Cochran on Simpson Trial

In his Perspective on Justice (“Simpson Trial Lessons Lost in Time,” Commentary, June 8), Johnnie Cochran scolds America for not engaging in “a tempered national discussion about race and why the verdict came out the way it did.” He lectures us that the “biggest myth perpetrated by the verdict’s critics” is that Simpson was acquitted because he is black when, in fact, “‘few, if any, people thought of O.J. Simpson as black.”

Cochran’s piece is revisionist history at its best, because Cochran characterizes as “myth” that which the defense team sought to and did accomplish: making Simpson the undeserving beneficiary of built-up grass-roots resentment over race-biased police practices.

I do believe that police sometimes act in ways that are race-biased. In terms of a national dialogue on race, because O.J. was never victimized by such police actions, it was immoral for the defense team to make him the symbol for those who have genuinely suffered. It is exceptionally hypocritical for Cochran, the architect of the legal strategy, to now reprimand the nation that truth is actually myth and to suggest that, while others are to blame for the lack of a “tempered national discussion,” he is not.

GREGORY FAST

Oxnard

Fear and ignorance will indeed flourish without a rational exchange of ideas, as Cochran points out. It appears the jury was full of both at the Simpson trial. Otherwise, how did they rationally exchange ideas from a trial with a year’s worth of testimony in under four hours?

NEIL PROFFITT

Redondo Beach