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GORDON DANIELS

Jason Vassell with his mother last Friday and Luke Ryan, left, one of his attorneys.

The most talked-about criminal case in Hampshire County reached its "disposition" last week not with decades of threatened prison time for defendant Jason Vassell but the legal dialing down that should have come two years ago.

Very late one night in early February 2008, three young men who had been drinking clashed in the lobby of a University of Massachusetts dorm. For the first time, we can look in on that dismal scene, through surveillance video released by prosecutors on Friday and available at GazetteNET.

We see a lurching choreography: two visitors who arrived at the dorm together, both white, tangling with a resident, Vassell, who is black. Race is hard to detect on the video; this is meaningless violence - shoves, punches, jabs with a pocketknife - enacted by people who should have been asleep hours earlier.

But the fact of race and the enduring problem of racial injustice lifted Commonwealth v. Jason Vassell out of the ordinary.

Prosecutors with the Northwestern District Attorney's office played this by the book, though it was a volume missing the chapter on white-on-black violence in our country.

Vassell was charged with two counts of aggravated assault and battery with a dangerous weapon because his assailants did not carry a weapon, and he armed himself with a small knife. Vassell was also faulted by authorities because he fought back when confronted by the two men's racial insults and threats, rather than believing, at 5 a.m., he could work this out by summoning police. It was wrong for him to stab people with a knife. It was also wrong that he believed that he needed to defend his life in his campus home.

Last Friday, a prosecutor sought to cast Vassell as a naive Dorothy in the Land of Oz, saying all her office wanted all along was to have him click his heels and take responsibility for his actions. That comment suggests he could have been home a long time ago and has only himself to blame for his legal problems.

In our view, local prosecutors did not manage, through 28 months of the Vassell case, to take their measure of responsibility for work we all share: seeing instances of racial unfairness for what they are - and correcting them.

From the start, prosecutors failed to look broadly enough at this case. Instead, perhaps believing Vassell's use of a knife to stab both of his attackers trumped all other crimes here, locked in for a long adversarial battle in court. Within a year, the office was fighting the defense team's attempt to explore the possibility of racial bias in local policing and prosecution generally.

In one sense, this case played out as its own racial confrontation. When the defense's charge of bias arose, prosecutors reacted as many would by digging in and going not for understanding, but for a win.

The DA's office at first refused to produce records of five years of arrests in the region, as the defense worked to establish a pattern of discriminatory prosecution. Prosecutors lost that fight in the Supreme Judicial Court after they appealed Judge Judd Carhart's order to release the records. Meanwhile, instead of seeing his case promptly shepherded to "disposition," as it was Friday, Vassell dropped out of UMass and incurred heavy legal costs. His life went into limbo.

Of the two men Vassell fought, one, Jonathan Bosse, was never charged. The other, John Bowes, initially faced aggravated assault and battery charges, but those were dropped before his trial in March 2009; he was put on probation for a year - already complete - after a jury found him guilty of a separate charge of disorderly conduct.

Vassell is now on 2½ years of pretrial probation, though Judge Carhart, showing a sympathy for what Vassell endured, dated the start of probation to the night of the fight.

Come August, Jason Vassell should be able to return to his life, with no criminal record.

He is no hero, but this case stood for something and that is why so many rallied to his cause. This case reminds us all to consider history. In 2010, here in America and in Hampshire County, we may not know racial justice; but who can mistake racial injustice?