Presswatch/King's Jury
Eastland, Terry
King's Jury by Terry Eastland Like almost everyone else who watches television, I had seen the beating of Rodney King on videotape and concluded that the four Los Angeles police officers charged...
...Powell then hit King over and over, about ten times—all this, according to the tape, while King was trying to stand up...
...For some reason, King did not want to obey...
...The camera in the hands of the bystander began rolling at this point, but as Parloff notes, most Americans never saw the early part of the 81-second tape, all of which, of course, the jury did see...
...De42 The American Spectator August 1992 spite the Taser darts, King jumped up, wheeled around and lunged at defendant Laurence Powell—another fact unreported by the New York Times...
...T his is what the jury learned, yet press accounts either understated these facts (see the April 30 New York Times, a paper Parloff justifiably takes to task time and again) or failed to mention them altogether (Parloff cites Time, but there were plenty of others, especially television reports...
...The prosecution put on a witness who testified that Powell later hit King in the head with his baton, but Parloff points out that this testimony was "out of synch with that of other prosecution witnesses" and wasn't corroborated by the videotape...
...Parloff speculates that he resisted because he didn't want to go back to prison...
...Reporters covering the verdict assumed the jury was wrong, and commentators said so explicitly...
...With numerous police cars on his rear and a police helicopter above him, King, who later tests showed was heavily intoxicated, finally stopped his car...
...stop signs and stoplights, racing around Los Angeles streets at 60 to 80 miles per hour...
...Again according to defense and prosecution witnesses, as Parloff observes, "King threw or shook the officers off his arms and stood up...
...Where the blows landed was a key issue...
...And that I would have done so even if I thought King was on PCP"—tests showed he was not, but the officers claimed they feared he was—"and even if I didn't know whether King was armed, and even if King had continued resisting after being shot with two Taser darts, and even if King had already jumped up and attacked me once...
...Parloff begins at the beginning, with the failure of King to pull over after California Highway Patrol officers observed him speeding...
...U The American Spectator August 1992 43...
...To make that kind of judgment I would have had to have been one of the jurors, and due regard for our jury system, a bulwark of our liberties, made me reluctant to indict them...
...According to the videotape, most of blows 11 to 56 appeared to land on King's arms or legs, and no witness said that any of these blows struck King in the head...
...King refused to do that...
...King's attorney conceded that King may have been charging Powell, who struck him with his baton—apparently the first of the fifty-six blows captured on the videotape...
...What she meant was that King could have behaved as his passengers had—by obeying the command to lie prone...
...But do I believe it beyond a reasonable doubt...
...They followed him for eight miles on the freeway, at speeds of almost 100 miles per hour, before finally asking L.A...
...The jury was seen as stupid if not also racist (King is black, the defendant officers white, and the jury had no blacks...
...By contrast, King did not obey police commands, according to prosecution witnesses, as Parloff points out...
...He ordered his officers to move back so that he could use (Parloff writes) "the next level of force recommended under Los Angeles police procedures, a Taser gun...
...The jury then learned that two passengers in King's car, both black, obeyed police orders by getting out of the car and assuming a prone position, whereupon they were searched for weapons, handcuffed, and later released...
...No blows were being struck...
...Police officers unsuccessfully tried to cuff him in that halfway position (a fact the New York Times did not mention in its summary of the defense case...
...The Taser part of the story, by the way, also went unreported in the New York Times...
...But when the not guilty verdict was returned, I could not say the jury had been wrong...
...The result, "Maybe the Jury Was Right," published in his magazine's June issue, is a unique and important piece on the King case...
...Because King never did lie flat on the ground, he wound up being forcibly cuffed, while in a sitting position...
...And their verdict, as Parloff argues, may well have been right...
...The jury heard the prosecution expert on excessive force testify that from this point on further use of the batons became excessive...
...What the jury was told, basically, was that when King was out of line—reaching for his waistband (one reason the cops feared him is that he had not allowed himself tobe searched) or taking positions from which he had earlier risen to his feet and approached the officers—he was struck...
...Regarding blows 11 to 56—those the prosecution expert regarded as excessive—the defense used slow-motion replays to show the jury that Powell and Wind were often pausing (Parloff writes) "to observe King's behavior...
...Eventually he complied to the extent of "getting down on all fours," according to defense and prosecution witnesses...
...Los Angeles Police Department policy forbids striking people in the head, neck, spine, or groin with a baton—which strikes could amount to lethal force...
...And when he was prone—as the officers repeatedly told him to be, according to both defense and prosecution witnesses—he was not struck...
...Whatever the reason for his resistance, it seems reasonable to conclude that the King the jury saw was the central figure in the drama...
...en the camera next focused on King, he was prone...
...Only Roger Parloff of the American Lawyer did what journalists should have done in judging the jury...
...Having watched most of the televised, seven-week trial, Parloff put himself in the jurors' shoes...
...his behavior was the key to what happened...
...Parloff hopes that, had he been one of the officers obliged to subdue King, he "would have shown the sort of courage, restraint, and presence of mind that the prosecution expert believes I should have shown...
...Even at the end, he was struggling...
...But King did not get down and instead moved toward Koon, who fired a first dart...
...With defense and prosecution witnesses testifying to this point, Koon told King to get down or he would be shot with the Taser, a gun whose electric shock is powerful enough to cause most people to collapse immediately, whereupon cuffs can be applied...
...But a prosecution witness who said that blow did in fact strike King in the head excused it on grounds of self-defense, and the prosecution expert on excessive force did not fault Powell for it...
...Powell and Timothy Wind, the only other officer to strike King, according to the videotape, appeared ready to use their batons if King were to get up again...
...Few in the press demonstrated any such reluctance...
...The second dart was fired, and now King fell to the ground, all of this according to both defense and prosecution witnesses...
...The prosecution expert on excessive force did not fault Powell for any of these blows—a commentary heard by the real jury (but not the rest of us watching the videotape before the trial...
...Nor did it have to stem from racial fear or stereotypes...
...These facts also called for some description of King other than "motorist," the term of choice in almost all press accounts...
...King fell to the ground...
...His most recent book is Energy in the Executive: The Case for the Strong Presidency, published this month by the Free Press...
...What Parloff points out is that prosecution witnesses called to testify against the four officers verified these and other facts, such as that, having exited the freeway, King then ran Terry Eastland is a resident fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center...
...Sergeant Stacey Koon, one of the four defendant officers, testified that he was frightened by this turn of events...
...parloff is led to ask the bottom-line question: "Was it criminal for these officers to continue to try to force King into a prone position longer than the prosecution expert testified that a reasonable police officer would have...
...For Parloff, and I suspect for others willing to think afresh about the King case, it is reasonable not to believe that...
...Which is to say: If you put yourself in the jurors' shoes, what they decided was far from stupid...
...Like it or not," writes Parloff, "this is what the video shows...
...Instead, King, standing 6 feet 3 inches tall and weighing 230 pounds, a much bigger man than any of the police officers, danced outside his car, "waving [Parloff writes] at the helicopter and wiggling his hips at the officers...
...this was a man, after all, who was on parole, driving while intoxicated, and had played Richard Petty on the streets of Los Angeles...
...Koon again warned King, who had not fallen to the ground, that he would fire a second dart if he did not get down...
...The first blow on the videotape, by Powell, may have hit King in the head...
...police for help...
...Parloff makes understandable the oft-ridiculed comment of one juror who said that she thought King was in control of the situation...
...King's Jury by Terry Eastland Like almost everyone else who watches television, I had seen the beating of Rodney King on videotape and concluded that the four Los Angeles police officers charged with felony assault were indeed guilty...
Vol. 25 • August 1992 • No. 8
