Justice is rendered. Some will celebrate while others will begrudge the conclusion. Our society benefits because the court system works, but all of us lose. The rapist goes to prison, probably for many years. Yet his victims remain victimized. Their lives were forever worsened by this man’s terrible actions. It is satisfying that he’ll be jailed, but nobody is the better. He was some sort of former football player who had become a police officer in Oklahoma City. His victims were African American women from poor neighborhoods. He abused his position to take advantage of them; one as young as seventeen and others older. Thirteen in total were brave enough to confront him in court. I hadn’t heard of the case until today’s papers proclaimed that the verdict was soon to be reached. There was doubt about how the case would be resolved. There was question about whether an “apparently all-white” jury would find the man, Daniel Holtzclaw, guilty. These doubts were increased because the case took place in a state with a controversial racial past. All of this in a United States trembling with racial strain. In the end, there were many charges and while some were declared “not guilty,” many of the worst were “guilty”. The rapist wept openly in court. Amazingly the verdict was delivered live on streaming video. The spectacle of a man being told that he was going to spend many years in prison was available for all to see. Human tragedy at its most extreme in the visual and linguistic context of dry, sober, and boring legal bureaucracy. The tension between the drama of a life condemned and the routineness of justice were apparent in the contrast between the rapist’s sobbing and the straight-faced expressions of those around him and the one-more-day-at-work tone of the judge’s voice. Race crossed with policing, live on the internet. Justice rendered in twenty-first century America.
