THE WALTER SCOTT CASE MISTRIAL AND THE
CRISIS OF FACTS
By Jelani Cobb
December 7, 2016
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As the hung jury in the murder trial of Michael Slager (at
right)—the South Carolina police officer who shot Walter Scott—makes clear,
Americans’ faith in the police can be corrosive to democracy.Photograph by Grace Beahm /
Pool / Getty
Liberals have of late devoted
a great number of pages to describing, analyzing, and lamenting the declining
faith in American institutions, and its role in the election of Donald Trump.
But, as the hung jury in the murder trial of Michael Slager—the
police officer who, in April, 2015, shot an unarmed fifty-year-old black man,
Walter Scott—makes clear, the resounding faith in particular institutions can
be just as corrosive to democracy.
Earlier this year,
a Gallup poll found
that only nine per cent of Americans had a lot of confidence in Congress,
and that only twenty per cent had any faith in the integrity of newspapers. But
fifty-six per cent of the public felt that the police were trustworthy. This is
the reason that Slager’s defense could essentially argue that the jury should
trust his account of the shooting—in which Scott attacked him and posed an
imminent threat—over the footage captured by a bystander’s cell-phone camera,
which shows Slager unloading rounds into a fleeing man, and convince at least
one juror. It’s the reason that Officer Timothy Loehmann was not charged in the
death of Tamir Rice, Officer Dante Servin was acquitted for
shooting into a crowd in Chicago and killing Rekia Boyd, and Officer Daniel
Pantaleo was not indicted in the chokehold death of Eric Garner. It’s the reason that, as this year closes,
we can anticipate reading some version of this story in the one to come.
Last year, in a speech to the
National Press Club, Nikki Haley, the governor of South Carolina, addressed the
racial tensions that had roiled the state after the Scott shooting and, weeks
later, the massacre of nine churchgoers at the Emanuel A.M.E. Church in
Charleston. The people of South Carolina, she pointed out, had not resorted to
violence in their response, despite their frustrations. (This, she said, was in
contrast to the reactions to police shootings in Baltimore and Ferguson, Missouri, where, Haley
claimed, the Black Lives Matter movement had “laid waste” to black
communities.) The patience of South Carolina was further tested as the trials
of Dylann Roof, accused of the church shooting, and Slager
were scheduled to take place at courthouses across the street from each other
in Charleston. (After months of delays, Roof’s trial is expected to begin
today.) The mistrial in the Scott case, reportedly the result of a single
holdout juror, suggests that the patience and faith Haley extolled are actually
civic liabilities, which benefit a judicial system that is incapable in most
instances of justly evaluating its own officers. South Carolina’s residents
remained peaceful following the Scott shooting, but to nonchalant bureaucracy
peace appears to be identical to passivity.
In the wake of the non-verdict, Haley urged more patience. There
would be a new trial, she said. “Justice is not always immediate, but we must
all have faith that it will be served.” Senator Tim Scott, the black Republican
whom Haley appointed to the Senate, in 2012, and who spoke out on the Senate
floor this summer about his own experiences of racial profiling, released a
statement saying, too, that “we must continue to have faith in our judicial
system.” This bypassed the damning fact that the jury—six white men, five white
women, and a single black man, in a county that as of the last census is
thirty per cent black—was unable to unanimously determine that it is
illegal to shoot an unarmed man in the back. Scott’s mother spoke to the press
about her belief that God would provide justice—an altogether reasonable
recourse given the failure of human beings to do the same. “It’s not over until
God says it’s over,” she said.
There are other implications. The current conversation
around police use of excessive force is focussed on the idea that body cameras
can regulate police behavior. Yet the outcome of Slager’s trial should remind
us of something we have known since the Rodney King verdict, twenty-four years
ago: even video evidence cannot overcome subjective bias in the
criminal-justice system. Taken in total, the reluctance of juries to hold
police accountable is an inversion of the “fake news” crisis in the
Presidential election. There, a gullible public believes outrageous claims that
reaffirm its world view. In the criminal-justice system, as black America has
long known, an indifferent public sees evidence of outrageous actions but
chooses not to believe it in order to preserve its world view. We have moved
far beyond facts. The only novelty is that the rest of the country is now
seeing it.
Jelani Cobb has been a contributor
to The New Yorker and newyorker.com since 2012, writing
frequently about race, politics, history, and culture.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
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