Justice, finally.

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Judgement Day
by Jeff & Sabrina Nelson

"I use the rules to frustrate the law. But I didn’t set up the ground rules."
--F. Lee Bailey

bout a week ago, just as deliberations began on the Simpson civil trial, Sabrina had a vivid dream in which she saw the murder of Ron Goldman, and experienced tremendous dread and agony of that tragic murder. The dream ended in an oak panelled courtroom which also seemed to be the viewing room of a mortuary. Candles filled the room, as did jurors, a judge and many people who were celebrating some joyful event. Sabrina asked one of the revelers, "Why are you celebrating?" The person responded, "Because we got justice!" But Sabrina, still tormented by the murder scene she had just dreamt, kept asking, "Why are you celebrating? He’s dead..."

When the verdict on Simpson’s criminal trial came down in 1995, Sabrina and I were embroiled in what had turned into a very nasty piece of litigation. We had sued our former landlady, who had falsely accused me of assaulting and threatening to kill her (and had made a false police report against me), and who had also been involved in making a series of middle-of-the-night "anonymous" phone calls to us in which the caller, whom we recognized, threatened to kill our children if we didn’t move. (We moved.)

We were disappointed and in some ways devastated on a personal level by the first Simpson verdict. Here we were in a situation where the defendant in our case was very obviously guilty, but she was lucky enough to hire a lawyer smarter than but just as dishonest as she was, and who defended her by helping her to create false testimony and outlandish alibies (not to mention the witness tampering). And here was Simpson, who had hired some of the best whores in the business, who used their considerable talents and intelligence to confuse, obscure, lie, mislead and bamboozle the jury into accepting some version of events made out of whole cloth in order to help their client escape justice.

And it worked for him! I remember turning off the TV immediately after the verdict was read, and we both felt shaken and demoralized.. We thought: "Is this how things work in court? Is that going to work against us? People can just hire a lawyer to help them lie, and get away with doing bad things?"

I keep saying here that many lawyer’s help their guilty clients lie, because so often that’s what it occurs. Hey, you expect the defendant to lie. He’s a bad person; he’s done something terrible and won’t admit it. That’s why you have to have a trial in the first place. But many defendants who lie haven’t come up with the most convincing lie, yet. Too often a lawyer helps refine and make more plausible his client’s lie.

Lawyer:
"Are you sure it happened at 10:00? Are you sure it didn’t happen at 8:00, and maybe you stopped at a McDonalds because then you would have been at point B by 10:00, and have an alibi?"

Client:
"Oh, yeah...right...now that you mention it, it happened at 8:00 and...yeah, now that I think of it, I stopped at McDonalds. Right."

That’s not lawyering, in my view. That’s conspiring. And it’s an unfortunate, but real part of our legal system. Lawyers want to win, they’re paid to win, and so...well, you may realize your client is guilty, but you’re pretty creative, so you help make up a bunch of stories. When there’s a hole in your client’s defense, you help them plug it up. The plaintiff has pictures of the shoes your client denies owning? Say the photos are faked. Just say it often enough and with conviction, and maybe one or two suckers will bite, and your guilty client can walk.

During those last few hours after they announced the latest verdict would soon be read, Sabrina and I were physically shaking with nervous tension, hearts racing, stomachs sick with fear. Because the judge didn’t allow broadcasting from the courtroom, a reporter outside the courtroom who could hear the verdicts was to hold a card up in the window with a Y for "yes" or an N for "no" as the jury’s answers to each of the eight questions were read. When that first Y came up, Sabrina started crying with relief, and with joy. It wasn’t just OJ on trial, for us it was the justice system on trial. And when OJ was found liable, we felt joy and exhilaration because of what it says about our system: The big lies don’t always work. The high priced a-hole attorneys can’t always lie your way out for you.

The fact that it was not just a 9 to 3 verdict, as was needed to win, but a unanimous jury on every count was also cause for celebration for the families of the victims. This showed without any doubt that those jurors believed that the defendant, OJ was guilty. That had to make the plaintiffs feel good.

And we really do have a pretty good idea how those people in the courtroom, the plaintiffs, felt when they got that verdict. They beat two evils -- OJ, the criminal killer, and his attorneys, the other criminals -- the guys who don’t use the law for justice, but to abuse justice.

We won our case, by the way, when we won a huge settlement, and they had to write us a big fat check. But you know what? Those two years of litigation hell we suffered took away precious moments from our lives that can never be repaid by money -- the first years of our marriage, of our children’s lives... But it does help to have a win, and 12 impartial people hearing the facts and telling the other person they did something terrible IS a punishment to the person who wronged you, no matter how they try to rationalize and minimize the loss. And it gives you some closure. So perhaps now the Goldmans and the Browns can finally have some sort of closure to this horrible chapter, and begin the mourning process for their loved ones.

"The Devil makes his Christmas pie of lawyers’ tongues."
-- English Proverb

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Jeff & Sabrina Nelson are two of the Founders of VegSource and relieved ex-litigants.