THE O.J. SIMPSON MURDER TRIAL : Both the Brilliant and the Bigoted Come to Chat

I sat down at my home computer one night this week and joined a group of O.J. Simpson trial addicts who have kept cyberspace buzzing the past few months with their unrestrained opinions on the case.

A stroke of my keyboard activated my modem and connected me with TimesLink, my paper’s electronic information service. Soon I was in the O.J. Simpson chat room, which consists of TimesLink subscribers who engage in a free-flowing conversation about the case twice a week with reporters and legal experts.

Participation in the chat room has increased steadily. On Monday night, when I joined the talk, we had two rooms steaming away during a special get-together to mark the anniversary of the Simpson-Goldman murders.

It is like no other form of communication. On talk radio, the producer can cut off the ignorant or bigoted. They can be banned from television studios, even from the most oddball public access shows. But on the electronic superhighway, the sane and the mad, the brilliant and the dumb rant away without interference.

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My fellow guests were George Lewis of NBC, Loyola Law School professor and trial commentator Laurie Levenson, DNA expert Eric Swenson and Times reporter Andrea Ford.

You have to be fast to play the game. Participants fire off questions with the speed of accomplished typists. Before we could answer one question, three or four others had crossed the screen. It was more a shooting match than a dialogue.

Early in the chat, an undertone of bigotry emerged, as it often does in these sessions.

A participant called Mr. LoveFem (we use handles instead of our names) typed out his thought that “the guy is guilty as sin, blacks don’t want to face it, if it were a white guy they would say this is a mockery of the judicial system.”

My colleague Ford, who is African American, replied with restraint. “Mr. LoveFem; have you any idea how insulting this is?” she wrote. I was more direct. I told Mr. LoveFem, “You ought to get off this room right now, you slob.”

A number of the participants were steeped in the details of the case. Many of them had theories, some conspiratorial, and all had opinions, mostly pro-prosecution. They touched on most of the big issues of the case.

“Levenson, based on the photos, do you believe the murderer was in a frenzy of rage?” asked Horv.

“I believe that the killer really wanted to kill these victims--I’m not sure what kind of rage it was,” she replied.

We had a long discussion of what constitutes a jury of peers.

MsFranki said, “O.J.’s peers were not in Downtown L.A.” Her point was that Simpson lived in Brentwood.

Samax asked, “What is a jury of one’s peers? I believe the framers of the Constitution were referring to social status so the rich wouldn’t be judging the poor and vice versa. If I am correct, Mr. Simpson does not have one peer on that jury.”

After I signed off, I went elsewhere for an explanation of the evolution of the jury peer concept, to a book called “With Justice For Some” by Professor George P. Fletcher of Columbia Law School.

Fletcher said that the concept “jury of peers” is vague and hard to define. It doesn’t refer to any specific group. It doesn’t mean Simpson should be tried by Brentwood residents or former USC tailbacks.

He explained the phrase first appeared in 1215, he said, when King John of England “conceded in the Magna Carta that ‘no free man’ shall suffer loss of liberty except by the ‘lawful judgment of his peers.’ The notion of judgment by one’s peers has become part of the lore of the jury trial.”

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So the answer came from an old-fashioned, although recently published, book, not from cyberspace’s relentless chatter.

There are places on the Internet, and other electronic sources, where I could have also found the answer. Maybe some of the chat room habitues stayed up into the early morning doing computer research on the question.

That’s not the chat room, the free-flowing computer communication device that is supposed to turn us into a well-informed, sophisticated, open, forward-looking world community.

So far, the chat room has fallen short of the mark.

I’ve been fascinated with the way the Simpson case has taken hold in the electronic subculture, just as it has in every other form of communication, from radio to dinner table conversation. My chat room friends are loaded with notions, nuggets of information and some sharp insights, gleaned from watching the trial, viewing television news and reading the paper. But a lot of them are just dead wrong. Or bigoted.

The superhighway, like the rest of America, is full of opinions and rumors about the Simpson case, but not much wisdom.