Justice in los angeles

Whatever the verdict, the principle of a fair trial has taken a beating

A black suspect is savagely beaten, receiving more than 50 blows in 81 seconds, by a posse of white police officers, and the officers are acquitted of using excessive force against him. Shocking? Certainly. A travesty of justice? That is harder to say. The T-shirts sported recently by some blacks in Los Angeles – “No Justice, No Peace”– offered one answer. But justice, in a property constituted court system, is not what people think it should be. It is what a jury decides. There is a difference.

The world knew what it thought about the Rodney King case. On the evidence of an amateur videotape, shown in edited versions, most people reached the conclusion that Mr King was beaten savagely and unnecessarily. When the acquittals came, the newspaper, among others, called the jurors “blind.” Los Angeles rioted; and the result was a second, federal, trial for the police officers, which has just ended. That trial, however, may have added a deeper and subtler level a damage: this time to the conduct of justice in the United States.

The first, state, trial was assumed to have been deeply flawed. The jurors came from a suburb of Los Angeles, Ventura county; ten of them were white. The trial had been moved there from a city, it appeared, specifically to tap their law-abiding sympathies. Enough said. In fact, the suburban site was acceptable to both the defence and the prosecution, and the jurors were vigorously vetted. There is no evidence that the jury, which deliberated for a week, did not try hard. The case was simply more difficult that it appeared. The second trial, in fact, has shed an interesting light on the first: showing, in particular, that the infamous videotape, when seen in full, was every bit as ambiguous as the first jury had said.

Federal prosecutors insist they always had an interest in the King case, even before the outcome of the state trial. That may be; but it was the riots that made the second trial imperative, to reinforce the local peace. The new charge, that the police had set out to deprive Mr King of his constitutional rights, required a higher standard of proof and did not amount, technically, to double jeopardy: the offence, if proved, went against federal, rather than state, law. But the American Civil Liberties Union has decided that the second trial did indeed, in the words of the Bill of Rights, put the officers “in jeopardy of life and limb” twice for the same offence.

It is hard to disagree. Federal intervention of this sort has usually been reserved for blatant miscarriages of justice, as in Jim Crow courts in the south; and, to repeat, there is no evidence that the Ventura county trial was subverted by racism. In practice, too, the second trial ended up, like the first, obsessed with the simple scale of the beating.

This was, in effect, a second bite at the cherry; a bite that carried and added sharp expectation that the jury, this time, would “get it right.” The trial was back in Los Angeles county, where it should have been before, and there were two blacks on the jury. The set-up was “more representative of Los Angeles”; it was “fairer.” Possibly. But any idea of fairness has been overwhelmed, in the city and the media, by the tendency to see the second trial as a corrective to the first.

Twelve good men and true

This puts uncommon pressure on a jury; especially a jury aware, as the second one was, that riots had followed the acquittals. In effect, the second jury was damned whatever it decided. If the jurors acquitted the officers, again, they would be racist fools. If they convicted them, they were cowed by fear.

The two King trials, between them, have revealed a certain impatience with leaving the matter to juries at all. Juries are meant to approach a second trial, like a first, in virtual ignorance of the case. That ignorance, that willingness to be persuaded all over again by evidence that is well-worn to others, seems hard to accept in a case as charged as this one; and this, many jurors think, is part of a trend. The jury system is still held in high regard in America; but jurors themselves, according to a recent survey, feel they are treated with contempt. In racially-charged trials, such as the King case, it is assumed that the colours of the jurors’ skin will determine how they look at the evidence. The more divisive the case, the more they may be criticised for failing to reach the verdicts people expect. But the King debacle, with all its other painful baggage, should remind Americans that meeting expectations is not what juries are for; nor, necessarily, what justice is about.

John Brandon

/from The Economist, April 17^th 1993/