Simpson death opportunity to focus on domestic violence

I’m pretty sure that the number of people who are mourning the death of OJ Simpson can fit into the trunk of the smallest car Hertz ever rented.

He was a man who killed his wife Nicole, as well as innocent stranger Ron Goldman, and was acquitted because he played the race card.

Any good thing that he ever did in his life, and he did some exceptional things, will always be obliterated by those criminal acts.

As a human being, I am repulsed by the fact that he treated women like a punching bag.

As a lawyer, I am repulsed by the fact that he did the same with our legal system.

But perhaps his death can serve a purpose, beyond the encouraging thought that clearly there is a hell, otherwise where would we situate his soul?

It will be a chance for us to focus on domestic violence, the generational abuse that ends in death and the destruction of families.

In my immigration practice, I encounter women who have been the victims of their spouses, other family members, strangers and even police and government officials.

The incidence of domestic violence is extremely high in many countries in South and Central America, in Africa, in the Middle East and South Asia.

If you were to shadow me in immigration court, you would see women from Egypt who have been tortured by their ex-police-officer husbands, women from El Salvador who were raped by their uncles, women from Mali who were beaten by their fathers as punishment for not marrying the men chosen for them, and women from Pakistan who were shot at by the Taliban for going to school.

These things happen every day, in every corner of the world.

And they happen in California, on the steps of a mansion owned by the rich and beautiful wife of an iconic athlete.

Domestic violence has no language, no citizenship, no age, no profession, no sexual orientation, no religion and in some cases, no gender requirements.

It is the one crime that for years went unreported in the United States for this simple reason: It was not a crime.

When I was growing up, men could rape their wives and the marital contract shielded them from criminal prosecution. That’s changed, thank God, but it’s still very hard to get any kind of protection from the authorities when the person beating your face into a facsimile of raw meat is the person who owns the house you live in.

One of the reasons I was disgusted with the OJ verdict was the reaction from some people who both tried to put the victim, Nicole Simpson, on trial while at the same time insisting on bringing race into the equation.

Nicole was a rich white woman, and some people had a hard time extending her the same sympathy that they would have to an impoverished Black or Hispanic woman who’d been terrorized by her abuser.

There was that sense that she had options they didn’t, that she could have run away, that money was her safe haven.

And as someone who understands that money cannot protect anyone from a person who wants you dead, this enraged me.

It also reminds me of the men I represented who were themselves victims of domestic violence either at the hands of their wives or their male partners.

People refused to believe they were “real” victims. Imagine the pain of being told that your ordeal is fabricated, or it was your fault. And then there was the race card. If Nicole had been a Black woman, it’s still possible that OJ would have been acquitted.

I choose to think, though, that the phenomenon of jury nullification wouldn’t have worked, because the subliminal message in the OJ acquittal was “we are protecting a Black man who probably committed the crime to serve justice to all the other Black men who were wrongly punished because of white women’s lies.”

And while it is understandable that there would be anger about the Scottosboro Boys and the Emmet Tills, and all of the others whose names are lost to history, this should never come at the expense of a murdered woman.

People might deny that this was what happened.

People might say that the late Johnny Cochran just did what great lawyers do: argue zealously for the rights of their clients.

The guiltier they are, the more zealously you fight. People might also say that OJ still paid a steep price in terms of complete ostracization, and the loss of most of his earthly wealth.

And those of us who believe in karma, and have a slightly more Old Testament view of justice than what is taught in the Baltimore Catechism can take comfort in the fact that at the end, he suffered.

But that doesn’t change the fact that Nicole Simpson has been dead for 30 years, that her son and daughter have been without a mother for 30 years, that the Goldman family lost a beloved son because of misdirected, homicidal rage, and that a murderer in all but the sentence was able to spend those last three decades of his life in relative freedom.

Hopefully, his death will bring some solace to the extended network of his victims. And hopefully it will also remind us of the horrific scourge of domestic violence that still exists, along with the repellent attempts to racialize human tragedy.