Rodney king trial verdict announced

Koon grew even more concerned after King successfully repelled a swarming maneuver by his officers and—more remarkably—managed to rise to his feet after being hit twice by an electric stun gun called a Taser.

The lights and noise awakened George Holliday, the manager of a plumbing company, in his apartment. He walked to his bedroom terrace and pointed his new video camera at the action unfolding ninety feet away.

He began recording as King rose to his feet and made a charge in the direction of Powell, but the scene came into focus only as Officers Powell and Wind began striking King with their metal batons. After King was handcuffed , Koon asked all officers who participated in the use of force to raise their hands. Officers Powell and Wind both raised their hands, but—remarkably—each learned for the first time that the other officer had participated in the use of force.

Shortly before 1 A. Tased and beat the suspect of CHP pursuit. George Holliday thought his video camera had captured something important. News producers at KTLA found the tape shocking and played it on the evening news. CNN picked up the tape the next day and soon it was everywhere. Those feelings seemed to extend even to many within the LAPD itself. It was impossible.

Soon prosecutorial wheels began turning—not for Rodney King, who was released without charges, but for the four LAPD officers involved in his arrest.

Officers present at the arrest scene at the intersection of Osborne and Foothill were suspended. On March 7, Chief Gates announced that the officers would be prosecuted. The next day, District Attorney Ira Reiner said that he would seek indictments from a grand jury. Within a week, the grand jury—after watching the videotape and listening to testimony from King and others—returned indictments against Officers Koon, Powell, Briseno, and Wind.

Initially, few people considered race an issue in the King beating. The mayor also asked for the resignation of Chief Gates, but Gates refused. Attorneys for the four officers, meanwhile, focused their attention on moving the upcoming trial out of Los Angeles County. Prosecutors seemed relatively unconcerned about the defense motion for a change of venue, content in the knowledge that such motions tended to fare poorly in California courts. Indeed, on May 16, trial judge Bernard Kamins denied the defense motion.

The key victory for the defense came in July when the California Court of Appeals unanimously granted their change of venue motion and removed Judge Kamins from the case on account of bias. More good news for the defense came in November when Judge Weisberg decided to schedule the trial in Simi Valley , a conservative and predominantly white city set amidst the rolling hills of Ventura County.

Prosecutors immediately understood the significance of the transfer to Simi Valley. Both sides understood that jury selection could be critical to the trial outcome. The prosecution would have loved to seat some blacks—who tend to be skeptical of police practices—, but the jury pool of people included only a half dozen African Americans—and five of those had no interest in serving on a jury in what they considered hostile territory. Michael Stone , attorney for Officer Powell, used a peremptory challenge to strike the one black to make it to the jury box.

Even more troubling for the prosecution, all the potential jurors seemed to be very pro-law enforcement. Two jurors were N. Two other jurors were retired military veterans. The media underappreciated the importance of the composition of the jury.

Perhaps placing too much confidence in the ability of the videotape to secure a conviction, the media failed to adequately prepare the public for the verdict that would come weeks later. During his opening statement for the prosecution on March 5, , Deputy District Attorney White played the entire Holliday videotape. Jurors would see the same tape over and over again before the trial was over.

Opening statements by the four defense attorneys revealed a split in defense strategy. King would not testify. He was too drunk to remember much about the beating, and putting him on the stand would open him up to cross-examination about his prior criminal offenses. Moreover, prosecutors feared King would lose his temper during cross-examination and antagonize jurors.

Singer: Yes. Singer: No, sir. Stone: Does that appear to be split in that photograph? Stone: Do you have any explanation for that?

Singer: I saw what I saw, sir. Other prosecution witnesses focused their testimony on statements by Powell that suggested his callousness—or worse. Two emergency room nurses testified concerning a conversation at the hospital between Powell and King. The prosecution rested on March Almost all of its evidence except the videotape had concerned just two of the four officers, Koon and—especially—Powell. The guy threw me off his back.

I thought I was going to have to shoot him. Stacey Koon was of three defendants to take the stand. He proved to be an impressive witness. Of course, I realise that every listener must, that any powerful public figure, let alone a politician, who now got up and protested that the second trial was unconstitutional, would probably be certified and put away on the well-known English legal ground of having the balance of his mind disturbed.

Still and all, while I grant that maybe it had to be done for the general pacifying of the country, for the pressing need to reassure blacks that judges and juries are not always against them, I dare to say that this precedent will bear watching.

The government seems to have discovered a neat way via the bypass of semantics of trying a man twice for the same offence when it doesn't like the way the first trial turned out. Last Saturday, also, we learned from our papers that a museum has just been finished in Washington.

The United States Holocaust Museum. A museum, not only to honour the six million Jews slaughtered in the Holocaust but to make real the stages of their humiliation. By, for example, assigning to every visitor an identity card that matches the age and sex of one of the original victims. The visitor will thus, as a Jewish reporter put it, have a phantom companion through the exhibition halls. Will find out what became of the person depicted on the card. It is as if everyone were expected to enter the museum as an American and leave, in some fashion, as a Jew.

In an opening ceremony of the museum, soil from several concentration camps was mixed with soil from the National Military Cemetery at Arlington, across the river. The aim of this act, undoubtedly noble, is to unite in the mind of the visitors the infamous plight of those six million Jews with the victims of racial hatred everywhere.

This will certainly move many people. Though to what end, I can't say. One or two notable Jews whose grandparents were victims of the Holocaust have found the Americanising of it misguided and a potential for muddy thinking and prejudiced action.

A famous Jewish woman scholar was asked if she thought that the Holocaust ought to be taught in the public schools.

On the contrary, points out to a disturbing truth that comes out in the open about once every generation. And then is quietly shunted into oblivion. The truth demonstrated by those periodical surveys is quite simply the abysmal ignorance of the Constitution among a great majority of the Americans who are supposed to live by it.

My own experience through the past 40 years more than suggests that an alarming huge majority of educated Americans could not, offhand, tell you what is meant by "due process". What human situations might be covered by equal protection of the laws? What actions at law — hi there, madam Attorney General — could be condemned as double jeopardy?

And, to take an example that ought to flame up in every mind when gun control is the topic, under what single condition does the Constitution allow you to keep a gun? The fact is that the Constitution does not give anyone a right to bear arms in order to shoot a rabbit, let alone to kill a neighbour. The Constitution specifies that a well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

There is no militia. When that article was written, the security of the infant United States depended on a militia that could be mustered on call. There was no standing army. Because the founding fathers never intended the country to have one.

The storeowner claimed self-defense. He was convicted of voluntary manslaughter but received no prison sentence. During the riots, nearly 2, businesses in Koreatown were destroyed, along with 2, African-American owned businesses.

Recovery from of the L. Riots has been an arduous process for Los Angeles, and the effected communities never received support to adequately address the issues illuminated by the riots. The organization wound up being transmogrified into a source of revenue for the wealthy and special interests. The LAPD has made some headway by way of improvements, and the make-up of the police force is much more diverse than it was in the early s.

However, the LAPD has still grappled with a variety of issues. In , L. Though the level of racial profiling and police brutality from the Rodney King era may not exist today, the scars on Los Angeles communities may never fully heal. However, Goldman offered hope in saying that young people today are more engaged, active, and encouraged than at the time of the L. Thanks for signing up! We get it: you like to have control of your own internet experience.