The Denny Beating Trail: The Verdicts : Two Worlds in One L.A. : Some Get to See a Different Side of the Same Coin of Justice

It hurts, huh?

You saw the videotape. You saw the beating, and you wanted something real bad to happen to those men you saw throwing bricks and bottles and spray- painting people. You wanted punishment, you wanted retribution, you wanted “justice.”

But as the jury read the verdicts Monday in the trial of Damian Monroe Williams and Henry Keith Watson, you didn’t feel like you got it.

And it didn’t feel good.

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Maybe you felt like Bob, one of scores of furious white callers who flooded the lines of the city’s talk show radio programs.

“I’m so angry, I can hardly talk,” he said on KFI. “The justice system is dead. It’s open season on white people. I never thought I’d say this, but I went out today and bought a gun. I’m not going to let this happen to me. And a lot of people feel like I do. I had to stand in line 45 minutes.”

Or maybe you felt like 47-year-old Mary: “I’m so upset that I feel like if I got inside my car, I think I’d run over somebody.”

Or maybe you can identify with KFI talk show host Bill Handel, who said he was “as enraged or crazed as I could ever be over an injustice.”

Or maybe your take on the verdicts was the same as the reporter who broadcast that Williams and Watson had “beaten” most of the charges against them, instead of just being acquitted like the Los Angeles police officers who were found not guilty by a Simi Valley jury in the beating of Rodney King.

And then you turned on your television to see supporters of two defendants dubbed “thugs” and “animals” celebrating what they said was a just verdict.

With these verdicts, they said they had found a nugget of fairness in the criminal justice system. As attorney Johnnie Cochran put it: “It’s pay-back time.”

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And it didn’t calm your nerves that Reginald Denny, the most famous victim of the Florence and Normandie beatings, said he accepted these verdicts.

Maybe you should talk with Nancy, another of those talk radio show callers. She is African-American. And she, like you, was surprised by the verdicts. She didn’t think the defendants should have been convicted of offenses that would warrant a lifetime of imprisonment, but she did think they would be found guilty of more serious offenses.

Nancy says she understands your pain, your anger and your disappointment. And she does, she said, because it’s the same pain and anger that she and other African-Americans have been enduring for years and encounter every day.

It is the pain she said she felt when those police officers were originally set free, the anger she felt when a judge bent over backward to reduce their sentences, the emptiness of the phrase that for better or worse, it is the justice system, the best in the world.

It was the pain and disappointment, she told the host, that she has endured almost all of her life as she has watched one racial injustice piled upon another.

“I’m not trying to justify anything,” she said, “but maybe now other people will know how we feel. . . . Now, you get a chance to feel what we feel.”

And maybe this will also help you understand why blacks feel so jaded about the criminal justice system: Before the year’s end, thousands of black males like Williams and Watson will be disproportionately convicted of crimes and locked away. Blacks make up 12% of the population in the United States and in California. But they comprise 46% of those behind bars in the nation and 34% in the state.

Black juveniles are in many cases three times more likely than white youngsters charged with the same offense to be placed in custody.

So, now you’ve had a taste of disappointment. Maybe the next time you hear blacks or Latinos complain about the flaws in the justice system, unfairness in the workplace or systemic discrimination, you can reach back to what you felt when you heard those verdicts Monday. And from that brief exposure, you may better understand their ongoing pain.