[On June 17th, 1994, O.J. Simpson was arrested by the LAPD. The subsequent trial featured a number of individuals whose stories have a great deal to tell us about America, then, now, and overall, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Simpson trial figures. Leading up to a special weekend post from one of my favorite young AmericanStudiers!]
On two distinct
and even opposed sides to a legal career, and how they complicatedly came
together in the OJ trial.
In his autobiography
A
Lawyer’s Life (2001), Johnnie Cochran (1937-2005) writes about how Thurgood
Marshall’s victory in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) helped inspire
his lifelong legal activism. Marshall, Cochran writes, “confirmed that a single
dedicated man could use the law to change society.” As Cochran’s own legal
career began to take shape in the 1960s and 70s (particularly after he left the
Los Angeles District Attorney’s office to start his own
private practice), he consistently represented African American clients who
were also underdogs, fighting against institutional racism and other layers to the
white justice system and power structure. Whether he lost those cases (as with Leonard
Deadwyler, killed by the LAPD while driving his pregnant and in-labor wife
to the hospital in 1966) or won them (as with Ron
Settles, a college athlete who died while in police custody in 1981 and whose
family received a sizeable settlement from the city), Cochran established
himself over these decades as a preeminent voice using the law for both civil
rights and challenges to the powers that be.
At the same
time, that evolving career gained Cochran prominence as a successful defense
attorney, a role that offered him opportunities to defend celebrity clients. One
of the most famous and controversial such clients in the years before the OJ
trial was Michael Jackson, whom Cochran
defended when he was accused of child molestation in 1993; Cochran was
instrumental in helping Jackson settle
that case out of court with the accusers’ families. (Cochran’s final case
was another such famous celebrity trial, helping get Sean (P. Diddy) Combs acquitted
on bribery and weapons charges in 2001.) The vast majority of those celebrity defendants
were likewise African American, a clear and important throughline in Cochran’s
legal work and career to be sure. Yet by nature of their celebrity, wealth, networks
of influence, and other factors, those defendants were much more part of the
power structure than opposed to it, and in a case like Jackson’s it’s fair to
say that Cochran also used the power structure to help Jackson reach that private
settlement and avoid any legal repercussions to the troubling charges levied
against him.
Any defense
attorney who practices for decades is going to have multiple, varied, and even opposed
types of clients, of course. But these layers to Cochran’s career were particularly
complicated in their relationship to each other, and nowhere was that complexity
more noteworthy than in the OJ trial. As I highlighted in yesterday’s post, Cochran
and the team based a significant portion of their defense on the LAPD’s histories
of institutional racism and police brutality, linking Cochran’s legal activism
to OJ’s status as a Black man accused (and potentially, they argued, framed) by
that power structure. Yet at the same time, as I wrote in Monday’s post, by the
1990s OJ was a wealthy celebrity, and one who had a famously
friendly relationship with the police prior to his arrest. Cochran
famously noted that he worked “not only for the OJs, but also the No Js,” a
statement that both reflects his overarching career ambitions and yet acknowledges
(or at least implies) that this particular case diverged from those goals. Did
the OJ case also undermine those broader and inspiring civil rights efforts of
Cochran’s? That’s a much bigger question than a blog post—one of many crucial
ones raised by this case.
Next
figure tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Simpson trial figures or stories you’d highlight?
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