Today’s Agenda

Verdicts have been rendered in the beatings of Rodney King and Reginald Denny, but race is often still a factor when people ask whether justice has been served. That keeps tensions high in a community grown weary of public debate about the fairness of the criminal-justice system.

Nevertheless, the debate continues, leaving many young people confused and angry.

How often is the debate grounded in solid understanding of the justice system? That question prompted the Constitutional Rights Foundation, a respected group of legal educators, to turn the King trial record into a tool for education and discussion of volatile social issues.

“Reviewing the Verdict: Issues of Police, Justice and Change,” featured in Making a Difference, was designed specifically for high school students. Its goal is to promote nonviolent, informed response to the legal, constitutional, social and political issues raised by the Rodney King case and its aftermath.

Marshal Croddy, director of program and materials development for the foundation, says, “Students oftentimes do not understand and do not have a lot of information about how the system works. They get fairly confused about fundamental things--confusing verdict with sentence, misunderstanding the purpose of various legal procedures. (But) that’s not just students, that’s true of the lay public generally.”

Students also question the fairness of the system and wonder how they will be treated by the police, he says.

“There is an underlying resentment which (the Denny and King) cases are sort of lightening rods for.”

First, Croddy says, the Denny and King cases were used as a leitmotif for educating the students about the system. The second goal, he says, was to try to raise larger political social issues--general police-community relations, the role of the media in conveying information about the system, race and the debate over its affect on key steps in the process--and to give students a balanced presentation of the various issues.

The final goal, he said, was to try to empower students to be more effective in doing something about the system, whether in terms of police-community relationships, or career choices, and in becoming more informed and active in solving some of the problems.

Croddy says the project promotes development of analytical and critical thinking, so the students have to wrestle with the issues of fairness and justice from both points of view.

“What we are trying to teach them is that they--as citizens, future citizens or voters or participants on juries or in working in the political process--do have something to say about the criminal-justice system and can be effective in changing it.

“A lot of kids feel like they do not have a role, that they are just victims of the system. And what we’re trying to promote is that it may, or may not, be true, but there are things that you as individuals and you, working within your community, can do to improve the situation. That’s a little harder.”