LAPD (King Beating) Trial(英)

officers. "He didn't have a platoon of Green Berets that were well trained……He is playing the cards he is dealt."

　　The jury debated the officers' fate for seven days. Verdicts of acquittal were easily reached for Wind and Briseno, and a l

ittle less so for Koon. Most of the discussion focused on the actions of Powell. Eight jurors wanted to acquit Powell of all charges, but in the end were unable to persuade the others on one of the assault charges.

　　At 3:15 P.M. on April 29, 1992, the clerk announced the jury's verdicts. Less than two hours later, Los Angeles was in flames.

　　All Hell Breaks Loose

　　Some people reacted with disbelief to the jury verdicts; others reacted in anger. A crowd outside the Ventura County Courthouse shouted "Guilty! Guilty!" as the defendants were escorted away by sheriff's deputies. According to Rodney King's bodyguard, Tom Owens, King sat "absolutely motionless" as he watched in "pure disbelief" the televised verdicts being read. A visibly angry Mayor Tom Bradley publicly declared, "Today, the jury told the world that what we all saw with our own eyes was not a crime."

　　Sixty-two minutes after the King verdict, five black male youths entered a Korean-owned Pay-less Liquor and Deli at Florence and Dalton Avenues. The youths each grabbed bottles of malt liquor and headed out the door, where they were blocked by the son of the store's owner, David Lee. One young man smashed Lee on the head with a bottle, while two others shattered the storefront with their thrown bottles. One of the youths shouted, "This is for Rodney King!" The deadly Los Angeles riots of 1992 were underway.

　　Events grew increasingly ugly. Black youths with baseball bats battered a car driven by a white. Another white driver was hit in the face by a chunk of concrete thrown threw his car windshield. Police faced gangs of rock and bottle-throwing youths. The taunting, missile-hurling crowds grew in size, forcing the police to beat a hasty retreat out of the riot area. The Florence-Neighborhood is left to the anarchy of the mob attacking helpless civilians.

　　Perhaps the most horrific image of the riots involved mild-mannered truck driver Reginald Denny. Denny was at the wheel of his eighteen-wheeler, carrying a load of sand and listening to country music, when at 6:46 P.M. he entered the intersection at Normandie and Florence. A helicopter overhead captured on videotape what occurred next. Denny was pulled from his truck into the street, where he was kicked and then beaten on the head with a claw hammer. The most vicious attack came from Damian Williams who smashed a block of concrete on Denny's head at point-blank range, knocking him unconscious and fracturing his head in ninety-one places. The helicopter camera recorded Williams doing a victory dance as he gleefully pointed out Denny's bloodied figure.

　　When the rioting finally ended five days later, fifty-four people (mostly Koreans and Latinos) were dead——the greatest death toll in any American civil disturbance since the 1863 Draft Riots in New York City. Hundreds of people (including sixty firefighters) were injured. Looting and fires had resulted in more than one billion dollars in property damage. Whole neighborhoods in south central Los Angeles, such as Koreatown, looked like war zones. Over 7,000 persons were arrested.

　　Even as the rioting continued, President George Bush and Attorney General William Barr began the process of bringing federal charges against the four LAPD officers accused in the King case. On the day after the Simi Valley verdict, Bush issued a statement declaring that the verdict "has left us all with a deep sense of personal frustration and anguish." In a May 1 televised address to the nation, Bush all but promised a federal prosecution of the officers.

　　Prosecuting the officers on the federal charge of violating King's civil rights accomplished two Bush Administration goals. The first goal was to control the rage that had developed in black communities. The second was to reduce demands from some in the civil rights community for sweeping investigations into police misconduct.

　　On May 7, federal prosecuto

rs began presenting evidence to a Los Angeles grand jury. On August 4, the grand jury returned indictments against the three officers for "willfully and intentionally using unreasonable force" and against Koon for "willfully permitting and failing to take action to stop the unlawful assault." on King.

　　The Federal Civil Rights Trial

　　The second trial of Stacey Koon, Laurence Powell, Timothy Wind, and Theodore Briseno began on February 25, 1993 in the Los Angeles courtroom of District Judge John G. Davies. The Department of Justice assembled a formidable team of four prosecutors to try the closely watched case. Lead prosecutor on the team was thirty-four-year old Steven Clymer, considered the best trial lawyer in the U. S. Attorney's office in Los Angeles.

　　Unlike the Simi Valley jury, the federal jury was racially mixed. Although the defense made a considerable effort to exclude African-Americans, two blacks were seated as jurors. One of the two, Marian Escobel ("Juror No. 7), sent an early signal of the difficulty she would cause the defense when she was overheard strongly criticizing the defense's treatment of other potential black jurors. In one of his most important trial rulings, Judge Davies denied a defense motion to remove Escobel from the jury——perhaps because he understood that the juror accurately perceived the defense conduct. A second problem for the defense resulted from their focus on excluding African-American jurors: they gave insufficient attention to identifying and excluding white jurors who were especially fearful of producing a verdict that would cause more rioting.

　　In addition to a more favorable jury, the prosecution had other advantages in the second trial. Clymer noted later that the government "had the advantage of seeing everything that had gone wrong in the first trial." Clymer excluded from the witness list those witnesses who had backfired in Simi Valley. He avoided juror suspicion that the prosecution was hiding something by calling Rodney King to the stand. He came up with a medical expert who would prove King's facial injury came from a baton blow, not the asphalt. He identified a credible use-of-force expert, Mark Conta, who countered the testimony of the defense's expert. He used cross-examination to suggest that defense police witnesses were friends seeking to bail the defendants out of a tight spot. Finally, he presented new and potentially damaging facts to present to the jury, such as Powell taking King on a ninety-minute detour to Foothill Station after leaving Pacifica Hospital, rather than directly to the USC Medical Center, as Koon had requested. Clymer hoped that the jury might conclude the detour was made to show off their injured "trophy."

　　King may have been an ex-con who had given wildly different accounts of his beating, but he came across on the stand as an uneducated man was either too drunk or confused to remember events, not as a sophisticated liar. Through King's testimony, the jurors saw a man who seemed to have been in genuine fear of his life. He also raised the issue of race. Although he at first had denied that race had anything to do with his beating, he told the jury that as he was being hit, the officers "were chanting either 'What's up killer? How do you feel killer? [or] What's up nigger?" Asked whether the word used was "killer" or "nigger," King answered, "I'm not sure." Watching King testify, defense attorney Stone worried. He saw King as "very polite and mild-mannered and thoughtful" and that, he said, "spells credibility."

　　Changes in the defense strategy also worked to the prosecution's advantage. Koon, in his testimony, revealed none of the inner fears that seemed to impress the Simi Valley jury. To some jurors in the federal trial, he came across as arrogant or cocky. Powell, afraid of Clymer's expected rough cross-examination chose not to take the stand at all. Theodore Briseno appeared as a witness

only on videotape. Judge Davies granted the prosecution's request to show the videotape as rebuttal evidence after Briseno's new attorney, Harland Braun, announced that Briseno would not testify. Braun's decision was based on his proposed a "unified defense" in which the defendants would strive to keep their differences to a minimum. (As he studied the case, Braun came to see Powell as a "scared kid" and Koon as taking more responsibility for the beating than was due. Braun believed all four officers deserved acquittal, and saw few benefits——and much potential harm——to his client in putting Briseno on the stand where he would be cross-examined about his criticisms of his fellow officers.) The effect, however, of Briseno appearing only on videotape was to magnify problems for Koon and Powell. Attorneys for those two officers had no way of challenging the devastating criticisms of their clients made on the edited videotape.

　　The closing arguments for the defense showed that they understood the political pressures the jury faced. Harland Braun told jurors, "No man should be condemned in this country because there is a threat of riot. So in a sense, my client is on trial, but you are also on trial; it's your courage that's on trial." Braun compared the LAPD officers' trial to that of Jesus before Pontius Pilate:

　　When the prisoner was brought by the authorities before the judge, Pontius Pilate asked a simple question, "What evil has this man done?"……And the authorities really had no answer. But when you read Matthew you find in it an eerie echo of this case, that the man was condemne

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