sion and eventually to thorough legislative reforms of the police and the judicial system in Belgium.48 The examples above could create the illusion that public opinion is only beneficial for the Rechtsstaat, which is not the case. In the OJ Simpson case for example, the shrewd lawyers of the defense did everything they could to turn a simple murder case into a racial dispute.49 An important part of their defense strategy was to manipulate public opinion. Their actions actually split public opinion through racial lines, with the white community predominantly considering OJ Simpson guilty of murder and the African American community predominantly considering him as a victim of racism ofLApolice force. The result was that the jury – consisting out of nine black, one Hispanic and two white people – acquitted OJ Simpson, despite the massive evidence against him. In recent years, the Rechtsstaat has been put under a lot of stress. In countries such as Poland and Hungary, the fundaments of the Rechtsstaat are slowly but steadily undermined, as the independence of the judiciary and the freedom of the press are under attack.50 Waves of populism are flooding Western democracies. This has been most visible in the United States, under the Trump administration, with the recent storming of the Capitol as dramatic final chord. When looking at the role of public opinion in these events, the following observations can be made. To start with, there is the decline of the mainstream press. In the 1970s, the large majority of the American poPublic opinion and the Rechtsstaat in the new Millennium the intangible public opinion as safeguard of the rechtsstaat 48 Parmentier, Stephan, Fijnaut Cyriel & Van Daele Dirk, From Sisyphus to Octopus: Towards a Modern Public Prosecutor’s Office in Belgium. I: Fijnaut, Cyriel & Parmentier, Stephan,(red.),The Future of the Public Prosecutor’s Office in the European Union – Special Issue of The European Journal of Crime, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice 8 (3) 2000, s. 154–186. 49 Hixson, Walter L., Black and White. The O.J. Simpson Case. I: Annette Gordon-Reed, (red.), Race on Trial: Law and Justice in American History, New York 2012, s. 214–232. 50 May, Christopher & Winchester, Adam, Handbook on the Rule of Law, Cheltenham 2018. 74
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