Abstract
Last year I began work on a long-term project studying the historical intersection of race, lawyers, and ethics in the context of the American criminal justice system. Informed by the jurisprudential movement of Critical Race Theory (CRT), the project investigates the rhetoric of race or "race-talk" in criminal defense advocacy and ethics dealing with racially motivated acts of private violence. The first part of this ongoing project, inaugurated in the recent essay "Defending Racial Violence," explores the rhetoric of race in cases of black-on-white violence. The second part, now in progress, examines such rhetoric in cases of white-on black violence, specifically in the context of lynching. A third part, soon to be commenced, will survey the rhetoric of race in cases of racially motivated acts of public violence.
In search of a starting point for this larger, multipronged project, I turned to the 1993 trial of Damian Williams and Henry Watson in Los Angeles County Superior Court on charges of attempted murder and aggravated mayhem arising out of the beating of Reginald Denny and seven others during the South Central Los Angeles riots of April 1992. To win acquittals, the Williams-Watson defense teams refuted evidence of intent and voluntary conduct required to prove criminal liability for murder and mayhem. The defense relied on a "group contagion" theory of mob violence-incited diminished capacity. Invoked as a partially exculpatory defense, the theory suggests that young black males as a group, and the black community as a whole, share a pathological tendency to commit acts of violence in mob situations and, by extension, in other social situations. Both Williams and Watson are young, male, and black. Denny is white.
The troubling conjunction of race, racialized defense strategy, and purportedly race-neutral ethics in the context of the Williams-Watson trial prodded me to develop tentative, working hypotheses regarding the rhetoric of race in criminal defense advocacy. In "Interracial Violence and Racialized Narratives: Discovering the Road Less Traveled," Robin Barnes challenges these descriptive and prescriptive hypotheses. Because Barnes's critique implicates issues vital to the application of Critical Race Theory to practice, I Will first clarify the challenged hypotheses and then meet her objections.
