The New York Times-20080129-Two Grievous Cases Seek Different Paths to Justice

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Two Grievous Cases Seek Different Paths to Justice

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Cesar Rodriguez may be the most despised man in New York. He will certainly do until a more likely candidate for the title comes along.

Mr. Rodriguez is on trial in Brooklyn, charged with the murder of his 7-year-old stepdaughter, Nixzmary Brown. When she died two years ago, she entered the unholy pantheon of brutalized children who died while in the care of those whose paramount duty was to keep them safe.

Whether by his own account or his lawyer's, Mr. Rodriguez has acknowledged using all his force to beat Nixzmary with his hands. He admits to having hit her repeatedly with a belt. He says he dunked her head in cold water, and used duct tape and bungee cords to tie her to a chair. A litter box was her toilet. She was emaciated. At her death, she weighed 37 pounds, roughly the weight of a child half her age.

But he didn't deliver the blows that killed her, Mr. Rodriguez says. His lawyer pins the blame on Nixzmary's mother, Nixzaliz Santiago, who may qualify as the most despised woman in New York until another contender turns up.

She, too, has been charged with murder, and is expected to stand trial once the Rodriguez case is wrapped up. When that will be is hard to say. On Monday, as through much of last week, testimony was suspended while the judge conferred behind closed doors with all the lawyers.

None of this is meant to judge Mr. Rodriguez's innocence or guilt. Even so, given what is known about his treatment of Nixzmary, it is hard to imagine a less sympathetic figure (except perhaps Ms. Santiago).

And yet a jury sworn to impartiality -- 10 women and 2 men -- was picked. It took a while, and a couple of hundred people first had to be questioned by the lawyers. But a panel was put together, a dozen Brooklynites pledged to keep minds open and mouths closed and to weigh the murder charge based solely on what they hear in the courtroom.

All of which makes more startling the latest developments in the unrelated Sean Bell case.

As you undoubtedly know, three police detectives have been charged -- two with manslaughter and one with reckless endangerment -- in the fatal shooting of Mr. Bell, the unarmed Queens man who died in a 50-shot fusillade on what was to have been his wedding day in November 2006.

Through their lawyers, the detectives insisted that there was no way for them to find a fair-minded jury in Queens, a borough of 2.3 million people. First, they asked that their trial be moved out of the city because, they said, the pool of possible jurors had been incurably poisoned by the publicity surrounding the case. But an appellate court didn't buy that argument.

On Friday, the detectives switched gears and asked for a bench trial. They got one. It means that in a month or so, assuming all goes as scheduled, the charges against them will be heard by a judge, not by a jury. This represents a gamble on their part. A bench trial strategy is deemed risky by many legal experts. The defense apparently thought that pleading their case to ordinary New Yorkers was an even greater risk.

No question, many people were appalled by 50 shots being fired at an unarmed man, and feel instinctively that the detectives should pay a price. But there are also many who, just as instinctively, recognize that the police have often-dangerous assignments.

In this case, the detectives say they had reason to suspect that Mr. Bell and his companions, who had just left a strip club of dubious repute, were armed. They say that they clearly identified themselves as officers and that Mr. Bell then tried to drive his car into them. Odds are that in multiracial, multiethnic Queens, more than a few people are automatically ready to cut the police some slack.

To form a jury, the authorities summoned more than 4,000 Queens residents for possible duty. Out of 4,000 people, they needed to find 16 or perhaps 18 to serve as regular and alternate jurors. In short, they needed a meager four-tenths of 1 percent of the jury pool to be open-minded. But even that minuscule percentage was not to be found, in the defense lawyers' opinion. Only Diogenes, it seems, had a rougher time locating an honest man.

They in effect are saying that police officers doing their jobs -- however horribly flawed the outcome -- cannot get the same fair hearing in this city as a man who has admitted to beating a 7-year-old girl, tying her to a chair, holding her under cold water and denying her food. Is that the New York you know?