IT SEEMED IMPOSSIBLE THAT ANY jury could acquit the four officers who were accused of beating Rodney King. How could anyone discount the brutal vision of King being clubbed and kicked on videotape for 81 unforgettable seconds? It seemed like an open-and-shut case.
In a sense it was, but not in the way most people expected. Most of the jurors appear to have made up their mind quickly that the officers were innocent. That left much of the rest of the country wondering how the evidence of their own eyes could not have been sufficient for the jury in Simi Valley, ! Calif. But this trial hinged on matters both narrower and broader than that shocking bit of videotape. The narrow ones were fine points of law that jurors must decide upon, such as what constitutes reasonable doubt and just how much force is permitted under the procedural guidelines of the Los Angeles police department. The broader matter was race, the inescapable factor in any case in which a jury that has no black members must choose between the police and a black man accused of a crime.
In the view of many legal experts in California, the outcome may have been decided as soon as the trial venue was moved to the dry hills of Simi Valley, an overwhelmingly white, middle-class community of 100,000, 35 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles. In July a state appeals court accepted defense arguments that the barrage of publicity and political fallout surrounding the case would make it impossible for a fair trial to be held in Los Angeles County. The move was surprising, though not without precedent. In a typical year, about 10 felony trials are moved in California. But it's been more than a decade since one was moved out of Los Angeles, where even such celebrity monsters as Charles Manson and the Hillside Strangler were tried locally. And there was no place in California -- or the nation for that matter -- where people had not seen and reacted to the King videotape.
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Stanley Weisberg, who would preside at the trial, was offered a choice of three venues by the state judicial counsel. He rejected Orange County, a redoubt of white conservatives just south of L.A., because its court calendar was too crowded. The prosecution pushed for a location in the San Francisco Bay Area: Alameda County, home to Oakland, where the population, 15% African American, would be a near reflection of Los Angeles, which is 10% black. But Weisberg also rejected that option, citing the cost and inconvenience for all sides of a venue 387 miles from L.A.
That left Ventura County, and the town of Simi Valley, which is just 2% black. A large part of the local citizenry moved there to escape Los Angeles and all it represents to them: gangs, crime, high housing prices and minorities. The place is home to a large number of police and fire fighters. The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library is there. Even if Simi Valley could not be counted on to yield an old-fashioned, Alabama-style jury, any panel chosen from there was more likely to identify with the four white officers who had held the nightsticks than with the one black man writhing on the ground.