After more than four years in court and dozens of prosecutors, thousands of documents and tens of thousands of pages of testimony, the state had failed in its mission. The verdict was an embarrassment to the government, both at home and abroad. Yet the result only embittered the state against us even further. The lesson they took away was not that we had legitimate grievances but that they needed to be far more ruthless. I did not regard the verdict as a vindication of the legal system or evidence that a black man could get a fair trial in a white man’s court. It was the right verdict and a
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