THE IMPOSSIBLY TANGLED ISSUES of the O.J. Simpson trial could best be understood last week by paying attention to the tears. Prosecutor Marcia Clark finished her summation with the chilling sounds of Nicole Brown Simpson's pleading 911 calls to police. While a screen flashed pictures of Nicole's bruised face, followed by her and Ronald Goldman in death, the families of the victims wept. But what may make more of a difference to the verdict is what happened when defense attorney Johnnie Cochran Jr. gave his summation a day earlier. When he reminded the mostly black jury of how often African Americans have been mistreated by racist police, one of the black jurors seemed on the verge of tears.
The Simpson trial was probably destined to come down to race, though maybe it didn't have to come down quite so hard. By the time the case went to the jury last week, careening into its final and most heart-stopping stage, blacks and whites, who often live in separate neighborhoods, were living in separate worlds on the subject of O.J. His trial has generated two utterly opposed views of who is guilty: Simpson for murder, or the Los Angeles police for tainting the evidence against him. That both views might be true is a possibility that threatened to get swept away by the emotions stirred up by the trial.
In her final arguments Clark urged the jurors to ignore "the sideshows." But when it came to the toxic racial elements of the case, there were no clear lines anymore between what was a distraction and what was essential to a fair judgment. It would be complicated enough if Simpson were just a wealthy and charming athlete accused of murdering his wife. But from the start there was more to it: he was black, his wife was white and the police department was the same one that brought the world the beating of Rodney King.
That gave Cochran the opening to put at the center of his case Mark Fuhrman, the Los Angeles police detective who played a critical role in collecting evidence at the crime scenes--and whose mind, judging from the taped monologues he made for a would-be screenwriter, is a storm of racial fury. But Cochran set off his own kind of racial tempest 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."
Even before the verdict, it was plain just how passionately the Simpson case pressed upon the sore spots of the American racial psyche. On Thursday Bill Clinton said he was "concerned" about Cochran's play to racial feeling in his final arguments: "I hope the American people will not let this become some symbol of the larger racial issue in our country."