Well, I certainly don't remember the names of the officers tried in the beating of Rodney King: there were several of them.

That's a fair point, of course this was an extemporaneous thought—not a researched idea that I had.

I think that in many cases the victim's name gets remembered.

The Atlantic has an article in the current issue mentioning Medgar Evers. As it happens, I do remember the name of the man who shot Evers, was acquitted then and convicted thirty or forty years later. But I have to fish in my memory for it. I certainly don't remember the names of the Manson adherents who killed Sharon Tate, a bit later in the 1960s.

A counterpoint though, I certainly remember the names of many of the American mass shooters and almost none of their victims.

Any interesting point, though at the moment I can't get past Whitman, whose crime occurred almost 60 years ago.

So is that one remembers the side with fewer names?

It's something of a double-edged sword because, naturally, "George Floyd trials" made it sound like George Floyd was the person on trial.

Not really honestly. I’m gonna make a honest guess and say no one really thought that, if you didn’t know what that trial was at that time, you genuinely had to have been living under a rock.

I wonder why you’d think, even after a rare murder conviction of a cop, that the murder victim being the “main character” is odd. The trial isn’t the “story”, only its conclusion.

The parent comment is about media fixation on perpetrators. This was an event where that was reversed.

Good. That was the goal. The whole point of saying the names of the victims is to center them in the telling of what happened to them.

Who are you meaning by "prior victims" there?

Asking because George Floyd was the one killed in the above mentioned instance.