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Briseno's credibility was undermined by the fact that on the tape he too is seen delivering what appears to be one kick to King at a key moment in the assault. It comes about midway through the episode, at a point when King appears to have been lying still, facedown on the ground, for several seconds. Briseno's apparent kick appears to prompt King into groggy motion again, which sets off another flurry of pounding from Officers Laurence Powell and Timothy Wind. Briseno's lawyer, John Barnett, contended that his client had not kicked King but merely put his foot on the man's neck to hold him down so the beating would stop.
With race the ever present issue in the case -- King has claimed that he was taunted throughout the beating with racial slurs -- the prosecution did little to bring home its significance to the jury. Prosecutor White did tell the court that just 20 minutes before the King beating, Officer Powell had sent a computer message to another patrol car saying an incident that evening involving a domestic dispute at the home of a black family was "right out of Gorillas in the Mist." That's "a racial statement," White pointed out. "You have to wonder what was his motive when he was beating Mr. King." But overall, the defense made no more than faint attempts to show that racial hatred could have inspired the officers to impermissible brutality. That issue will now be central to the civil rights investigation the Justice Department is still pursuing.
"The prosecution was methodical, almost tedious in its presentation," says / Laurie Levenson, a law professor at Loyola Law School. "The defense came out swinging from the first, painting King as a bad and dangerous man." On the order of Judge Weisberg, defense attorneys were not permitted to tell the jury about King's criminal record, including his imprisonment for robbery. But they were able to portray King as a large, aggressive man who was legally drunk. Much was made of the officers' claim that they thought King had gained unusual strength and tolerance to pain because, they believed, he was under the influence of angel dust -- the hallucinogenic drug pcp. Subsequent tests showed no trace of the drug in King's system.
All of that was in keeping with one part of the defense strategy -- to make the jurors empathize with the dangers police officers face. The defense contended that the officers did not dare simply to seize King and apply the cuffs for fear that the suspect might grab one of their guns. "I tried to put the jurors in the shoes of the police officers," boasts Michael Stone, Powell's attorney. "We got the jurors to look at the case not from the eye of the camera but from the eyes of the officers." That's one more reason why the prosecution probably erred in its decision not to call King to the stand.
The second part of the defense strategy was to persuade jurors that in any event, everything that appeared on the tape was within the flexible guidelines for police procedure in subduing a suspect. The L.A.P.D.'S policy in that area has it both ways. It permits "minimum reasonable force" if "other reasonable alternatives have been exhausted or would clearly be ineffective under the circumstances." It adds that "this does not mean that an officer has to wait until a suspect attacks." Nightsticks cannot be used "to gain compliance to verbal commands absent combative or aggressive actions by the suspect."