Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [238]
Of course, criminal justice is and remains intensely political, in many senses of the word—perhaps even more so than in the past. A small but significant number of trials crackle with political electricity. Victim groups pack the courtroom and howl for blood. Adverse decisions lead to riots. The trial of Dan White, in San Francisco, was a good example. White had gunned down the mayor of San Francisco and also Harvey Milk, the city’s first gay supervisor. He mounted a vigorous defense, and the jury bought into it—partly, at any rate. When White received a light sentence, San Francisco’s gay community exploded; crowds rampaged through the city.63 More recently, on April 29, 1992, a jury in Simi Valley, California, acquitted four Los Angeles police officers who had brutally beaten a black motorist, Rodney King. A “storm of anger” engulfed south-central Los Angeles; dozens of people died in the burning, looting, and wholesale vandalism that swept over the city in the next few days.64 The politics of criminal justice was never more visible than in those nights of carnage.
Race and Criminal Justice
I have touched on the relationship between race and criminal justice at a number of points in this chapter. Race figures prominently in political justice: for example, in the Herndon and Korematsu cases, and certainly in what has come to be called “the Rodney King trial.”
At the beginning of the twentieth century, most American blacks still lived in the southern states. These states were white-supremacy territory. The early years of the century were the high point of American apartheid. Black Americans did not and could not vote, and they were suppressed and oppressed in countless ways. The criminal justice system in the South was no friend of the southern black; the most that could be said for it is that extralegal “justice” (lynch law, for example) was even worse.
Gerard C. Brandon, of Natchez, Mississippi, was a rarity among white southern lawyers: he told the truth about southern justice. Addressing the Mississippi Bar Association in 1910, Brandon said that even slaves got more out of the courts than Mississippi blacks in his day. “It is next to an impossibility,” he said, “to convict even upon the strongest evidence any white man of a crime of violence upon the person of a negro.... I have even heard attorneys make the appeal to a jury that no white man should be punished for killing a negro.” The converse was equally true: “It is next to an impossibility to acquit a negro of any crime of violence where a white man is concerned.”65 A Southern chief of police put it even more bluntly around 1920: “We have three classes of homicide,” he said. “If a nigger kills a white man, that’s murder. If a white man kills a nigger, that’s justifiable homicide. If a nigger kills another nigger, that’s one less nigger.”66
Apologists for the South insisted that southern courts were honest and fair, that there was equal justice for all in the South. This was, of course, a lie. These were white people’s courts; they served white interests and white interests only. Blacks could have justice only when they did not threaten those interests; and white supremacy was the highest interest of all.67 The ideology of equal justice seemed to be worth something to white southerners. But white supremacy was worth far more.
Change came about very slowly. There were campaigns against