Essay 601

From The New York Times…

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Tolerance for a Racial Slur Is a Test for Potential Jurors

By COREY KILGANNON

Potential jurors for the trial of a 19-year-old charged in a bias attack in Howard Beach last summer have been asked some unusual questions during jury selection: Do they listen to rap music? Are they familiar with hip-hop culture? Yesterday, the prosecution and defense asked them how they feel about a certain longstanding epithet denigrating black people.

The epithet — or “the N-word,” as the lawyer representing the defendant, Nicholas Minucci, repeatedly described it in court — may well be the crux of this racially charged and high-profile case.

Prosecutors in the trial, in State Supreme Court in Queens, will try to establish that Mr. Minucci, who is white, uttered the word as he chased down and beat a 22-year-old black man, Glenn Moore, with a baseball bat on June 29, fracturing Mr. Moore’s skull. Mr. Minucci is charged with assault as a hate crime and 18 other counts and faces up to 25 years in prison if convicted on all of them.

Mr. Minucci told police investigators in a videotaped interrogation after the incident that he said, “What up?” — followed by the epithet — in addressing Mr. Moore as he approached him, and that Mr. Moore responded by saying, “What up?”

Mr. Minucci has maintained that his subsequent actions were self-defense against a robbery attempt.

If Mr. Minucci is convicted in the attack, but the jury decides it was not motivated by racial hatred, then he will face a lower sentence.

Prosecutors hope to prove the attack was motivated by such a bias. The defense, meanwhile, is expected to suggest that a young man growing up in a mixed neighborhood in New York City uses “the N word” as a matter of course and that the word no longer carries the racially charged overtones it has historically.

Mr. Minucci’s friends and family have said that the word is uttered today more in collegiality than hatred, and that its proliferation in rap music and everyday conversation among young people of various races and ethnicities has changed its meaning and impact.

At one point yesterday, Mr. Minucci’s lawyer, Albert Gaudelli, surveyed 11 potential jurors, four of whom were black. He turned to a black man from Queens Village and asked him what he thought about “the N word,” explaining that “the N word is going to be an issue in this case, and its use.”

The man responded, “It depends on who’s saying it and how it’s being used.”

Mr. Gaudelli said, “At one time, it had only one meaning, as a pejorative term, but today it means many things, or can mean many things.” He motioned toward the prosecutors and said of the case, “They have to prove that it is bias.”

He told the jury pool, “The word in and of itself dose not establish bias. Does everyone agree with that?” This elicited a murmur of faint agreement.

However, for all the assertions that the word has become harmless, neither Mr. Gaudelli nor anyone else in the courtroom actually uttered it.

Outside the courtroom, Mr. Minucci’s mother, Maria Minucci, discussed the word in explaining his actions. She calls the case politically motivated and charges that prosecutors have seized upon the word to justify a grandstanding prosecution of her son to get publicity for the Queens district attorney.

She said her son grew up in the ethnically diverse neighborhood of Lindenwood, where his friends were — and still are — the black and Hispanic children from nearby housing projects.

The pejorative has become a form of address, Ms. Minucci said.

“Every kid in the neighborhood uses it,” she said. “It doesn’t mean the same thing anymore. They all say it all day long, no matter what race. They all grow up saying it now.”

She added, “All of Nick’s friends — black, white, Spanish, Chinese — they all use the word. You should hear when they talk on the phone to him in jail.”

Ms. Minucci suggested that such a shift has been “the best thing possible for that word” because through its use “it’s lost a lot of its power and hatred.”

Clearly, not all prospective jurors felt that way. At one point, Mr. Gaudelli objected to the possible selection of one black woman who “felt that the use of the N-word is automatically biased and prejudiced,” he said.

Under questioning by Justice Richard L. Buchter, she said, “I guess I’m from the old school. I still find it offensive when I hear it.”

She eventually acknowledged that under certain circumstances she might see it otherwise.

Not surprisingly, prosecutors seemed to be looking for jurors who still hear poison in the word. One prosecutor, Michelle Goldstein, asked potential jurors it they were familiar with hip-hop terminology.

“Do you listen to rap music?” she asked a woman who appeared to be under 30. The woman nodded.

“Sure you do,” Ms. Goldstein said. “It’s all over the place. Clearly, there are offensive words. Just because rap artists use a word does not mean it is not offensive to people.”

She turned to a white man in the jury pool who said the word must be evaluated in context.

“You have to look at who is communicating the word,” he said. “Words have different meanings and annoy different people.”
She asked a white male schoolteacher, “Wouldn’t you agree that certain words are more commonplace today than 20 years ago when they were pejoratives?”

“Not in my classroom,” the man snapped back, prompting laughter.

Suggesting that the word has not lost its sting, Ms. Goldstein compared it to “sweetheart,” saying it means one thing when used by one’s fiancé but something very different if uttered by a stranger to a woman on the street.

The defense and the prosecution both asked the jury pool if they would be biased against Howard Beach, which two decades ago was the location of another high-profile racial attack.

In the end, the jury of 12 was picked: four blacks, four whites, three Hispanics and one Asian. Two of the five alternates are black.