New York
FOR THE PAST YEAR, if you were to express even a whisper of doubt here about the guilt of the four cops involved in the tragic shooting death of Amadou Diallo, you were treated as though you were dancing on the poor man’s grave. What justification, the Diallo fanatics would shout, could there possibly be for the firing of 41 bullets at an unarmed man in his vestibule?
According to the rainbow coalition of a jury that heard the Diallo case in Albany — made up of blacks, whites, women, men, somebody in a wheel-chair, a gay activist — the four officers had nothing but justification. The jurors were given almost every possible opportunity to convict Sean Carroll, Edward McMellon, Richard Murphy, and Kenneth Boss of something. The charges ran the gamut from the original “second-degree murder” down to a minor felony called “reckless endangerment.”
In all, there were six different possible crimes for which the cops could have been convicted. And so, 24 times, when asked the jury’s verdict, the forewoman said: “Not guilty.”
Then the bailiff asked the other jurors, “And so say you all?” And 24 times the jurors said, in unison, “Yes.”
Take that, Hillary Clinton. A month ago, during a meeting with black leaders, the carpetbagger candidate casually called the killing a “murder.” Her use of the word caused a mini-scandal, and Mrs. Clinton backed down from it, given the fact that the trial was about to begin — and we are all supposed to believe that people are innocent until proven guilty, right?
You might think the presumption of innocence would be especially important to a liberal like Mrs. Clinton. But this was the Amadou Diallo case — and when it came to the Amadou Diallo case and the liberals of New York City, the very notion of the presumption of innocence was considered somehow offensive. Four white cops had shot and killed a black man. That fact alone was considered almost prima facie evidence of their guilt, given how ugly relations can be between black people and police officers.
But what crime was it they were supposedly guilty of? According to Robert Johnson, the very political district attorney of the Bronx who convened the grand jury that indicted the cops, they were guilty of a “drive-by shooting” — which justified a charge of “second-degree murder.” The indictments should have been greeted with gasps of outrage and shock, because police officers are supposed to be protected from such treatment. As a society, we pay cops to apprehend dangerous criminals who might be carrying weapons of their own — and just as a soldier who kills on duty is not a murderer, neither is a police officer.
Johnson never offered a narrative of the case that differed from the version offered by the police officers, which was this: It was dark. Diallo was in the vestibule of his apartment building. Officer Sean Carroll saw something in Diallo’s hand when the man turned. He shouted “gun” and began firing. So did Officer Edward McMellon, but as McMellon fired, he fell down — and Diallo was still standing. The other two officers, who were the backup, thought McMellon had been shot by Diallo, and so they fired as well. The whole tragic business took less than 10 seconds.
But again, this was the Diallo case, and Johnson is black, and so was Diallo, and so were most of the protesters in town, and for months the city had been in an uproar, and justice had to be done. So what if “justice,” in Johnson’s politicized and racially Balkanized version of it, was actually the worst kind of injustice — the railroading of four police officers by the district attorney of one of the largest counties in the United States?
No outrage was expressed by the folks who are usually so quick to condemn prosecutorial overreach (see: Hillary Clinton). After all, by the time the indictments were handed down more than a thousand people had had themselves arrested in front of police headquarters, their hands placed in plastic handcuffs before the cameras, the charges later dismissed.
The demonstrations had no real purpose but to embarrass and harass mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who showed almost superhuman restraint when he refused to denounce the officers even as he expressed daily remorse for the tragedy that had occurred.
The demonstration’s organizers — among them two top advisers to Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign — wanted to discredit Giuliani’s crime-fighting efforts by discrediting the police department. In so doing, his brilliant record as mayor would be tarnished, and the left-liberals he has disenfranchised with his two mayoral victories and humiliated by his ability to govern a city they had made seemingly ungovernable might be able to hold their heads up once again.
They didn’t really care about Amadou Diallo. To Al Sharpton, to Susan Sarandon, and even to Hillary Clinton, Diallo is just a corpse to use against Giuliani. They hate Giuliani so much they were willing — they were eager — to see four innocent police officers sent to jail for 25 years in pursuit of a petty political agenda.
The jurors didn’t allow that to happen — and thank God.
Contributing editor John Podhoretz is a columnist for the New York Post.
