"The O.J. Simpson case, they had no understanding of that DNA evidence, and didn't want to"
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Wambaugh’s line lands like a cop’s dry aside after the paperwork is done: the scandal wasn’t just what the jury didn’t know, it was what they refused to learn. By pairing “no understanding” with “and didn’t want to,” he turns ignorance from an accident into a choice, a moral posture. That extra clause is the blade. It suggests that the O.J. Simpson trial wasn’t merely a courtroom drama but a referendum on which kinds of truth people were willing to accept in 1990s America.
The context matters: DNA evidence was still culturally new, cloaked in lab jargon and statistical thinking most people hadn’t been trained to trust. The defense successfully reframed scientific proof as something like opinion: susceptible to contamination, bias, and institutional misconduct. Wambaugh, coming out of police writing and procedural realism, hears the deeper noise: a public primed to treat expertise as just another narrative, especially when the expert institutions (police, prosecutors, labs) had credibility problems of their own.
The subtext is bleakly modern. “Didn’t want to” hints at motivated reasoning before the phrase went mainstream: when stakes are racial, political, or celebrity-soaked, evidence becomes negotiable. Science doesn’t lose because it’s wrong; it loses because it’s inconvenient. Wambaugh’s intent isn’t to relitigate guilt so much as to indict a culture that prefers a story it can perform - suspicion, grievance, spectacle - over a truth that requires humility and mental effort.
The context matters: DNA evidence was still culturally new, cloaked in lab jargon and statistical thinking most people hadn’t been trained to trust. The defense successfully reframed scientific proof as something like opinion: susceptible to contamination, bias, and institutional misconduct. Wambaugh, coming out of police writing and procedural realism, hears the deeper noise: a public primed to treat expertise as just another narrative, especially when the expert institutions (police, prosecutors, labs) had credibility problems of their own.
The subtext is bleakly modern. “Didn’t want to” hints at motivated reasoning before the phrase went mainstream: when stakes are racial, political, or celebrity-soaked, evidence becomes negotiable. Science doesn’t lose because it’s wrong; it loses because it’s inconvenient. Wambaugh’s intent isn’t to relitigate guilt so much as to indict a culture that prefers a story it can perform - suspicion, grievance, spectacle - over a truth that requires humility and mental effort.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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