From: barnhart@ddsw1.mcs.com (Mr. Aaron Barnhart)
Subject: Re: Mssrs. King & Denny
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 1993 06:02:14 GMT
Organization: Evanston, Illinois, U.S.A.

galan@netlink.cts.com (Greg Gross) wrote:
:At the risk of unleashing the flame-fest of all time, here goes:
:
[butane canister unveiled]
:
:Neither the beating of Rodney King nor that travesty of a verdict can 
:justify what happened to Reginald Denny, nor can it justify acquitting 
:those who assaulted him.
:
:Justice can't be reduced to a simple tit-for-tat. 
:
:In NY right now, a lot of Jews are outraged that a young black man was 
:acquitted recently in the stabbing death of a Jewish man.  In their 
:outrage (rightly or wrongly), should they feel entitled to snatch some 
:young brother out of his passing vehicle and beat him within an inch of 
:his life, as was done to Denny?
:

Funny you should mention that --

"The Hasidim of Crown Heights did not late last month burn their
neighborhood or otherwise turn it into South-Central Los Angeles.
But in almost every other respect, the acquittal of Lemrick Nelson
Jr., a black teenager, in the August 1991 slaying of Yankel
Rosenbaum, an ultra-orthodox Jew from Australia, has an uncanny
resemblance to the Rodney King case. We did not attend the trial,
but it is hard to believe that one or more policeman planted on
Nelson both a blood-stained knife and three bloodied dollar bills
(all matching in DNA testing the victim's own blood type), that
the confession that Nelson was said to have made to police and
then retracted was either never made or extracted under duress,
that the identification Rosenbaum made of his assailant in his
last moments was in error or never occurred, and that each of the
prosecution witnesses was lying about the evidence as he knew it.

"Apparently Nelson's own father doesn't believe that the policy
tried to grame his son. He was quoted in the New York _Daily News_
as saying after the verdict that God had forgiven his son.  Forgiven
him for what?  Some believe the verdict is a reflection of the low
confidence New York's minorities now have in the policy.  Maybe.
We fear that, as in the King case, simple racial loyalty may
have had much to do with the jurors' decision.  Rosenbaum was the
altogether random victim of a mob of young black men who assaulted
him, we are told, as an expression of rage at the death of a black
child in an accident causedf by a car in the motorcade of the
Lubavitcher Rebbe.  Although there were many participants in the
violence, Nelson was the only one arrested.  The Hasidim believed
in his guilt, yet assumed that jury of six blacks, four Hispanics,
and two whites would never assert it, and that the presumption that 
the Hasidim wouldn't riot somehow guaranteed this verdict.

"We suspect that they may be right on all counts.  We may already
be at the point where to do justice in a racially laden trial, a
jury will have to be made up of individuals who are not the defendant's
peers, psychologically and socially unbound by any ties, however
abstract, to both victim and accused.  Citizens of other planets,
perhaps."

-- The New Republic, 11/23/92

A.

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