Washington -- I will sure be glad when the O.J. Simpson trial is over. Long before the opening statements it has become an extremely poisonous episode in a nation already bedeviled by racial polarization, distrust of police and the criminal-justice system, manipulations of juries, contempt for the media, and more.
Early on I wrote that passions over an interracial marriage, anger over spousal abuse, debates over what sexual fidelity can be expected when a couple is separated, the celebrity of the defendant and the impact of limitless media coverage might make the trial almost as much a social calamity as the gruesome murders of Nicole Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman.
It has become worse than I imagined.
The prosecution and the Los Angeles police have leaked vTC transcripts of 911 calls and police interrogations of Mr. Simpson (and other things) that portray him as a wife-beater who often threatened to murder her.
Defense lawyers have tried to impugn the integrity of police investigators, suggesting that a racist planted evidence to try to ensure the conviction of O.J. Even the wife of Judge Lance Ito was dragged into this gambit.
Now we have an ugly war -- in the courtroom and society at large -- over what the defense says is a media campaign by relatives of the murder victims to so vilify Mr. Simpson that he can never get a fair trial.
The angry assertions by relatives are not surprising, although there is something unsettling about seeing Denise Brown, the sister of murder victim Nicole, all over TV saying "O.J. did it" and even accusing the defendant of mentally abusing his and Nicole's children from his jail cell.
I'm not sure this media campaign, or any of the others, will be pivotal in the jury's decision-making. I'm only sure that there is no need to sequester the jury on the pretense that it guarantees an uncontaminated verdict.
There is not a person on the jury panel who has not heard or read 50 things that were prejudicial one way or the other. Even though they deny it, every juror has some opinion already about the guilt or innocence of Mr. Simpson. So the media campaigns may backfire and only harden the current biases of some jurors.
Unquestionably, the trials-by-press make infinitely more difficult the jobs of Judge Ito and the attorneys on both sides. Can either group of lawyers be so persuasive in the courtroom as to wipe early, media-driven prejudices from the minds of 12 jurors? Is the opinion of any juror now changeable by anyone?
That casts serious doubt upon our jury system -- until we look for something better.
I fear that no matter what the verdict, we are doomed to a decade or more of bickering over whether the decision was correct, and whether the media are what made it wrong.
8, Carl T. Rowan is a syndicated columnist.