Across an incredulous nation, that was the question everyone asked when they learned of the verdict in the Rodney King case. Most of the jurors weren’t talking-indeed, some were hiding-but those who gave interviews were swayed by several aspects of the trial: King never took the stand in his own behalf, the four cops seemed believable and the prosecution failed to explain what they should have done differently. The strategy was to shift the focus away from the police officers.
In that sense, King was an easy target. He had led the police on a high-speed chase, reaching 115 miles per hour on the freeway, and then laughed at the officers who surrounded him with guns drawn. All this happened, the defense told the jury, before the video rolled and the beating began. And King could have ended the violence simply by “assuming the position”-face down, legs spread, arms outstretched-the defense argued. The two other black men in King’s Hyundai-who submitted to handcuffs-were unharmed by the police.
There was still the videotape to deal with, though. How could the camera lie? For the defense, the key was to confront the damning tape head-on. “There were positive things to point out,” Michael Stone, the lawyer for Officer Laurence Powell, told NEWSWEEK. The defense played the tape forward and backward, freeze-frame and fast-motion. “A picture is worth a thousand words,” says Darryl Mounger, the lawyer for Sgt. Stacey Koon, “but a lot of times it takes a thousand words to explain a picture. What you think you see isn’t always what you see.” Here are three examples of what the defense-and jurors-saw.
the beating, King (center) struggles to his knees even as the four police officers order him to lie face first on the ground so he can be handcuffed. Defense lawyers dwelt on these early scenes in the videotape, where King repeatedly tries to get up. In a frame 25 seconds earlier, King made it to his feet and lunged at Officer Powell. The defense’s message to the jury: King refused to obey orders and posed a threat to the officers. “They were not going to let him get into a position where he could stand again,” says Stone, Powell’s lawyer. That’s why they used their batons on a man the lawyers said was 6 feet 3 and 250 pounds. Expert witnesses explained that under LAPD regulations, officers are permitted to use force to subdue a suspect or overcome resistance. The judge’s instructions to the jury further emphasized that such force is “reasonable” if the typical cop would use it under similar circumstances.
Other defense witnesses testified that King had already been hit with two Taser darts, each carrying 50,000 volts of electricity–enough juice to immobilize almost any suspect. Tim Singer, a highway-patrol cop who was not charged, testified that the scene reminded him of a movie “where the monster gets shot and still is coming at you.” This shows King’s willingness to resist arrest, Stone says. “The strategy was to put the jury in the shoes of the police officer so they see things through his eyes.” It apparently worked. One juror told CNN, “They did what they had to do in order to get him under control in extreme conditions.”
face first, having already sustained numerous blows from the four policemen. Officer Theodore Briseno (left) has his leg on King’s neck. Yet the defense believed this frame critical to their success in winning over the 12 jury members. Why.? Because, much as it might appear otherwise, Briseno isn’t really attacking King. He’s keeping him down for his own good. Briseno testified that he feared that his exhausted colleagues would escalate the violence-maybe even shoot the suspect-if King didn’t stay on the ground at this late point in the highly charged confrontation. Under this view of the videotape, Briseno’s lawyer John Barnett told the jury, Briseno may have saved King’s life rather than causing him gratuitous injury.
The frame also shows, as the defense team argued it, that Officer Powell (back to the camera) has moved his baton out of his strong right hand and, in preparation for an arrest, is reaching for handcuffs in his rear pocket. This is the only point in the 81-second taped beating that the officers testified that they believed King was ready to stop resisting and comply with orders. But, as shown in subsequent frames of the video, King began to move yet again. Powell quickly shifted his baton back to his right hand and delivered more blows in an attempt to subdue him. “In my opinion,” a juror told Reuters, King “was in full control.” Only later did King finally ask the officers, “Please stop.” Though King still wasn’t in the proper position, Sergeant Koon instructed the officers to “cuff him.”
videotape potentially was the most damaging to the four police officers. King is virtually motionless on the ground and is offering no visible resistance. But the officers, according to their lawyers, continued to beat King because he refused to comply with their demands. The cops also said that the tape hardly shows everything they were dealing with-King’s expression, for example. “This guy had a look of determination,” says Mounger, Sergeant Koon’s lawyer. “He did not have a look of pain or fear on his face.” And they pointed out that King appeared to be on PCP, a drug that sometimes gives users unusual strength. (Tests showed no PCP, but King was legally drunk.)
Stone concedes that these frames “put us in a terrible hole. When I first saw the tape, my knees were shaking.” But Stone and the other defense attorneys figured that it could show that the officers complied with rules for escalating degrees of force.
Police are trained to use the baton first to cause pain. That usually stops a suspect. “A little pain is a great incentive,” says Mounger, who served 10 years with the Los Angeles Police Department. “When you get hit with a metal baton by someone who knows how to swing it, you’re supposed to do what they say so they don’t hit you again.” If the pain doesn’t deter, the officers are trained to use the baton to break bones-wrists, elbows, clavicles-bones that break easily. One juror’s conclusion: “The officers simply did what they are trained for, using the tools that they are given.”
