Residents Ponder Whether Justice Was Served : Reaction: Some contend that racial hurt was the motivator behind decision. Law enforcement officials are devastated by the jury's ruling.

By ANDREW D. BLECHMAN

Oct. 4, 1995 12 AM PT

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

Streets cleared. High school students from Oak Park to Ventura put down their books. Judges at the Ventura County Hall of Justice halted their trials, and deputies huddled around a courtroom television set.

Cafeteria cooks at Oxnard College stopped work to see the jury pronounce O. J. Simpson not guilty of double murder, and students roared with applause.

“I think it was the right verdict,” said a jubilant Curtis Clay, 19. “With a reasonable doubt, you’re supposed to be inno cent, and you have to say there was definitely a reasonable doubt.”

But there was no joy at Roxy’s Deli in Thousand Oaks, where waitresses said the family of murder victim Ron Goldman often comes by for a bite to eat.

“We all ought to go to Simi Valley and riot,” one middle-aged woman said to about a dozen people crowded around an outdoor television set. “This is just awful.”

The verdict may have been swift and certain, but few county residents could agree Tuesday whether the Simpson jury’s action amounted to justice.

In a case that relentlessly picked at the scabs of America’s racial wounds, some saw racial hurt as the great motivator behind the decision.

“I truly feel it had a lot to do with the Rodney King verdict,” Simi Valley homemaker Sharon Bone said of the infamous trial in which four Los Angeles police officers were acquitted of beating black motorist Rodney G. King. “The jury said, ‘The police here are not going to get away with anything because in the Rodney King case, they got off.’ ”

To some African-American residents of the county, the outcome had a deep resonance.

Clay, the Oxnard College student, said he was happy to see a black man finally get justice because he could afford it.

“O. J. could buy a better trial than others,” said Clay, referring to Simpson’s pricey legal counsel. “A lot of people can’t do that.”

Amiri Shihib was even blunter.

“If he didn’t have the money, he would’ve been convicted,” said Shihib, 21, who agreed with the verdict.

But other African-American residents were less concerned with the trial’s broad social implications.

“I thought he was guilty,” said Oxnard resident Roxanne Avalos, 20, who is black. “Race didn’t matter one way or the other.”

What really mattered, echoed Simi Valley City Councilman Paul Miller, was money.

“Wealth is the real issue here, not race,” said Miller, who is a former Simi Valley police chief and served 20 years with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

“It’s fairly common for people who commit a crime to go free,” Miller said. “The only difference in this case is that the media has focused on Mr. Simpson daily for more than a year.”

Perhaps no one took the verdict more to heart than county police officers and prosecutors, who were almost to a person devastated by what they believed to be a grossly unjust decision.

“I think people’s confidence in the justice system has been shaken,” said Ventura County Sheriff Larry Carpenter, who watched the drama with several deputies and staffers in his office. “Everybody’s groping for a reason why the jury did what it did. It was an unbelievable verdict, given the evidence.”

Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury’s terse remarks set the tone for his office, where dozens of prosecutors somberly gathered in small groups and debated the sometimes elusive ideal of justice.

Tuesday was “a day that will live in judicial infamy,” Bradbury said in a written statement. “A day that saw a guilty man go free; a day that racism triumphed over evidence and reason; a day that justice set aside her scales and wept . . . for Ron, for Nicole and for herself.”

Law enforcement wasn’t the only profession left with a black eye, county prosecutor Matthew J. Hardy III said.

“A lot of times, the public perception of lawyers as money-grubbing scum balls willing to do anything to win is very accurate,” Hardy said.

Said colleague Peter D. Kossoris: “The legal profession deserves to look bad--and I hope the public will demand some changes.”

What needs to change is the way that some police officers do business, public defender Michael Schwartz countered.

“We know some cops lie, frame suspects and plant evidence,” he said.

Zane Smith, another public defender, said the verdict was a consequence of that kind of police behavior: “Sometimes those chickens come home to roost.”

Which is where the lesson lies, according to prosecutor Kevin De Noce. “There’s one thing everyone can agree on--that the jurors didn’t trust the police,” he said.

“Some type of amends need to be made between law enforcement and the jury pool responsible for producing this verdict.”

But making amends was not on the minds of friends and neighbors who grieved Tuesday outside the Agoura home of victim Ronald Goldman’s family. One couple who lived nearby registered disgust at the outcome of the emotionally wrenching case.

“It’s a travesty of justice. All you have to do is lose a child to know,” the man said, his voice trailing off. His wife said that she, too, had lost a child many years ago.

“They just didn’t listen to the evidence,” she said of the jurors.

Across the street from the Goldman home, neighbor Teresa Schwanauer, an administrator at Amgen, had left work early after the verdicts, unable to concentrate. She said many employees gathered in the Amgen cafeteria to hear the verdicts.

“There was mostly shock,” she said. “But there were a few cheers. I didn’t expect that.”

If the jurors had deliberated longer, Schwanauer said, she would have felt that they had considered the evidence. But their quick verdicts told her that the jurors treated the subject too lightly.

“I’m disgusted with the jurors,” she said, unloading groceries into her house. “I have absolutely no faith whatsoever in the justice system now.”

Staff writers Miguel Bustillo, Joanna Miller and Carlos V. Lozano, and correspondents Scott Hadly, Paul Elias and Catherine Saillant contributed to this story.

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