The first time police officers went on trial for beating Rodney King, Los Angeles looked at itself in the mirror and saw Caliban. Not everyone recognized the same monster. Some saw racist authority and biased justice. Some saw a lawless citizen and mob madness. But for almost everyone, inside and outside the smoking city, the trial became a symbolic test of national values -- something that trials, with their focus on factual specifics and winner-take-all outcomes, are not constructed to be. The acquittals were so shocking to a nation mesmerized by a videotape, and so achingly rejected in riot and rage, that it was inevitable the case would somehow be tried again. This time, with the jurisdiction federal rather than local and the charges focused on civil rights, the burden on participants is greater. The result will be momentous, but the nation is really watching for what comes after. As defense attorney Ira Saltzman challenged jurors last week in a closing statement, "Your verdict might result in some . . . something. Can you withstand that pressure?"
If the judgment this time is harsher for the police, there will be some suspicion that it represents expediency and fear of another riot rather than fair weighing of the evidence. Maybe so. But guilty verdicts would also reflect the fact that this prosecution, led by Assistant U.S. Attorney Steven Clymer, did a better job. It relied less on the celebrated videotape, which the defense at the first trial dismissed as a partial record, and more on live testimony -- from weeping or infuriated police who rejected clubbing and kicking as unnecessary and wrong, from seasoned medical experts who debunked the defendants' blow-by-blow account, above all from previously unheard civilian eyewitnesses, including the victim himself.
The defense, too, was probably better this time. For one thing, it presented a united front. In the first trial, Officer Theodore Briseno testified that his fellow officers were "out of control." This time he and two other defendants opted military style to leave the talking to the senior officer, ) Sergeant Stacey Koon -- although a tape of Briseno's testimony was shown over vociferous objections from the defense.
Far from pleading for understanding, Koon insisted his explicit intention had been to "break bones" to get King to submit: "The intent I had was to cripple him, to make him unable to push off the ground. You can't push off the ground if your elbows are broken. You can't push off the ground if your knees are broken." Any taint of sadism was probably reinforced by testimony that another of the accused, Laurence Powell, left the battered King in the back of a patrol car for nearly an hour while swapping "war stories" with colleagues before taking him to a hospital.