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Article: Justice unseen. (second Rodney King civil rights trial) (Editorial)
- Article from:
- National Review
- Article date:
- May 10, 1993
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1993 National Review, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Perhaps justice was done in the second Rodney King trial. God knows. But what was seen to be done was not justice, but politics. To begin with, federal intervention in the form of a second trial, defensible when law-enforcement authorities and juries act plainly as accomplices to murder as in Mississippi Burning, was here the result of plainly political considerations: a belief that something had to be done in the face of the riots. Even if the original verdict was wrong--something which is not established by the second verdict--it was not so wrong as to justify double jeopardy (cf. Roger Parloff's article in Legal Times, demonstrating that the Simi Valley jurors ...