The courtroom was silent when the jury returned from its deliberations and delivered its verdict: guilty. Tensions had been rising across the country as the trial of this murderer-in-uniform reached its climax. Advocates for the defendant had objected to the president’s comments which, they said, had prejudiced the case for the defense. Yet, there was an initial consensus that, imperfect as the case had been, the verdict was correct.
The Washington Post maintained a stony silence, but the editorial board of The New York Times observed that, although “the quest for justice is an endless and often frustrating journey,” there “can be no serious doubt about the justice” of the guilty verdict. If nothing else, it finally demonstrated that justice is possible. One of the nation’s most prominent and respected religious leaders hoped that some good might come out of the case. “There may even be a triumph emerging for future justice, love, mercy, forgiveness and peace!”
The following day, the court sentenced Lt. William L. Calley, jr. to life in prison for the murder of 22 civilians in the Vietnamese village of My Lai three years earlier. It was March 30, 1971.
Almost exactly 50 years later, I am still processing the verdict in another case of uniformed murder the day after the jury in Derek Chauvin’s trial for the murder of George Floyd returned from its day of deliberation. The details of the two cases differ in so many ways, and yet it is difficult not view the one through the lens of the other. Was justice, such a worthy but elusive goal as the Times opined in 1971, finally achieved? Could the verdict, as the Reverend Billy Graham hoped a half-century ago, herald a national reconciliation and an epoch of “justice, love, mercy, forgiveness and peace?”
Any historical comparison, the historian Barbara Tuchman observed in A Distant Mirror, will inevitably yield a dark answer. And the lesson from history today is that no, there is no justice.
I am relieved and gratified that the jury found the defendant guilty on all counts. For once, a jury in a case of police murder actually looked at the evidence. This, in itself, feels like a significant triumph yet it nauseates me to think that something so obvious, so inescapably correct – that a police officer who brazenly murdered a Black man in broad daylight, in public, on a busy street, has been convicted of the murder of a Black man – seems like something of a miracle.
This is America: a place where the obvious is miraculous.
It is an affront to the very idea of justice to say that “justice has been done” or even that “a small quantum of justice has been done.” In a just America, there would never have had to be a trial because neither Floyd, nor Breonna Taylor, nor Walter Scott, nor Daunte Wright, nor Ma’Khia Bryant, nor any of the others whose names we know, and more whose names we don’t, would have been murdered by racist police officers. Justice is a universal idea that applies to all people at all times, and not merely a salve that we apply to its most obvious and egregious breaches.
Moreover, as much as I am satisfied that Chauvin will be going to prison, where I hope he will spend the rest of his life, he did not act alone. He was not a proverbial bad apple in a bushel of righteous fruit. He was authorized, validated, and protected by an entire system of enablers. He committed the murder, but he did it on their behalf, with their endorsement.
I have little doubt that Medaria Arradondo, the chief of the Minneapolis Police, a tireless advocate for racial equality throughout his almost-30-year career, and the man who courageously broke the “Blue Wall” in this case, was motivated by the quest for justice. But I have to ask: why did it happen this time? Did Chauvin’s comrades, fellow-travelers, and his enablers in the Minneapolis Police, the city, state, and national governments, merely take note of the way the wind is blowing today, and serve him up as their scapegoat and sin offering?
We can comfort ourselves that the mass uprisings against police brutality and murder last spring and summer produced results; that they inscribed, in theory at least, the basic and immutable truth that Black lives matter, that no jury could acquit so flagrant a killer without considering the hell that would inevitably break loose. Yet I have to wonder: what does it say about justice if we have to take to the streets to obtain it? And will the lesson even really stick?
I inevitably return to my thoughts of Lt. Calley, who was sentenced to life in prison 50 years ago for an unspeakable war crime but released, after a mere three years of house arrest, in 1974. What of the chain of command that ordered the slaughter and directed the helicopters to land in My Lai and which ordered the men that day to “shoot anything that moves” – which they dutifully did – and the Pentagon PR flaks who told the press that “we engaged Viet Cong resistance,” and the politicians and civil servants who covered it all up?
General Samuel Koster was reassigned. Captain Ernest Medina and Colonel Oran Henderson, acquitted of all charges, quietly retired to civilian life and died prosperous old men. President Nixon appointed General Creighton Adams, the overall US commander in Vietnam, to be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1972. And, even though the Winter Soldier Investigation of 1971 revealed that the blood orgy at My Lai was far from an isolated incident – indeed, it was business-as-usual – and there were other atrocities before and after, Calley’s conviction was a rare event. The classified report of the Pentagon’s Vietnam War Crimes Working Group ran to 9,000 pages.
So, we must wonder about Chauvin’s partners, colleagues, sergeants, lieutenants, commanders, and inspectors who enabled a 19-year career riddled with misconduct complaints and disciplinary actions and allowed him to be at that place at that time last May to commit murder. And equally, we must question the commitment to justice of all of the police officers, union representatives, lawyers, and elected officials who make up the bricks and mortar of the “Blue Wall.” Now that they have served up their blood sacrifice, will they feel that their sins have been expiated and go back to business-as-usual?
There is a chink in the wall today, to be sure; evidence at long last that accountability for police brutality is possible. But that evidence should chill us to the bones, for if it was possible in this case, then why was it not possible for Philando Castile, Eric Garner, Laquan McDonald, and all the others in the past and future? Hannah Arendt wrote in Eichmann in Jerusalem that a single incident of resistance to evil is incontrovertible proof of the banality of evil.
Consequently, I cannot regard yesterday’s verdict as evidence of justice, or even a modicum of justice. But only that the “endless and often frustrating journey” toward justice might yield a small measure of hope, for without that is only despair. As Tuchman wrote, looking into the distant mirror of 14th France, an “event of great agony is bearable only in the belief that it will bring about a better world. When it does not, as in the aftermath of another vast calamity in 1914-18, disillusion is deep and moves on to self-doubt and self-disgust.”
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Photo courtesy of NBC News