When the not guilty verdicts were announced in the Amadou Diallo case, a friend called me to ask what I thought. He assumed I would be outraged at the miscarriage of justice. Perhaps something in my 60s past, or my known antipathy to guns, caused him to assume I would react this way.
But I didn’t. I had followed the case closely enough to have some serious doubts about it. Most of all, though, I found the words “split second” going through my mind again and again. Under some pretty tough conditions, in a society obsessed with guns, on streets