The witnesses in the trial of a white man accused of a racially motivated beating of a black man in Howard Beach last summer had been typical for an assault case in Queens. Until yesterday.
All of the previous witnesses — the hardened detective, the newsstand owner, the pizza maker, the career criminal and other assorted neighborhood characters — had offered plain-spoken testimony about Nicholas Minucci, 20, who is charged with using a racial epithet while attacking Glenn Moore with a baseball bat on June 29, 2005.
But the final witness for Mr. Minucci was a stranger to him, to Howard Beach and to the State Supreme Court in Kew Gardens, Queens. The defense got the Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy to travel from Boston to testify about the current usage of the racial epithet, sometimes referred to in court as the "n" word.
The epithet has become central to the trial, as a measure of whether Mr. Minucci attacked Mr. Moore because of his skin color. Several witnesses have testified that Mr. Minucci repeatedly spewed the epithet in anger while chasing Mr. Moore and beating him on the head. Mr. Minucci insists that Mr. Moore was about to commit a robbery and that he used the word as a form of benign address before subduing him with a few swats to the side and legs.
Mr. Minucci's lawyer, Albert Gaudelli, said he hoped Professor Kennedy's testimony would convince the jury that the mere use of the epithet did not constitute racism. On the stand yesterday, Professor Kennedy's explanation of the modern usage of the word seemed to support Mr. Gaudelli's claim.
"The word is a complex word," he testified. "It has many meanings."
"Professor Kennedy had just taken the stand in a packed courtroom and rattled off his impressive credentials — which include attending Princeton, Oxford and Yale, a clerkship for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and his membership in the Bar of the Supreme Court."
He left out: Pissboy! Kennedy's carrying water for this bigot shows how low a real NIGGER will go.
Thurgood is probably spinning in his grave.