In Kentucky.

#Brexit 2.

#Brexit.

The Debacle Of O.J. Simpson Trial Reinforces How I Understand Society.

BY PAUL PRATHER

Twenty years after the most notorious trial of the last century, I find myself still mesmerized by it, perhaps more now than at the time.

Lately, I’ve watched all 10 episodes of the FX dramatic series, The People v. O.J. Simpson; I’ve read The Run of His Life by Jeffrey Toobin, the nonfiction book on which the TV series was based; and I’ve finished viewing the powerful five-part documentary on the case, O.J.: Made in America.

For a while, I couldn’t figure out my own fascination with the 1994 murders of Simpson’s estranged wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ron Goldman, especially after so much time has elapsed.

But I think I find the Simpson debacle riveting because it reinforces two principles at the center of how I understand society: first, true justice doesn’t, cannot exist in our fallen world, and second, we humans, individually and as a species, are profoundly flawed.

From beginning to end, the Simpson trial was riddled with every imaginable irony, hypocrisy, venal subplot, misjudgment, arrogance, incompetence and bias. No one involved — prosecutors, defense lawyers, police, the jury, the judge, the media, forensic scientists and, least of all, the defendant himself —emerged intact.

Even the victims, particularly Nicole Simpson, sometimes appeared mercenary and amoral. Saying that is not to blame them for their fates, but to note that even the dead were defiled by this story’s grime.

The backdrop to the trial was a violent police force, the notorious Los Angeles Police Department, which had compiled an ugly history of brutalizing black citizens. Blacks in L.A. feared and despised the LAPD, and with very good reason, Rodney King being only the tip of a mammoth iceberg whose depths white people couldn’t comprehend.

An exception to this was Simpson himself. A wealthy hall of fame football player, actor and corporate shill with an ingratiating public persona, he’d made a point of befriending cops and enlisting them to perform personal favors for him. Rather than abusing Simpson, the LAPD had protected him when Nicole charged, as she repeatedly did, he’d beaten her half senseless.

“I’m not black, I’m O.J.,” Simpson bragged.

Rules rarely applied to him. Entitled, glib, astoundingly narcissistic, he cheated at everything, even at golf with the business executives whose professional favor he relied on. He was a serial philanderer, too.

He proved, however, a hapless criminal.

When he finally killed Nicole and Goldman in a fit of pique, he left behind enough evidence to convict a dozen murderers.

Prosecutors practically high-fived each other. They’d never seen so much incrimination: Simpson’s blood at the murder scene, as well as the victims’ blood in his vehicle, on his later infamous gloves, on his clothes and at his house.

He had no alibi. Cops observed a cut on his left hand. A pattern of bloodstains at the crime scene showed the killer had bled from the left side of his body. And the bloodstains matched O.J.’s DNA.

He’d already demonstrated motive: his escalating violence and stalking. Nicole had prophetically left behind handwritten notes, and even photos of her bruises from past beatings, saying she would one day turn up murdered, and when she did authorities should assume O.J. was her killer.

On and on the evidence went. An open-and-shut case.

Except the prosecutors repeatedly erred, in jury selection, in presenting the voluminous evidence, in failing to adequately vet Mark Fuhrman, a detective who’d played a small role in the investigation but had an extensive history of racism the defense could exploit.

Professionally, the prosecutors were no match for the “dream team” of defense attorneys Simpson had assembled. (He funded his defense partly by signing millions of dollars’ worth of memorabilia while in jail.)

It was a white lawyer, Robert Shapiro, who hit on the idea of turning Simpson’s trial into a referendum on the LAPD — that is, using the “race card.” Later, Shapiro would distance himself from this strategy, blaming it on another lawyer, Johnnie Cochran, because the race card’s bald cynicism made Shapiro a pariah among his well-to-do friends.

But the strategy worked. A largely minority jury, drawn from the same areas of Los Angeles long victimized by the police, exhausted by a trial that ran the better part of a year — months they spent unhappily sequestered — acquitted Simpson in a single morning’s deliberations.

In O.J.: Made in America, a juror admits the verdict was less a statement about Simpson’s innocence than a payback to the LAPD.

A final irony. Years after that first trial, after he’d been found responsible for the murders in a subsequent civil lawsuit, Simpson was sentenced to up to 33 years in prison for an unrelated penny ante Las Vegas robbery that legal experts say may not even have been a crime. Even if his acts were illegal, they would have netted another defendant probation, or at worst a couple of years behind bars. Simpson remains incarcerated.

Many view this imprisonment as its own kind of payback: by the Las Vegas judge for Simpson’s acquittal in the 1994 murders.

So Simpson walked free when he should have gone to prison, but got 33 years when he should have walked. Justice by injustice, you might call it. Still, that doesn’t really sit right, does it?

Our courts convict more guilty people than innocent, I imagine, and probably acquit more innocent people than guilty. But their proceedings are marred on all sides, always, by a stain that is the human stain.

We humans are capable of humility and decency and honesty and love.

Just beneath those virtues, perhaps interwoven with them in the very same hearts, lie the taints of arrogance and seaminess and dishonesty and hatred. Such sins infect every social structure we create.

Paul Prather is pastor of Bethesda Church near Mount Sterling. You may email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/living/religion/paul-prather/article85961207.html#storylink=cpy

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Donald Trump.

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Enjoy Your Monday Afternoon.

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TGIF.

Funny.

Trump U!

Funny,

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Nigeria!

nigeria is a den of thieves constantly ruled by a nigerian kleptomaniacs, with the resulting unfortunate circumstance that most citizens residing in the country, and those aspiring to do so from outside it, are merely waiting for their turn at the nation's till, in order to outdo their predecessors in thievery, and set new records at unguarded lust for money, which the Bible has heretofore warned us, is the root of all our evils. unless the kleptomania is cured, the cancer will have the effect of killing its victim or rendering the country destitute, as nigeria becomes the haiti of africa

America Today.

President Hillary Clinton?!

Hillary Clinton Wins Democratic Presidential Nomination; Donald Trump Wins Republication Nomination.

He Blows ... .

America!

Muhammad Ali, The Greatest. RIP.

Donald Trump And The GOP. lol.

TGIF.

Real Culprit In Gorilla (Harambe)'s Death: It's Captivity.

by Lori Gruen

The death of Harambe, the endangered lowland gorilla shot at the Cincinnati Zoo after a 4-year-old boy crawled through a barrier and fell into his enclosure, was a deeply traumatizing event — for the child, for the surviving gorillas, for the witnesses, for the animal care staff and for those of us sensitive to the plight of captive animals.

In the wake of such a tragedy, it seems someone must be blamed, but the fingers are being pointed in the wrong direction. The real culprits are zoos.

Many animal-protection proponents suggest that Harambe wasn’t a threat to the boy. Gorillas tend not to be aggressive, and if Harambe wanted to hurt the child, the 450-pound gorilla could have done so immediately, not after interacting with this curious creature for 10 minutes. But these people weren’t there.

Did members of the gorilla care staff do enough to try to separate Harambe from the child? If they could lure the female gorillas away, why not Harambe? Some activists are calling the killing of Harambe an act of cowardice by incompetent zoo employees. But members of the zoo care staff, and those who raised Harambe from infancy at another zoo, are devastated by what happened. Some staff might have argued against the hasty decision. We don’t yet know.

Others argue that the boy’s mother is to blame. How could she let her child fall into a wild-animal enclosure? Why didn’t she have control over her son? How long did she let her child wander unsupervised such that he had time to get through the barriers?

In a post on social media, a woman who identified herself as the child’s mother didn’t express remorse for the death of Harambe, just praise to God and thanks to zoo authorities for saving her son. Some people are suggesting that she be deemed legally negligent and charged with causing the death of an endangered animal. But she is just one among millions of mothers who bring their children to zoos. This was a terrible accident, but she isn’t the only one to teach children to view wild animals as amusement.

For me, the real question is not who to blame, but why anyone was in a situation in which they had to make a choice between the life of a human child and the life of an endangered teenage gorilla in the first place. Keeping wild animals in captivity is fraught with problems. This tragic choice arose only because we keep animals in zoos.

Killing is less common at U.S. zoos compared with the regular practice of “culling” at European ones, but zoos are places that cause death. Harambe’s life was cut short intentionally and directly, but for many zoo animals, simply being in captivity shortens their lives. We know this is true for whales at SeaWorld. Elephants, too, die prematurely in zoos. So why have zoos?

One reason often given is that zoos protect and conserve endangered wild animals. A few zoos do finance conservation efforts — the Cincinnati Zoo is one of them. These efforts are laudable, and I would hope that in light of the tragedy, the Cincinnati Zoo will spend more money to help protect lowland gorillas. Their habitat, as is true for so many wild animals, is under threat.

But captive animals, especially large mammals born in captivity, like Harambe, cannot be “returned to the wild.” These sensitive, smart, long-lived gorillas are destined to remain confined, never to experience the freedom of the wild. They are, at best, symbols of their wild counterparts. But these symbols are distortions, created in an effort to amuse zoo-goers. Zoos warp our understanding of these wonderful beings and perpetuate the notion that they are here for our purposes.

If we really need someone to blame, maybe we should look at our society, which supports these types of institutions of captivity. If zoos were more like sanctuaries, places where captive animals can live out their lives free from screaming crowds and dangers not of their own making, no one would have had to decide to kill Harambe. Sanctuaries are places where the well-being of animals is of primary concern and animals are treated with respect. 4-year-olds and their families could see gorillas in Imax theaters, where their curiosity could be safely satisfied and gorillas could live with dignity, in peace.

Lori Gruen is a philosophy professor and the coordinator of animal studies at Wesleyan University and was editor of the anthology “The Ethics of Captivity.”

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/opinion/op-ed/article81222187.html#storylink=cpy

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