Politics & Power Quote by Lance Ito

Ito’s line reads like judicial neutrality, but it’s also a quiet act of damage control from the man who presided over the O.J. Simpson trial-the televised legal spectacle that made “the system” into primetime entertainment. On the surface, he’s defending transparency: let citizens watch, judge the judgment, and learn how justice is assembled. The phrasing is almost studiously bland, as if caution itself were a civic virtue.

The subtext is sharper. “Works or doesn’t work” is an unusually candid admission from a sitting judge: he isn’t promising legitimacy, only exposure. That pivot matters. Ito isn’t arguing that cameras improve justice; he’s arguing that scrutiny has value even when it reveals failure. In a trial where perceptions of policing, race, celebrity, and prosecutorial competence collided, legitimacy wasn’t something the court could simply declare. It had to be negotiated in public.

His insistence that “the American public” can “make up their own mind” also shifts responsibility. If viewers conclude the verdict is unjust, the court can point to process: you saw what we saw. It’s democratic rhetoric applied to a non-democratic institution. Judges aren’t elected to reflect public opinion in a given case, yet Ito frames the audience as a kind of national jury after the fact, tasked with rendering a cultural verdict on the legal one.

The intent, then, isn’t just to justify televised proceedings. It’s to reframe the trial’s chaos as civic education-a way to claim that even a compromised-looking system can redeem itself through visibility.