This article appeared in the February 1995 issue of The Public Defender, the voice of the Southern University Law Center. It may be cited as M. R. Franks, Thoughts Over a Glass of California's Juciest, Public Defender, February 1995, at 1.
*Assistant Professor of Law at Southern Univeristy, Baton Rouge, Louisiana; formerly Professeur Associé on the Faculty of Law of l'Université de Cergy-Pontoise, Paris. The author holds his Bachelor of Science and Juris Doctor degrees from Memphis State University.
My student confessed that she was dying to ask her professor what he thought of the O.J. case. "Get me off on a subject like that and there's a significant danger I won't stop," I warned her.
Words from an article in London's respected Economist echoed through my mind: "The media binge seems to demonstrate nothing more than America's astonishing capacity for excess and for focusing on relative trivia at the expense of serious matters such as health-care reform, genocide in Rwanda and the threat of nuclear proliferation that oozes out of North Korea."1
Assuming over the course of a year each man, woman and child in America spends twenty hours listening to O.J.-related news (that's an average of just 23 minutes per week), then 250 million Americans have just wasted a total of 5 billion man-hours drooling and slavering over another man's troubles. Were those five billion man-hours put to productive use tackling any one of America's myriad social problems, we could overkill that problem and have a few hundred million man-hours left to spare.
One of our social problems, of course, is domestic violence. But we as a people are not sufficiently introspective to ask ourselves whether our present epidemic in domestic violence is in part the product of our own misguided laws. I express no opinion on the innocence of Mr. Simpson, but I do find it curious that at the time of the alleged crime Mrs. Simpson was receiving $24,000 per month in alimony and child support,2 this in addition to occupying the home of her former husband -- a man whom she was still dating.
When one returns to the home of one's kinda-ex -- a home that one is still paying dearly for -- perhaps intending only to kiss the children goodbye before making a business trip to Chicago -- and one finds instead his former wife, who professes she still loves him, in bed with an arrogant little "friend" -- a nasty fellow who perhaps cannot resist the temptation to mutter a few confrontive words or even hateful epithets -- the natural human reaction is one of rage, a rage only exacerbated by the monthly bills and an acute awareness of who's footing them.
In Louisiana, any such natural rage would be tempered and redirected by the thought, "Just wait 'till the judge hears about this." Louisiana judges simply do not award alimony to a spouse at fault, or even in situations where both spouses are mutually at fault. And any Louisiana award of alimony promptly terminates upon the recipient's open cohabitation. Louisiana, being a state with its head still screwed on relatively straight, does not look with favor upon custodial parents' one-night peccadillos in the presence of the children.
In short, the highly explosive setting that allegedly precipitated the Simpson events probably would not have occurred in Louisiana. And had such a setting occurred here, our courts would have been open and eager to redress quickly any moral deficiencies of the magnitude that appear to have been endemic in the former Simpson household.
But in California, things are different. Alimony there is awarded without regard to fault. In the Land of Dates and Nuts, even a spouse grievously at fault can call it quits and get paid for doing so. Nor does alimony in California terminate even upon the recipient's open cohabitation. With rules of law like that, any fleeting thought of "wait 'till the judge hears about this" offers its thinker little comfort. As any Californian knows, it matters there not one whit whether the good judge ever "hears about this."
Persons going through a divorce have a right of access to judges who will listen attentively to evidence of fault and who will take swift action to right wrongs. When the judiciary abdicates its solemn duty to be judgmental and when the legal system turns a deaf ear to cries of injustice, people succumb more readily to the temptation to render do-it-yourself justice. I believe the present epidemic in domestic violence is in part the effect of over-liberalization of the divorce laws.
I am not convinced that O.J. Simpson killed anyone. The crime could well be drug related. But even if a jury finds O.J. guilty, I am saddened by our utter failure to lay the blame where it belongs -- on the doorstep of legislators whose amoral "no fault" solutions only enflame and exacerbate domestic problems. Society has once again broken the social contract and, in the words of our own Declaration of Independence, "the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise." Too bad the California courts turn their backs on gross immorality in the presence of children, thereby issuing a gilt-edged invitation for rage on the part of the non-custodial parent.
Future anthropologists visiting the ruins of America years hence will call 1995 the "Year of the O.J. Fascination." Before that, we had the Year of the Branch Davidian Fascination, the Year of the Michael Jackson Fascination, the Year of the Manuel Norriega Fascination, the Year of the Marion Barry Fascination, the Year of the Imelda Marcos Fascination, and even the Year of the Edwin Edwards Fascination.
Boy did we sure show twenty-four innocent Waco children who's boss. Never mind that David Koresh could have been nabbed two months earlier with little or no bloodshed when regularly outside jogging. In that particular case, law enforcement's minions were so hankering for a shootout that they eagerly orchestrated news briefings when instead they should have been quietly making safe arrests.
All of these high-profile cases (about one a year in this country) seem to have but one single thread in common: macho Neanderthals in law enforcement plumping for their vainglorious moment of fame, exhibiting all the sportsmanship of a guaranteed-bag hunt while showing more concern for their own media coverage than shame at their hunger for needless carnage.
Our American approach to justice doesn't play very well in France or the rest of the world. Most other countries have a distinct shortage of similar scandals, and look with horror on the nightly bad news from the United States.
The rest of the world is very aware that we are a dysfunctional country. With 6 per cent of the world's population, we consume 60 per cent of the world's illegal drugs. Our overweening racism breeds despair and elicits violence, all the more so in a country where citizens of every color already have a higher-than-normal propensity for violence. America now has per capita murder and rape rates ranging from two to 21 times those of Europe. Our murder rate is 324 per cent that of Europe as a whole, and our rape rate is 549 per cent that of France and 21.62 times higher than Ireland's.
As one comparison, New Orleans saw about 400 murders in 1993. Paris, France, saw 135 murders that year. That's in a city of 8.7 million -- seven times larger than New Orleans. The murder rate in Paris is only 4.96 per cent of the murder rate in New Orleans. That is, one's chances of being murdered in New Orleans are 20 times one's chances of being murdered in Paris.
America's propensity for violence and crime is not limited to the black community. Even predominantly white states such as Idaho, Maine and Montana, where well under half of one per cent of the populace is black, are still far more violent than most of the world and hardly suitable rôle models for the rest of the country.
Myopic eyes see no solutions other than more police, larger prisons and stricter punishment. America cheerfully pays more per capita than any other country for the care and feeding of the world's largest prison population, still growing
According to author Michael Wolff:
The U.S. imprisons more people than any other country, surpassing even the most repressive police states. . . . Even in its totalitarian heyday, the Soviet Union jailed nearly 40 per cent fewer of its citizens. Beyond the issue of expense -- 16 billion annually, with the yearly cost per prisoner approximating the tuition for a year at a top private college -- imprisonment breeds repeated imprisonment.3 |