IF O.J. SIMPSON IS A FREE MAN TODAY, he leaves behind a machinery of law that looks as twisted as any Los Angeles freeway after an earthquake. Critics of his acquittal point to issues that took the trial where it had no business going, from the defense plea for racial reparations to breathless news bulletins on Marcia Clark's hairdo. Yet even within the strict letter of the law, the case unfolded with such grotesque distortions of what most Americans think of as normal justice that the system itself ended up in the dock. Verdicts are now coming down, and they are not pretty. From police irregularities to the issue of trial by jury itself, what the British writer G.K. Chesterton called "the awful court of judgment" has acquired a modern spin on the adjective.
Of course, extraordinary cases always run the risk of producing exaggerated lessons. In response to the abduction and murder of Polly Klaas, California and other states rushed to pass "three strikes'' sentencing laws with little thought for their effect on prisons and the courts. Now many legal observers worry about what changes, intended and unintended, the Simpson spectacle may engender. "Reforms will come speedily and without great caution or thought,'' predicts Brandeis professor Jeffrey Abramson, who wrote We, The Jury: The Jury System and the Ideal of Democracy. Says Yale Kamisar, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School: "If I were teaching criminal law tomorrow, I couldn't look my students in the eye. What I'm teaching them seems unrelated to what's going on in the real world."
Some legacies of the biggest case ever to unfurl continuously under the public eye are already evident. DNA sleuthing, exotic beyond belief a short while ago and still quite expensive, is becoming more common--as are more skeptical defense questions about lab procedures. "There is less need to proffer this evidence as if it's from some alien culture," says law professor John Dwyer of the University of California, Berkeley. "It's still not quite akin to, 'Here's a fingerprint--how can you possibly contest it?' but it's way different than it was 12 months ago." Already overburdened courts are bracing for the prospect of more criminal defendants who refuse to cop a plea, opting instead for an O.J. dash for daylight before a jury. Potential jurors may be loath to perform a duty that in the Simpson case proved to be a kind of medieval torture.
Other lessons will be drawn as politicians, police and the justice system propose steps to prevent some of the excesses of the Simpson trial from recurring. Just what those lessons should be, however, is a matter of debate--a prosecutor's needed reform may be a defendant's constitutional grievance. Among the points of contention:
POLICE PROCEDURE. To blacks who read the acquittal as a righting of scales that had been weighted against them, the glaring injustice for O.J. was police negligence, not to mention Detective Mark Fuhrman's bigotry. Investigators came off looking like 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."