Monday, June 22, 2009

November 19, 2006: Rush to Judgement?

Last Tuesday night an Iranian UCLA senior, Mostafa Tabatabainejad, declined to show his identification to UCLA police officers when requested to do so after 11 PM in Powell Library. According to his attorney, Stephen Yagman, and as reported by the Los Angeles Times, he "declined because he thought he was being singled out because of his Middle Eastern appearance." The Times continued the account as follows:

The lawyer said Tabatabainejad eventually decided to leave the library but when an officer refused the student's request to take his hand off him, the student fell limp to the floor, again to avoid participating in what he considered a case of racial profiling. After police started firing the Taser, Tabatabainejad tried to "get the beating, the use of brutal force, to stop by shouting and causing people to watch. Generally, police don't want to do their dirties in front of a lot of witnesses."

He said Tabatabainejad was hit by the Taser five times and suffered "moderate to severe contusions" on his right side.

The Web page for this story, filed the following Friday after Tabatabainejad had retained Yagman's services, also included a link to a YouTube site with "video evidence" of the incident. This site has attracted considerable attention and provides links to several supposed "on the spot" recordings, one of which is also available on Truthdig. As of this morning, this particularly video has been viewed 344,777 times and accrued 2976 comments. The comment count at Truthdig is only up to 46 but is more "on topic" than the YouTube comments (such as "Worst camerawork I've ever seen, even for a citizen journalist..."). However, it is because I agree with this particular comment that I put those scare quotes around the word "evidence." At the end of the day, there is far more audio than video here; so one can assume that, should this matter ever come to trial, there will be justifiable debate over whether it would be legally admissible as evidence. (For that matter I can imagine the judge asking which members of the panel from which a jury was selected have seen any of the YouTube videos.)

The Truthdig comments exhibit an extremely passionate reaction to the incident. From my vantage point in the grand scheme of history, I was almost immediately reminded of when the National Guard fired on protesting student at Kent State and the rhetorically passionate photograph taken of the consequences. In the wake of yesterday's musical reflections, I was also reminded of when and why Coltrane composed "Alabama." However, it is important to remember that rhetoric is not logic (and, for that matter, that legal decisions are not necessarily made on the basis of either logic or rhetoric). Therefore, in the wake of all this passion, I feel a need to reproduce my own contribute to the Truthdig comments:

About ten years ago there was a case in Northern California involving environmental protesters getting pepper-sprayed by the police. My wife decided to give the students in her class the project of trying to interview as many of the parties involved in this incident as they could. Sure enough: both sides explained the motives for their actions clearly and sympathetically. What did the kids learn? Be very careful when the media try to get you to take sides when you do not know all the facts! Ten years ago this kind of dispute could have been settled by a good impartial judge. Today I’m not so sure ...

What I do know for sure is that there is more to this story than will ever be resolved by YouTube videos or Truthdig comments. The lesson this time around is that there is a fine line between creating forums for public discourse and muddying the waters of due process of law. I have the greatest sympathy for any judge who will have to deal with Mr. Yagman.

No comments:

Post a Comment