Word: misconducting
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...Keystone Kops, which will certainly prompt a new skepticism about police testimony in all sorts of proceedings. Suggests prominent San Francisco trial lawyer John Martel, a Simpson prosecution consultant: "Perhaps an enlightened society has to pay a price like that to learn of the depth and cost of police misconduct, not just in Los Angeles but elsewhere...
Some reformers would go further and put new restrictions on lawyers' conduct inside the courtroom as well: California Governor Pete Wilson wants to restrict an attorney's right to use political rhetoric in front of the jury, like Johnnie Cochran's urging them to "send a message" about racist misconduct. This sort of jury nullification, wrote syndicated columnist George Will, in which the panel is motivated by something other than the particulars of the case, amounts to "approximately what Groucho Marx said in the movie Duck Soup: 'Who are you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?'" Legal scholar Kamisar...
...mistreatment of blacks. It is the President who should swipe at the "code of silence" too many cops embrace when their colleagues are guilty of excess. Above all, it is Clinton who needs to say what we all know--that minority Americans are too often the victims of police misconduct and that the misuse of public power diminishes everyone, not only those against whom the nightsticks are swung. The President claims to have recently rediscovered the bully pulpit. He should use it now, when it is most needed...
...when he used his closing arguments to call Fuhrman and another Los Angeles officer, Philip Vannatter, "twin devils" and to compare Fuhrman to Adolf Hitler. More than that, he urged the jurors to see a not-guilty verdict as an opportunity to send a message against racism and police misconduct. "Fuhrman is a nightmare, but he's America's nightmare, not just black people's nightmare," Cochran told Time last week. "And everybody needs to understand that...
Moreover, Simpson's choice of Johnnie Cochran as his lead lawyer made the race factor inevitable. Cochran's career was built around suing the L.A.P.D. for racially inspired misconduct--some of it even more horrendous than that revealed in the Simpson trial--and he is no fool. Still, prosecutors, knowing Fuhrman's history, decided to have the detective testify. That gave Cochran the opening to cast the trial in racial terms, which worked because Simpson was wealthy enough to hire lawyers and investigators to dig up proof of racially motivated police misconduct. It is no more unethical for Simpson...