convicted, and in jail for life. And I think that the, the extent to which the for-profit edge of this particular trial, the amount of capital, business that was being generated by the following of this trial, allows for an exceptional case to be generalized. And that would be very unfortunate if it became the basis for informing our public policy.

MR. LANGBEIN: May I join Pat on that. It is very important to understand that what you're seeing in the O.J. case really happened, and it's every bit as horrible as you see, with excessive safeguard in this area for defendants. But when you get into the plea-bargaining process by which 98 percent of the cases are processed in most large urban areas, what you will see is a world of almost no safeguard in which people are herded through like cattle, in which there are almost no investigative resources available to defense counsel and so on, and that doesn't photograph very well, because you don't have Johnnie Cochran walking around. And it just doesn't get on the TV set. I wish it did. Pat's absolutely right.

MR. MAC NEIL: We're going to have to leave it there, ladies and gentleman, Ladies and Prof. Langbein. Thank you.

MR. LEHRER: The Simpson trial was more than an exercise among lawyers about justice and the legal system, of course. And we look at some of the other fallouts from it now, beginning with this report from Charlayne Hunter-Gault.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: Here in New York, as in other cities, it was one of those the-day-the-earth-stood-still kind of days as people from all walks of life waited for the O.J. Simpson verdict. The crossroads of the world, Times Square, temporarily became a huge pedestrian mall as traffic came to a grinding halt, all eyes on the giant screen. Downtown, workers from the financial district squeezed into a sports bar for a not-business-as- usual moment. Even in the nation's capitol, the business of government was put on "hold." News conferences of Senators and one former Secretary of State promoting his memoirs were postponed or cancelled altogether, while cabinet members and the State Department briefing on the state of the world were scheduled for earlier. No one wanted to compete with the verdict in this historic double-murder trial. And most wanted to be where they could see it. Howard University made this possible for its students, moving televisions into an auditorium. At an appliance store in Baltimore, a law school in Chicago, everyone was glued to their TV's. And at the moment the verdict was read there were shouts of jubilation and relief-- [cheering and shouting] as well as stares of shock and disbelief.

YOUNG WHITE WOMAN: I'm disgusted. I mean, there was too much evidence against him. I just, I don't see how they got a reasonable doubt out of that.

YOUNG BLACK MAN: Whether he was guilty or not, there's a question, but as far as whether there was reasonable doubt, it was evident by--just the fact that they brought his blood to the scene of the crime. I think he should have been found "not guilty."

YOUNG WHITE MAN: Well, from the evidence that was presented, I think he was guilty.

SECOND YOUNG WHITE MAN: First degree for Nicole and second degree for Ron, definitely.

YOUNG WHITE MAN: Yeah. That's what I believe.

SECOND YOUNG WHITE MAN: He got away with a big crime, and it's just not good. It doesn't show the people justice.

MIDDLE-AGED BLACK MAN ON STREET: I'm sorry about the people who lost their lives and the way they lost it, but I do feel that justice was served properly for a change.

SECOND YOUNG BLACK MAN: [shouting in background] The bottom line is that they--the LAPD--biased the case from the very beginning. Even if he did do it, they, the LAPD, are the ones who set him free and not necessarily the jury.

MR. LEHRER: Now, the Simpson case and verdict as seen by a group of our regular essayists and commentators: Clarence Page of the "Chicago Tribune," writer Roger Rosenblatt, Richard Rodriguez of the "Pacific News Service," Jim Fisher of the "Kansas City Star," Cynthia Tucker of the "Atlanta Constitution," and journalist and author Haynes Johnson. Clarence, first, the simple personal question: Did you expect him to be acquitted?

CLARENCE PAGE, Chicago Tribune: My thinking kept shifting back and forth. I was looking for clues as to what the jury was thinking, and the clues all balanced each other off. You know, when the jury came in, they did not look at this, at this suspect, which--the defendant--which usually means that they have found him guilty, but it was very quick, they were in and out.

MR. LEHRER: Did you form a judgment at the beginning, whether or not O.J. Simpson was guilty or not guilty, whether he would, in fact, be convicted or not convicted for these crimes?

MR. PAGE: In the beginning, no. In the end, I think, just judging by the evidence, I think O.J. Simpson was probably guilty. I think he probably got away with murder. I also think the Los Angeles police and the other investigators definitely botched this investigation. Reasonable doubt was all over the place. Johnnie Cochran took advantage of it. The race card was only one of the cards he played here.

MR. LEHRER: Yeah. Jim Fisher, was this an outcome that you expected?

JIM FISHER, Kansas City Star: [Kansas City] I go along--I go along with Clarence. I thought he was guilty but there was that doubt that came in in the last days. And I had a dollar bet with my wife, and she won. So I--I would say that the thing is, though, this isn't the end of the world. I think what's struck me is everybody says that this thing was nation to nation, worldwide, and I'm sure there was that interest. But things have been going on out here. And the corn's coming in. The soybeans are being harvested. Cars are being built--airplanes. And I think while there was a period at noon today where a lot of people took interest in what happened, life goes on.

MR. LEHRER: Cynthia, what--what did you expect to happen, and how did it--how does it jive with what, in fact, did happen?

CYNTHIA TUCKER, Atlanta Constitution: [Atlanta] Well, Jim, what happened is pretty much what I had expected to happen for a long time. I have to say after the jury came back in so quickly yesterday--I expected them to be out at least two weeks--I began to rethink my assessment. I thought well, my goodness, maybe I was all wrong about this, maybe they all quickly decided on guilty. But for a while now, I have thought the most likely scenario was either a hung jury or an acquittal. And I think it's condescending toward the jury to suggest that an acquittal is an unreasonable verdict. The jury was not asked whether or not they thought O.J. Simpson committed these murders. The jury was asked to decide whether the prosecution had proved its case beyond a reasonable doubt. And I think it is very credible to say that the prosecution never got beyond reasonable doubt, and Mark Fuhrman was a very, very big problem for them.

MR. LEHRER: Roger Rosenblatt, your thoughts, going in to the--to the verdict, itself.

ROGER ROSENBLATT, Writer: I thought they would find him guilty, and I thought that the summations, particularly Darden's summation, was persuasive, that--but I thought the prosecution's case was more persuasive. And one of the interesting things about this case is that the--the thoughts that it engendered in the public or in us as individuals. I remember thinking if the jury comes in and finds him guilty, then they didn't play the race card. But, as Cynthia suggested, I don't know why I wasn't thinking if they found him not guilty that they wouldn't be playing the race card. They simply-- it is just as possible, even probable, that they looked at the presentation, drew a different conclusion from mine, and having much more experience and evidence before them, and found that guilt was not proved.

MR. LEHRER: Haynes, what are your thoughts?

HAYNES JOHNSON, Journalist/Author: Well, there certainly was reasonable doubt in this case, but I have to say that the way it played out, race was so central to us, and it tells me we still see things totally differently. We see them through the prism of white and black. Those scenes you showed to me on the students--

MR. LEHRER: Yeah. Charlayne's piece, yeah.

MR. JOHNSON: --the silent white faces and the cheering black faces. We see different worlds in this country, and it's still the central issue in American life. This trial was all about that. We're not talking about guilt or innocence here. We're talking about something deeper. Maybe that should have been outside the courtroom, but it came in the courtroom. And it defined, again, who we are after 300 years of dealing with this problem. It hasn't gone away--the way we see things.

MR. LEHRER: How do you react to the man who told Charlayne, well, he may have done it, however, it was--it wasn't the jury that turned him free, it was the LA Police Department?

MR. JOHNSON: Well, that's--you can--you can take that argument and say that gives you a way out. I think the case was overwhelmingly that he was guilty, as Clarence said, but there was reasonable doubt in this case, so you could argue. But I must say the three hours of deliberation in this case was stunning after that. I thought it'd be a hung jury or a second degree conviction. I didn't think for three hours they would come back with total unanimity of not guilty.

MR. LEHRER: Richard Rodriguez, did you expect this?

RICHARD RODRIGUEZ, Pacific News Service: [San Francisco] Not immediately. It--my first thoughts when O.J. was, was imprisoned was that what we would engage in in America was this debate between the feminist understanding of, of O.J. Simpson and the racist understanding, the racial understanding, I should say, as a black man. And I thought that in some way in those early days that feminism was going to free us from seeing O.J. as simply a black man, that we would understand him as a man, and that the question of spouse abuse, for example, would less be concerned with racial identity and more with sexual identity. As the case developed, I thought Johnnie Cochran particularly moved the issue into a black-white dichotomy, which is now the way we talk about it. As someone, incidentally, who does not see himself as either black or white, I was chagrined throughout this entire process that America, certainly the journalistic establishment, insisted on establishing that America existed as two parts, black and white, and every night on NBC or ABC, there would be these surveys indicating how many black Americans found him innocent, how many blacks--whites found him guilty, and so forth. As someone who does not exist in that--on that checkerboard, I found maybe in all of this the exhaustion of that, of that dichotomy, or its deepening. We may be more inclined now to see ourselves in this black and white America, or less inclined now I think as the metaphor gets exhausted.

MR. LEHRER: You mean, you think the reporting of it made it, made it worse, or you don't think--I mean, in other words, the reporting, the polls, themselves, affected people's thinking about it, is that what you mean?

MR. RODRIGUEZ: Well, clearly, clearly, we--the O.J. Simpson trial had a kind of influence or romance or an effect on our imagination that went beyond the immediate facts of the case. We were dealing with a kind of parable here. You know, a lot of black kids that I talked to in recent months were talking about pay-back time; after centuries of, of judicial abuse of black defendants, here was a case where the black man was going to get off. In some sense, you know, what has happened in this case is that the moral capital that black America accumulated over these centuries has been, has been essentially paid on the--for the freedom of O.J. Simpson. And I think now the comments I hear from strictly non-black Americans, Chinese grocers, Koreans, Mexicans, the white, the white Yoga instructor whom I saw a few minutes ago, they talk about--they talk about this now as having been the, the black--the justification, that blacks got their day, but essentially O.J. is not every man, that blacks got their case--got their day, and the celebrity will walk free.

MR. LEHRER: Clarence, did blacks get their day today

MR. PAGE: There's two trials here, Jim. There was the inside trial, which is what the jurors saw, and there's the outside trial that the rest of us saw. O.J. Simpson was on trial inside the courtroom. Outside, our society was on trial. Richard is absolutely right. And we had the same discussion, you may recall--

MR. LEHRER: I know. When it happened-

MR. PAGE: --after the LA riots.

MR. LEHRER: Exactly. You're right

MR. PAGE: And Richard raised the point then that we kept talking about the LA riots in terms of black and white, and there were all these Hispanics and Asians involved. That's the new California. By the year 2010, whites will be a minority in California. That's the future of America. But we're still caught up in the past. What we're seeing in the O.J. Simpson drama is the legacy of racism. This just shows that racism is alive and well as an issue. White people cannot just say, oh, it's all over, we've got to shove it under the rug. The irony of O.J. Simpson is he was white before this trial. He was color-blind. He was living the color-blind life. He had a white wife, lived in a white neighborhood. He had white friends, belonged to a white country club. Americans did not look at O.J. Simpson as black, especially white Americans. And it was after this trial came along where the race card popped up. You know, Johnnie Cochran didn't invent that race card. It was there all along. That's why the pollsters from week one were asking the questions in terms of black and white, because they knew that beneath the surface of our placid calm in this country we sill have a torrent of racial tension.

MR. LEHRER: Jim Fisher, was it seen that way in Kansas City?

MR. FISHER: I think Kansas City and the Midwest has about the same breakdown as you do on either coast. Most white people were going for guilty, and I'm sure the black community was saying the same as they were on the West and East Coasts. The odd thing that I've seen, though, is that just in the last few weeks maybe that the O.J. Simpson trial has made me more cognizant of this. But you'll go to a restaurant, and you will see--and this is not downtown--but this will be in Kansas City's suburbs, and here's a group of people and maybe three quarters white and a quarter black and having a good old time. And I don't know if the press isn't-- there's no doubt that this racial division exists. But I wonder if it isn't being just shoved down our throat, that we aren't allowed to get along, and that people going out for dinner or people playing touch football, a little restaurant my wife and I go to where we go for hamburgers on Monday night, it's about twenty-five, seventy-five black, white softball players, because people believe it or not, they work together, they may have--there may be a difference in the criminaljustice system. And Lord knows, we have a long way to go in racial understanding in this country, but I think if you go back and look to what we were thirty, thirty-five years ago, the difference is huge.

MR. LEHRER: Cynthia, what do you make of Richard's statement that this was a day for blacks in America?

MS. TUCKER: Well, first of all, I want to say that Richard Rodriguez is not the only person who is just tired of the racial divisiveness of this case. I'm overwhelmed by it. I'm exhausted by it. I am deeply troubled by it. While it is true that on the surface it seems that in many cases certainly middle class black, brown, and white Americans and Asian-Americans can work together, go to school together, and to a lesser extent live together, this trial also suggests to me that we all remain all too willing to divide into our racial camps. It suggests to me that race remains a very, very difficult and very troubling issue in this country, and I happen to think that what went on and is still going on outside the courtroom was much more troubling than what happened inside. Unless I hear the jury tell me that they returned a verdict of "not guilty" in order to send a larger message about racism, I'm not going to pin that on them. But I am troubled that so many people--black and white--seem to be intent on seeing a larger message of racism in this verdict and in this trial. And so it persuades me, quite frankly, Jim, that I have tended to be too optimistic about race relations in this country. They remain much more troubled, I think, than even I knew.

MR. LEHRER: Roger, do you agree with that, that--with what Cynthia is essentially saying is that it's there and what--all the O.J. Simpson trial did was expose it for all of us to see in a more graphic way?

MR. ROSENBLATT: It certainly did expose it in a spectacular way, but I wonder if class wasn't exposed as much as race. I don't think that most of the people who were cheering the acquittal of O.J. Simpson were expressing a pleasure at a vindication of O.J. Simpson. I'll bet you at least half thought he was guilty but that the case wasn't proved and another case was proved, that is that the police and perhaps the prosecution, but certainly the police in Los Angeles were using unfair methods, as has been known before, and prejudicial methods against the black population. But the black population against which these methods are used are not--is not the O.J. Simpsons of Los Angeles. It's the people who live in South Central Los Angeles. And that's a class distinction, as well as race. So I think they were cheering something else. That is they were cheering a world that had fought against an oppressive situation in which--

MR. LEHRER: Excuse me, Roger. Clarence disagrees with you-

MR. PAGE: Yes. Just very quickly, Roger, as you--as you must well know, the list of upper class black celebrities, especially black males who've been stopped by police in LA, is manifest. I mean, this touches all classes. I hardly know a black person in America who has not had a relative or been personally hit by what they thought was unjust treatment of the criminal justice system, and that's what I think these polls reflect. It has nothing to do with O.J.'s trial. It's the sense that white people trust this system more than black people do, and--

MR. LEHRER: No matter who's involved

MR. PAGE: No matter who's involved. And when you're talking about a case of circumstantial evidence, blacks are going to be a lot more skeptical.

MR. LEHRER: Go ahead, Roger.

MR. ROSENBLATT: Yeah. I think that is true, but I don't think, Clarence, you want to deny the enormous progress made in our lifetimes of middle class black Americans

MR. PAGE: Yeah. Until we get stopped by the cops in the middle of the night. I mean, Mark Fuhrman said it. You know, if he sees a black person driving a Lamborghini, and they aren't wearing a $500 suit, he stops them. And believe me, it happens in Chicago; it happens in New York; it happens all over the country.

MR. ROSENBLATT: Then Mark Fuhrman becomes a representative of white America?

MR. PAGE: No. But he does become a representative, unfortunately, of a cancer in our justice system that needs to be dealt with. I mean, this is such an old issue for black folks in America, and it suddenly hit white America with such shock with Mark Fuhrman's tapes. Why does all this have to be like the Rodney King tapes, the Mark Fuhrman tapes, before people believe--

MR. LEHRER: Everything is on tape

MR. PAGE: Yeah. It's got to be on tape.

MR. LEHRER: Everything's on tape now. We are the taped society. Haynes.

MR. JOHNSON: What comes over here--you're right about the trial was inside and outside, but they were joined in this case. The prosecutor talked about don't play the race card. The defense attorney played the race card. Send them a message, he said to the jury, from outside that it's an unjust system. You could use the Mark Fuhrmans and say this is a racist society, and you could respond to it and say, yeah, that's right. Even if he was guilty, we're going to send him a message. So I disagree with Cynthia. She's right about the divide, but I think it was joined in the courtroom.

MR. LEHRER: They were hearing the same thing? The jurors were hearing the same thing, the people were hearing the rest of it?

MR. JOHNSON: Johnnie Cochran said send 'em a message, and I was listening to him, and he quoted Martin Luther King, "Truth pressed to the earth will rise again," and so forth

MR. PAGE: And Frederick Douglass--

MR. JOHNSON: And they understood what he was saying. Send 'em message.

MR. LEHRER: Richard, do you agree that this whole thing was joined, what was happening in the courtroom was essentially a--just a reflection of what was happening outside, or the other way around?

MR. RODRIGUEZ: Yes, I do, to a degree. But, remember too that whites are disenchanted. If it is true that blacks have a great deal to fear of all classes from the, from the police car, whites are increasingly--at least the ones I hear--not only whites but large portions of non-black America distrust the judicial system now. It doesn't--it doesn't imprison--it lets people off too soon, it is--it is now a tangle and the O.J. trial in some sense justifies a certain large public skepticism. Just as in California, after the Polly Klaas abduction and murder a few years ago, we got the three strikes legislation here in California, I predict that as a result of the O.J. trial, we are going to get a real crackdown on black teen-agers, on black street kids, and they are going to pay the price for O.J. Simpson's trip to Mexico.

MR. LEHRER: Yeah. Jim Fisher, what do you make of what was said in the earlier discussion with Robin that, that this was a celebrity case, that it'll never be repeated, nothing like this had ever happened before and nothing like this will ever happen again, do you feel that way?

MR. FISHER: No, not at all. It's happened before. It--Sam Shepherd was mentioned. Of course, the Lindbergh case, which was made, if you want to see a real circus, go back and look at the newsreels of that which was filmed. I mean, it didn't come out instantaneously. Sacco Vanzetti, Lizzie Borden. Then there was the great case of Henry Lord Beecher in 1870's and to knock--they knocked that off the front pages--which he had been fooling around with a female parishioner--it took Custer to get his scalp lifted- -well, get killed at Little Big Horn. So this is nothing new in American history. I think what it is though, is it's--the media-- there's more outlets. There's just not two or three newspapers or seven newspapers in New York. There's this tremendous inner pressure on journalists to get the story, this fusing of the tabloid with the broad sheet press and the, the television stations, and it's become--it is a circus, but it's nothing new.

MR. LEHRER: We're going to talk about that part of it tomorrow night or the next time, but Haynes, back to a personal question. I had a conversation with one of my colleagues this afternoon after the verdict that didn't have anything to do with whether the verdict was right or wrong but this, oh, my goodness, at least it's over. Did you have that feeling?

MR. JOHNSON: Oh, yes, absolutely, and I think the country did too, but the danger is just what Jim was saying, you can go back to the 1920's or 1870's--we've had the Kennedy rape trial; we've had Lorena Bobbitt; we've had the Tonya Harding, and now we've had the O.J. all live in our living rooms. So I'm afraid this isn't the end of this kind of spectacle in the country. The appetite is there.

MR. LEHRER: So to think it's an aberration may be an aberrational thought?

MR. JOHNSON: I wish it were, Jim, but I don't think so.

MR. LEHRER: All right. Thank you all very much. RECAP

MR. MAC NEIL: Again, the other major news of this Tuesday: a presidential advisory committee on human radiation experiments released its final report on government tests carried out between 1944 and '74; President Clinton apologized to the unknowing victims and promised to seek monetary compensation for some of them. The UN accused the Bosnian government of violating the exclusion zone around Sarajevo with an attack on Bosnian Serbs. A spokesman called the action "outrageous." And Macedonian President Gligorov survived a car bomb attack in his country's capital city. He suffered serious head injuries. Good night, Jim.

MR. LEHRER: Good night, Robin. We'll see you tomorrow night. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you and good night.