When I stopped watching my Oscar Grant Twitter feed, and looked for information about what was going on with the verdict and its aftermath in the major media outlets, it was as if he didn't exist.
Here's a summary of what happened from today's New York Times:
A white Bay Area transit officer was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter on Thursday by a Los Angeles jury in the shooting death of an unarmed black man on Jan. 1, 2009, ending a closely watched trial that percolated with racial tension and cries for peace in the city of Oakland, Calif., where the killing occurred.
The officer, Johannes Mehserle, 28, had been accused of a more serious charge, second-degree murder, in the death of Oscar Grant III, 22, a butcher’s apprentice who was shot while lying face down on a platform after being removed from a Bay Area Rapid Transit train during a fight.
This wasn't on the Times' homepage.
One of the things I like about Twitter is that you can tune in to any number of conversations and get the sense that whatever you're following is the most important (and only) thing happening in the world.
The majority of folks were in LeBron James World.
Without Twitter, I definitely wouldn't have had the same perspective on the Grant case.
This case is a very big deal to a lot of people, and it should be a bigger deal to a lot more.
***
Someone said "unless you were in that officer's situation, you have no right to judge him."
There are professions where life-or-death decisions and judgments need to be made in absurdly short periods of time -- think emergency room doctors, police officers, truck drivers. "We" always hope that the people making these critical decisions are well-trained, ethical professionals who possess consummate skills and respect for their fellow human beings.
At least that's my ideal.
In reality, there are times when good people make honest mistakes when they are doing their best.
More often than we'd like, not-so-good people make mistakes when they're not doing their best.
And both kinds of people, when they make egregious errors, are judged by the legal system. What color they are, their age, their profession, how much money they make, and where they are from shouldn't matter.
"Shouldn't" is the key word. The legal system, like society as a whole, is filled with biases small and large.
There are a lot of tragedies in the Oscar Grant story; the biggest is that an officer made an incorrect judgment and took a citizen's life.
If some can believe a trained officer can confuse a taser with a gun, it's likely others will believe a Los Angeles jury can confuse justice with injustice.
