An echo of "The Trial of the Century?"

The wheel of karma has turned for a violent man. OJ Simpson is living behind bars. No, Simpson's murder trial wasn't "The Trial of the Century." Neither was the Lindbergh baby case, nor the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, nor the Scopes "Monkey Trial."

The greatest trial of the 20th century, the one with the most important consequences for humanity, was that of the 21 principal surviving Nazi leaders at Nuremberg. To the extent that human rights are enshrined in international law it's because of the precedents set at that trial. The sensational revelations of the Nuremberg trials led directly to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the development of international humanitarian law.

OJ went on trial shortly after I returned to Panama, having closed my law practice in the United States. I didn't want to watch it but at the time I shared an office with a woman who's ga-ga about celebrities, so the TV set was on. It made me sick.

I did my years of legal battle against domestic violence. As a child I did my years seeing it, cowering from it, running away from it in stark terror.

OJ Simpson is a domineering jock who goes off the deep end about his trophies, and it was the fatal misfortune of Nicole Brown (Simpson) that in his perverse mind he considered her one of those. The ensuing criminal trial was a demonstration of prosecutorial incompetence and of doubts created by investigators trying to stretch a strong circumstantial case into an open-and shut one. The defense team did what it needed to do and raised arguably reasonable doubts. In the civil trial, a jury properly found that the preponderance of evidence showed that Simpson did it.

This is the banal story of a man who should have been thrown in jail for domestic violence long before, using his status to continue a pattern of brutality. That sort of impunity was one of the things that made me hate the practice of law.

Worse yet was standing up to a guy who was threatening me for interfering with his "right" to batter some woman he considered his property, getting the court to order him out of her life, and then seeing her hook up with another man with the same pathology.

As a "women's issue," domestic violence is about a change of heart that's far more difficult than its intellectual component. But mostly domestic violence is a "men's issue," a matter of an intellectual, emotional and above all moral decision wherein men acknowledge that they are not the one from whom they learned that behavior and refuse to live that way.

Let justice be done. Let human rights be protected. Let the use of violence by men to control women be reviled in the same way that racist violence was repudiated at Nuremberg. And let us consign this particular sexist punk to the obscurity he merits.