In Today’s America, Justice Is Still Deferred : King case: Lenient sentences dash hopes that videotapes would change way LAPD works.

U.S. District Judge John G. Davies’ extremely lenient sentencing of LAPD officers Stacey C. Koon and Laurence M. Powell reinforces the perception among many, if not most, blacks and people of color in South-Central Los Angeles and the ghettos of America that there is a double standard in our courts: one for white police officers convicted of crimes and one for blacks.

From my vantage point (I am almost a lifetime resident of South-Central Los Angeles), what I’m hearing is that “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” Discrimination, inequality and all kinds of racial double standards are alive and well 30 years after the greatest gains of the civil-rights era of the 1950s and ‘60s. There is both despair and anger that the professionals and “responsible citizens” of South-Central like me who are not members of the urban underclass and who have benefited from the civil-rights era gains can do nothing to dispel.

I recall a speech I heard in the ‘60s, during the Black Power era, given by Black Panther leader Alprentice (Bunchy) Carter at a rally in Los Angeles. Bunchy quoted a line from a poem by the noted black poet, Paul Lawrence Dunbar: “The life of a slave is not worth two dead flies on the scales of time.” This was shortly after the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.

Today, it would appear that Judge Davies is saying that the permanently maimed life of one descendant of slaves, Rodney King, was not worth “two dead flies on the scales of time.” If that was not his message, and that probably was not his intent, it certainly was perceived as that. While I found Davies’ warm praise for convicted felons Koon and Powell to be personally offensive, what was worse was his justification for the lenient sentence--that Rodney King essentially “brought it on himself” by resisting arrest.

The ante is now upped on the reaction to the anticipated conviction of the defendants in the Reginald Denny beating trial.

The community is certain that when (not if) the Denny defendants are convicted, that they will be sentenced to lengthy, if not life, sentences in state prison.

The happenstance videotaping of the King beating gave minority residents of Los Angeles familiar with LAPD justice a sense that now, finally, we have the evidence. Perhaps now we can get due process and end random beatings administered by some who may think, wrongly, that we are like “gorillas in the mist” and are to be so treated. Davies’ lenient sentencing tragically dashes that hope. This at a time when we desperately need to be pulling together as “Team America” to compete with “Team Japan” and “Team Germany,” rather than pulling apart because of racial disharmony exacerbated by economic decline and the perception of a two-tiered justice system.