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Indelible Substance
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Police Brutality, Corruption, and Systemic Racism
Healing, Progress, and Collective Consciousness
Justice, Perspective, and Ambiguity
Individuals vs. Institutions
Action vs. Symbolic Gesture
Summary
Analysis
Smith interviews an anonymous male juror in the Simi Valley trial. They’re sitting in the man’s quiet, dimly-lit house. The man is soft-spoken. He remembers how there were plainclothes policemen everywhere once the jurors returned to the courtroom to announce their verdict. The juror knew people would be upset by the verdict, but he never could have predicted the chaos that would ensue. Had he known what his role in the not-guilty verdict would put his family through, he might have told the judge he could no longer participate in the trial. The juror begins to cry.
The Simi Valley trial was King’s first trial. It was located in Ventura County, adjacent to Los Angeles. None of the 12 jurors was Black. Smith presents the juror in a sympathetic light. The audience’s instinct might be to judge the man for delivering a not guilty verdict, but the man’s soft-spoken demeanor and the suffering he has endured in the aftermath of the trial lends him an air of sympathy.
Themes
The juror recalls how the police escorted them to the bus, telling them not to worry about any rocks and bottles people might throw at them, since the bus’s glass windows were bulletproof. When the jurors arrived at their hotel, reporters hounded them for interviews. One reporter asked, “Why are you hiding your heads in shame?” When the juror arrived home after the trial, the same “obnoxious reporter” was there, trying to speak to the juror’s wife. The juror slammed the door in the reporter’s face. He recalls how the reporter moved down the block but proceeded to film his house. He remembers watching on TV as Mayor Bradley and President Bush condemned the jurors’ verdict. He felt as though he and the other jurors had been set up and compares the jurors to “pawns that were thrown away by the system.”
The harassment the juror received after the trial presents an interesting distinction between the individual and the system. The reporter’s demand to know “why [the jurors] are hiding [their] heads in shame” assumes the jurors are personally responsible for the verdict, yet this juror implies that the jurors are being scapegoated. The reporter’s accusations attribute all responsibility to the individual jurors and none to the legal system’s quirks, for instance. This is what the juror alludes to when he claims that he and the other jurors were “pawns that were thrown away by the system.”
Themes
The juror remembers how, after reading their verdicts to the court, the judge had “a look of disdain on his face.” Additionally, even though the judge had the right to withhold the jurors’ names to protect them from facing harassment and threats, he failed to do so. As a result, the juror received numerous threatening letters and phone calls, and newspapers published some of the jurors’ addresses. The juror reveals that more disturbing than these threats was when the KKK sent the jurors a letter expressing their support and inviting them to join their group. “And we all just were: / No, oh! / God!” says the juror.
Similarly, the judge’s “look of disdain” blames the jurors who were, to the juror’s mind, only making informed decisions in accordance with the judicial process. Many jurors were appalled at having to render a verdict they found legally just but morally abhorrent. The juror further emphasizes the disconnect between his morality and legal obligation by voicing his disgust at being solicited by the KKK after the trial.
Themes
