Commentary : Perspectives On The Denny Verdicts : The Jury Chose Peace Over Justice : The Denny and King beatings weren’t equal. And others besides blacks have felt injustice. Only they didn’t riot.

There is an ancient Jewish legend that when God created the human being, there was a celestial battle between Justice and Peace. The angels told God that among human beings, these qualities would not be able to live together.

The jurors in the Reginald Denny beating case drew the same conclusion that God’s angels did: In Los Angeles in the late 20th Century, justice and peace could not live in harmony. They chose peace.

No one can argue that the verdict was just. If you smash a brick into an innocent man’s head, leave him to bleed to death, do a celebratory dance around his body--and do this solely because the victim is of a different race--you should be found guilty on charges that would sentence you to many years in prison.

Even those who have argued that the punishment of the two police officers in the Rodney King beating case was unjustly lenient must now argue that the Williams-Watson verdicts also were unjustly lenient. After all, these people constantly argued that the two cases were morally identical.

The jurors didn’t want more rioting (and didn’t want to subject themselves to personal mortal danger). So, they chose peace over justice. The question for our society is: What price peace?

I don’t know the answer to this question, but I do know that we are lying to ourselves if we deny that this is the point to which we have descended--justice thwarted by mob intimidation.

I am torn. The idealistic part of me, the part that believes in the supremacy of justice, is depressed by the verdict. On the other hand, the selfish part of me, the peace-loving part that just wants my children to grow up in safety, celebrates the lessening of tension.

Maybe the jurors were wise in preferring peace to justice--after all, every day, murderers, let alone almost-murderers, get off with unjustly lenient verdicts in America’s aptly named criminal justice system. So, they may have figured, why not cheat justice in yet another criminal trial? At least some good may come of this particular perversion of justice. Maybe years from now, Los Angeles and America will have benefited from placating those in the street and in the halls of Congress who have threatened “No justice, no peace.”

How did we get to the point where American jurors could fear for their lives and for the life of their city if they rendered a just verdict?

There are many culprits.

The first is the widespread belief among blacks that the criminality of the police officers in the Rodney King beating and the criminality in the Reginald Denny beating were morally equivalent. The moment this belief took root, the pressure on the Williams-Watson jury to render similar verdicts as those in the police officers’ trial became unbearable.

But the two cases were not morally equivalent. Reginald Denny was an entirely innocent person, beaten solely because of his race. Rodney King was engaged in a criminal act, and was excessively beaten because of his criminal act.

The second culprit is the widespread belief that blacks have a monopoly on being cheated by the criminal-justice system. But granting the historic legitimacy of many black complaints against police misconduct, no ethnic or racial group has such a monopoly.

The Korean community, for example, has a powerful case against the American judicial and political system. It was largely Koreans and their businesses who were attacked in the 1992 riots, and they have been all but ignored.

Jews, too, can claim a biased judiciary in light of the preposterous verdicts involving the murder, not police beating, of two Jews: Yankel Rosenbaum and Meir Kahane. Rosenbaum’s accused murderer in the anti-Jewish riots in Crown Heights, New York, was identified by the dying Rosenbaum, and a knife with the dead man’s blood was found on the accused. Yet the defendant was acquitted by a jury of non-Jews who later attended a celebration dinner with his lawyer. In an almost identical miscarriage of justice, Kahane’s accused murderer was also acquitted.

And there are enough whites murdered or beaten by blacks who are given ludicrously lenient sentences to arouse the fury of many whites at American criminal justice. But the Denny jury had to reach a verdict at a time when only black anger at the judicial system is honored (and Koreans, Jews and whites haven’t rioted yet).

Third, because leading politicians and the major media “understood” rather than condemned the 1992 riots, the jurors in this case could in no way assume that the media and politicians would support them if they rendered a harsh verdict.

Fourth, the jurors saw how the media violated the trust of the Simi Valley jurors by publicizing their names and home addresses. Since the first Rodney King trial, a juror has to have extraordinary courage to render an unpopular verdict in a public case involving a black defendant.

I pray that the verdict helps to lower the level of black anger and thereby bring some racial peace to our city and country. If it does, the jurors’ choice of peace over justice will have been a wise one. But the need to have made such a choice does not bode well for our beloved country.