San Diego Jury Acquits Man of Slaying Officer

A Superior Court jury Thursday acquitted of manslaughter a young black man who killed a white police officer in a racially charged confrontation two years ago, closing perhaps the final chapter in a tragic saga that exposed a deep gulf between the city’s police force and the black community.

In addition to acquittal on the charge of voluntary manslaughter in the shooting death of officer Thomas Riggs, 27, the defendant, Sagon Penn, 25, also was found innocent of the most serious charges stemming from the wounding of a second officer and of a civilian who was a passenger in a police car under a community “ride-along” program. The jury deadlocked on three lesser charges.

In a tape-recorded statement to police shortly after the shooting, which was introduced into evidence at the trial, Penn said he acted in self-defense after the truck he was driving was stopped by Officer Donovan Jacobs. Penn did not testify, but other witnesses said that Penn grabbed Jacobs’ gun after the officer had pinned him to the ground and had struck him with his baton while cursing him with racial epithets. After shooting and wounding Jacobs, Penn fired at Riggs, killing him, and then fired into Riggs’ police car, wounding civilian Sarah Pina-Ruiz.

Penn fled in a police car, running over Jacobs in the process, but turned himself in to authorities within half an hour.

“This was one of the most controversial cases in the history of this city, if not the most controversial,” Judge J. Morgan Lester told the jurors after the verdicts were announced. All three of San Diego’s network-affiliated television stations broadcast the verdicts live from the courtroom.

This was the second trial for Penn. A year ago he was acquitted of murder and attempted murder, but the jury was unable to reach a verdict on the manslaughter charges and San Diego County Dist. Atty. Edwin Miller chose to try Penn again. Miller said Thursday that he is unlikely to try Penn a third time on the still unresolved charges, including assault with a deadly weapon.

Jurors Agonize

As in Penn’s first trial, jurors said Thursday that they agonized over the extent to which the police officers’ conduct in their confrontation with Penn on March 31, 1985, justified Penn’s actions.

In Lester’s packed courtroom, the verdicts--delivered after 23 days of jury deliberation, the last three intensified by the jurors’ unusual request that they be sequestered--were received with little outward emotion by principal figures in the case.

Penn, a student of Buddhism and martial arts who sat silently through both trials, kept his gaze fixed straight ahead, as his defense lawyer, Milton J. Silverman, drew up close beside him, clasping his shoulder. Penn declined comment afterward.

Colleen Riggs, the dead officer’s widow, held tightly to the hands of her mother and one of her sisters-in-law, seeming to blink back tears. Pina-Ruiz sat stoically behind her.

Afterward, Pina-Ruiz, ashen-faced, stormed from the courthouse. Her only comment: “The jury is blind.”

Riggs and her family were angry, too, saying that defense attorney Silverman had succeeded in putting the two officers on trial and turning the case into a referendum on racial prejudice.

Rejects Defense Claim

“Those two officers would have handled the situation in exactly the same manner if Sagon Penn were a white man,” Riggs said, rejecting the defense claim that Jacobs, especially, escalated the conflict in deadly proportion by beating Penn and barraging him with racist epithets.

“But because Sagon Penn is a black man, he is free today,” Riggs said. “If he were white, he would have been convicted.”

Jurors who met with reporters after the verdict, however, said that race--and the larger questions of police-community relations that swirled around the case--had not been an issue in their deliberations.

Among the 130 witnesses who testified in the retrial and the nearly 400 pieces of evidence introduced, no single statement or item was the linchpin of their decision, the jurors said. Instead, they described a painstaking process of breaking down each charge against Penn into its legal elements and weighing them against the evidence and the dozens of instructions Lester had given to guide their deliberations.

“We just took a reasonable, logical, methodical process to this and openly discussed it among everybody,” said the jury’s foreman, Howard McDowell, a 34-year-old salesman from San Diego.

Several jurors agreed, however, that the anguished statements Penn gave police after he turned himself in the night of the shootings figured strongly in his favor during the deliberations. Penn insisted in the tape recorded statements--which were not introduced as evidence in his first trial--that he was under attack and acting in self-defense. Penn also said that the first shot he fired was involuntary--that the gun went off when someone kicked his arm.

“They (Penn’s recorded statements) proved to me Sagon Penn was a very reasonable 22-year-old,” said juror Janet Geisler, 25, a bank cashier from San Diego.

The prosecution and defense had painted starkly different pictures of the encounter in a dirt driveway in a predominantly minority neighborhood of San Diego.

Called ‘Arrogant’

The prosecutor, Deputy Dist. Atty. Michael Carpenter, insisted it was an “arrogant” Penn who refused to take his driver’s license out of his wallet when Jacobs stopped him during an investigation of gang activities and then insolently walked away from the officer rather than cooperate with his interrogation.

Penn, he argued, escalated the minor incident “into a life-and-death struggle,” drawing Jacobs and Riggs into a wrestling match and grabbing Jacobs’ gun as the officer tried to subdue him. Penn emptied the revolver, intending to kill the two officers and hoping to eliminate Pina-Ruiz as a potential witness against him, the prosecution argued.

Silverman--who prevailed in a case few initially gave him a chance of winning--contended from the start that Jacobs instigated the tragedy, arguing that eight years of misconduct by the officer dating from his training at the San Diego Police Academy illustrated his racist, belligerent tendencies.

Among the 48 defense witnesses was a white former police officer who worked with Jacobs and described him as “the most prejudiced white person I’ve ever known” and “an ideal candidate for the Ku Klux Klan.”

The defense lawyer argued that police and prosecutors had spun a web of lies to ensnare Penn, who was not a gang member, by eliciting misleading testimony and seeking to cover up evidence that Penn was forced to act in self-defense.

Acquittals Voted

Penn was acquitted of one count each of voluntary manslaughter and attempted murder and two counts of attempted voluntary manslaughter.

The racially mixed panel deadlocked 11 to 1 for acquittal on an involuntary manslaughter charge in the death of Riggs and 10 to 2 for acquittal of assault with a deadly weapon in the wounding of Jacobs. Jurors divided 7 to 5 for conviction of assault with a deadly weapon in the shooting of Pina-Ruiz, 34. Lester declared a mistrial on those three counts.

The shooting, the emotional trial testimony and the decision by the district attorney to try Penn a second time all spotlighted tensions between authorities and San Diego’s relatively small black community. Accusations of insensitivity were hurled at the police by some black leaders, and the department responded by agreeing to civilian review of complaints of officer misconduct and by adding training in race relations.

The department also ordered all officers to wear bullet-proof vests.

Silverman said Thursday that the legacy of the case was a new introspection in the ranks of San Diego police.

‘They’re Very Sensitive’

“If this case has done anything that’s positive, I think it has alerted everybody of honor and dignity in the Police Department that they need to be ever conscious of the fact they have duties to discharge which are very important,” Silverman said. “And I think they’re very sensitive to that.”

Memories of the dead officer subdued any inclination to celebrate that Penn’s family might have felt.

“I can’t rejoice in something like this,” said Penn’s father, Thomas Penn. “Everybody is scarred and hurt; one man’s dead, another is wounded, a boy is hurt. How can you see a victory in that?

“I’d consider it a victory if everybody was OK and well and Mr. Riggs was back.”

Times staff writers Armando Acuna, Glenn F. Bunting, Barry M. Horstman, Janny Scott and Jenifer Warren contributed to this story.