When the media gets it right, but the jury doesn't

This isn't the first time I've felt this way. On Oct. 3, 1995, OJ Simpson was found "not guilty" by a jury of his peers in Los Angeles. I was craning my head around an open window to watch the one television at work in nearby Burbank. There in LA, the trial was not only sensational but it was hard to think of much else during it.

I feel similarly today, when an unjust verdict was decided in the George Zimmerman trial. While I respect the jury -- a phrase that's becoming pat to say -- I don't respect a system that allows a defense to hire better lawyers, or draw ineffective witnesses for the prosecution. While we all sympathize with poor Rachel Jeantel, it's fair to say she didn't do her dead friend many favors. Throughout her testimony, I wanted to hug her and say, "It's all right; just tell the truth."

But in the U.S. justice system, as with many the world over, truth is subordinate to clever lawyering, polished witnesses and a lack of fumbling on behalf of the other side. And then there's the jury.

In the OJ case it was African Americans who got him off. In the George Zimmerman trial, it was mainly Caucasians. Isn't this the real statement about race relations in America today? Have we learned nothing since 1995?

Throughout this, though, I was proud of my fellow journalists, from the eloquent Charles Blow with the New York Times to the steady Don Lemon on CNN last night. It was more than a little ironic that it was an African American journalist, and not the equally erudite Wolf Blitzer or Anderson Cooper, who was there to soothe us when the bad news was delivered.

The media got it right this time; the jury did not.

That does not mean I blame the jury. In my experience, most people are doing the best they can in life. But justice would have been much better served by a half-African American jury. We are not far enough along in race relations in this country to bury our heads in the sand and say, 'oh well, whites will get it right, too.'

No, too many upper middle-class Americans living in gated communities, people who've run away from hooded teenagers in convenience stores, who want to protect their SUVS, their precious Ikea furniture, their perfectly manicured lawns and children's boarding school futures were watching.

This writer has worked with many children throughout New York's more impoverished neighborhoods in Harlem, the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens. I am frequently reminded of how ambitious, smart, funny and forgiving most of these children are compared to the privileged white kids of, say, a Marin or Fairfield County.

I don't hate my own race. I don't hate the American justice system. I hate injustice.

And last night, justice was not delivered in America.

Photo by David Shankbone, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Mar 21, 2012, New York Union Sq. Million Hoodie March