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RACE, JUSTICE, AND THE MEDIA

Conflicts over Rights

The Bill of Rights guarantees citizens freedom of expression, a free press, and the right to a fair trial. Journalists argued that they had the right to cover every trial based on the public's right to know. Lawyers and judges maintained that publicity should not affect judicial trials. During the 1990s, however, these rights appeared to be in conflict in two highly publicized cases, which were further complicated when some segments of the public perceived the incidents and verdicts to be racially tainted.

King Beating

On 3 March 1991 Rodney Glen King, a high school dropout who had served a year in prison for theft and aggravated assault, was driving on a California freeway with two friends. When Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers attempted to stop him for speeding, King, who had been drinking and was still on parole, led the police on a high-speed chase and was finally forced off the road. During his arrest, several officers used force against King. They claimed that the six-foot, three-inch King charged them and resisted arrest; King contended that he was afraid of the white officers and had attempted to defend himself. While the incident was in progress, unknown to anyone at the scene, residents of a nearby apartment complex were awakened by the noise. One man videotaped part of the incident. Excerpts from the tape, showing a group of white police officers beating a black man lying on the ground, played repeatedly on television news around the world. King became an international symbol of police brutality and of the chasm between white and black justice.

Officers Indicted

Less than two weeks after the incident, on 15 March, four officers, Sergeant Stacey C. Koon and his subordinates Laurence M. Powell, Theodore J. Briseno, and Timothy E. Wind, were indicted for unlawful assault and use of excessive force in beating King. The trial was moved out of Los Angeles to Simi Valley, a neighboring suburban city. Superior Court Judge Stanley Weisberg presided; a jury of six men and six women (ten whites, two Hispanics) was chosen. The trial began the first week in February 1992.

Prosecution's Case

The prosecution's case was straight-forward. Using the eighty-one-second videotape of the incident, the state argued that the officers had wantonly abused their power and had betrayed the public trust. While many people believed that the beating was racially motivated, or at least partially so, prosecution attorneys also decided not to make race a primary issue given the majority white composition of the jury. These decisions proved to be strategic miscalculations.

The Defense

The defense argued that King was intoxicated, under the influence of an illegal drug, and aggressive. Addressing their state of mind during the incident, the officers testified that they believed, based on King's actions and the fact he Avas able to withstand two stun-gun darts, that he was under the influence of the drug Phencyclidine (PCP) or "angel dust," which produces erratic and aggressive behavior. Consequently, the officers judged that they were justified in using force to restrain King. The defense also used the videotape, playing it in slow motion and analyzing it frame by frame. They suggested that each blow delivered by the policemen was in response to specific actions by King in resisting arrest or in threatening the officers. The audio portion of the tape, which included racial epithets, was not played.

Rioting

After six weeks of testimony and six hours of deliberation, the jury found the officers not guilty. The end of the trial, however, only sparked violence. Between 29 April 1992, when the verdict was rendered, and 3 May, South Central Los Angeles, a low-income area populated largely by racial and ethnic minorities, was engulfed in chaos. Violence, looting, and mayhem ensued, leaving fifty-four dead, more than 2,500 injured, nearly 1,100 businesses destroyed, and an estimated __BODY__ billion in property damage. The bedlam revealed the simmering tensions between race and justice. The public outrage over the state verdicts prompted a federal civilrights trial in which all four officers were found guilty.

Denny Beating

One of the most heinous and publicized events during the riots was the beating of a white truck driver who was driving through the area. As news cameras fed live images to the nation, Reginald Denny was dragged from his truck and severely beaten. Crowds attacked whites, Latinos, Asians, and other blacks, many of whom lived and worked in the area. The National Guard was called in to restore order.

Federal Civil Rights Case

In response to the King verdicts and the outrage of the South Central Los Angeles community, the U.S. Justice Department filed federal charges against the four officers for violating King's civil rights. In an unusual coalition, civil libertarians and right-wing conservatives objected to a federal trial as violating the Fifth Amendment prohibition against double jeopardy. Nevertheless, a jury of nine whites, two blacks, and one Hispanic was seated. On 17 April 1993, after six weeks of trial and thirty hours of deliberation, the jury found Powell and Koon guilty of violating King's civil rights. Powell was also found guilty of causing injury to King. Briseno and Wind were acquitted. With the LAPD on "tactical alert," the federal judge sentenced the two convicted defendants to thirty months in prison. The prosecution had recommended ten-year sentences. Explaining the sentence, Judge John G. Davies stated that King's actions had provoked the assault, that the defendants were unlikely to commit similar crimes in the future, and given that Powell and Koon had been prosecuted at both the state and federal levels, longer sentences would be unfair.

Assailants on Trial

Two months after the federal trial of the officers, three black men were tried for the beating of Denny, five other motorists, and two firefighters who had attempted to halt the assault. Damian Monroe Williams, nineteen; Antoine Miller, twenty; Henry Keith Watson, twenty-seven; and Gary Williams, thirty-three; had been identified on videotapes as the assailants and were arrested in late 1992. In the spring of 1993, Gary Williams pleaded guilty to charges of robbery and assault and was sentenced to three years in prison. Damian Williams and Watson were charged with multiple felony counts. Williams, who was allegedly seen on the video striking Denny in the head with a brick, was additionally charged with aggravated mayhem. The prosecution relied heavily on video footage. Defense attorneys challenged the videotape evidence, portrayed the defendants as victims of poverty and racial discrimination, and relied on a group-contagion-theory defense, which suggests that individuals can become caught up in riotous behavior and lose sight of right and wrong. Reflecting the deep schisms between white and black views of the American criminal justice system, much of the local black community expressed support for Williams and Watson. On 18 October 1993, again with the LAPD on alert, the verdicts were announced. As controversial as the King verdict, the jury found Williams guilty of only one felony count of simple mayhem and one misdemeanor assault charge. He was sentenced to ten years in prison. Watson was found guilty of one misdemeanor assault charge, was credited with time served, and was released. Miller, who was tried separately from Watson and Williams, pleaded guilty to assault with a deadly weapon on 3 December; he was sentenced to time served and placed on probation.

Payback

Public reaction to the verdicts was strong, but mixed. Many in the press characterized the outcome as "payback" for the acquittals of the police officers in the initial King trial and the light sentences in the federal trial. A Los Angeles Tunes poll taken soon after the Williams and Watson verdicts in the Denny case found that 75 percent of Latinos, 66 percent of whites, and 53 percent of blacks believed the jurors were more motivated by fear for their own safety and of civil unrest than by fair and just consideration of the evidence. The poll also found that two-thirds of Latinos and whites disagreed with the verdicts and that only a slight majority of blacks approved of the verdicts. Rodney King filed a $15 million civil suit against the city of Los Angeles for violating his civil rights, but two years after the South Central riots, a civil court refused to award him anything in punitive damages.

Simpson

Three years after the King beating, Los Angeles and the nation were once again polarized by racial divisions over a jury verdict. This time, however, the individual acquitted was Orenthal James "O. J." Simpson, a retired football star, sports announcer, television personality, and the prime suspect in the murders of his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman on 1.2 June 1994. Simpson, an African American, was arrested on 17 June 1994, after a lengthy, televised car chase on the Los Angeles freeway; both of the victims were white. In a July Gallup poll, 64 percent of black respondents believed Simpson would not receive a fair trial, while only 41 percent of whites held that opinion. By the time a grand jury was convened to review the evidence and determine if an indictment was warranted, Simpson had hired a cadre of celebrity lawyers, including Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., F. Lee Bailey, Robert Shapiro, and appeals expert Alan M. Dershowitz. The group was referred to by the media as the "Dream Team."

TV in the Courtroom

The People of California v. Orenthal James Simpson was called the "trial of the century" and made celebrities of many participants in the case, including the judge, Lance A. Ito. Several important juridical issues emerged, including the growing use of technology in judicial proceedings, the merits and problems of live television in the courtroom, and the reliability of DNA evidence, as well as more traditional problems, such as the use of race as a defense tactic. In a much debated move, Ito decided that the trial could be televised.

Prosecution's

Case. The Simpson trial began on 23 January 1995 with hundreds of reporters from all over the world camped out in front of the courthouse. The jury consisted of eight blacks, two Hispanics, one white, and one person of mixed race; eight women, four men. The prosecution, led by attorneys Marcia Clark, Christopher Darden (the only black on the team), and William Hodgman, portrayed Simpson as abusive (several years earlier he had pleaded no contest to abusing his wife), jealous, and controlling. The evidence, however, was largely circumstantial; there was no weapon and there were no witnesses that directly linked the defendant to the crimes, but the prosecution presented a series of DNA experts who testified that blood found at the crime scene matched Simpson's DNA profile.

The Race Card

The defense argued that Simpson did not have the opportunity to commit the crimes, that his demeanor before and after the murders was not consistent with that of a murderer, and that the evidence presented was not only circumstantial, but may have been planted, particularly by Mark Fuhrman, a police detective whose history of racism was demonstrated in a series of audiotapes in which he used racial epithets. This evidence provided the Dream Team with the opportunity to introduce the so-called "race card." Over fellow defense attorney Shapiro's objections, Cochran suggested to the majority black jury that there was a widespread conspiracy against African Americans in the justice system. He even compared Simpson, a murder defendant, with Rodney King, a victim of police brutality.

The Verdict

On 2 October 1995 Judge Ito referred the case to the jury. At this time, even given the problems that plagued the prosecution, public-opinion polls indicated that more than half of Americans believed Simpson was guilty of the crimes. Whites were four times more likely than blacks, however, to hold this belief. Three hours and forty minutes after receiving the case, the jury informed Ito that they had reached a verdict. Fearing a replay of the civil disturbances after the 1992 King verdict, the judge delayed the reading until the next day to give the police department time to prepare. On 3 October, with millions of Americans watching television or listening to radio, the verdict was announced. Simpson was found not guilty.

Civil Case

Simpson's legal troubles did not end with the criminal trial. The following year the families of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman filed a civil suit against Simpson. Unlike in the criminal trial, the standard for a civil verdict is the lower criterion of "preponderance of evidence" rather than "beyond reasonable doubt." This trial lasted three months. A jury unanimously declared that Simpson was financially liable for the deaths. The families were awarded $8.2 million in compensatory damages and another $25 million in punitive damages.

Color of Justice

The issue of race and justice is a complicated one. The long history of discrimination against minorities in the United States and the racism that many minorities experience on a daily basis often lead them to regard traditional institutions, such as the legal system, with skepticism. After the King verdict, some analysts suggested that criminal justice reflected the values of the dominant white society. Upon viewing the beating of King, Americans of all races wondered whether the police would have behaved in a similar manner if he had been white. In the 1990s, as in previous decades, blacks were incarcerated at a much higher rate than whites. More young black men were in prisons and jails in the United States than were enrolled in colleges and universities. Another aspect of race and justice was money. While all criminal defendants are guaranteed the right to legal counsel by the Sixth Amendment, many minority defendants were unable to afford the quality of defense that many whites could. In 1998, 26 percent of blacks lived at or below the poverty level as compared to 8 percent of whites. The per capita income for blacks was $13,000 and $23,000 for whites. Some Americans and political analysts suggested that the Simpson verdict was not only bought, but was a deliberate "payback" for years of judicial injustices against minorities. Commenting on the verdict, George F. Will, a conservative columnist with the Washington Post, stated, "The jurors abused their position in order to send a message about racism or police corruption."