Venue Change for Officers Is County Rarity

There were enough unbiased jurors in Los Angeles to try Charles Manson, the Hillside Strangler, the Night Stalker and the accused McMartin Preschool child molesters. But there are not enough to try Police Sgt. Stacey C. Koon, an appellate court has ruled.

Koon and three Los Angeles Police Department colleagues, accused in the beating of motorist Rodney G. King, are the first criminal defendants in the county in nearly 20 years to win relocation of their trial, court officials said. The trial will be moved to a still-undetermined California county, where tensions related to the beating are presumed to be lower.

Koon and the others won their change of venue in part because of unrelenting pretrial publicity and the swirling political controversy that developed over the future of Police Chief Daryl F. Gates.

Mayor Tom Bradley and other critics questioned Wednesday whether the move will make it easier to find an impartial jury, since videotape of the King beating has permeated the nation’s consciousness. “Is it necessary to move that trial just because the people have seen that video?” asked Bradley. “Everybody has seen that video.”

But the appellate judges said they also feared that a threat of civil disturbances in Los Angeles might put undue pressure on jurors to convict white police officers accused of beating a black man.

Referring to a letter from the director of the Mexican American Political Assn. warning that minority youths would make Los Angeles “very hot” if the case is moved, the appeals panel noted that it had received “a document which can only be construed as a threat of community violence. . . .

“If the mere possibility of an order directing that trial be conducted outside Los Angeles County gives rise to such threats, we must draw the inevitable inference about the possibility of threats which could surface during the trial itself,” the justices said.

On this point, the panel headed by Justice Joan Dempsey Klein quoted last month’s decision of a Florida appeals court reversing the manslaughter conviction of Miami police officer William Lozano, whose shooting of a black motorcyclist sparked a civil disturbance.

The Florida court ruled that Lozano was entitled to a new trial--this time outside Miami, as he had asked. “We simply cannot approve the result of a trial conducted . . . in an atmosphere in which the entire community . . . was . . . justifiably concerned with the dangers which would follow an acquittal, but which would be . . . obviated if . . . the defendant was convicted,” the Florida court said.

The U.S. Constitution gives an accused criminal the right to a fair trial with impartial jurors drawn from the jurisdiction in which the crime occurred. So in asking for a case to be moved, the accused is asking to give up one constitutional right for another.

Courts rarely grant such requests, said G. Thomas Munsterman, director of the center for jury studies at the National Center for State Courts. “There better be a compelling reason,” he said.

In California, venues are changed in only about a dozen of the 8,000 felony cases tried each year, state officials said.

Most of those changed originate in small counties, but, even there, judges usually resist requests, apparently in the belief that they can eliminate, through questioning, jurors who have been prejudiced by pretrial publicity.

Criminal defendants in Los Angeles County seeking changes of venue have been uniformly unsuccessful for 18 years because judges here have been able to point to the county’s size as ample reason to believe that questioning will produce 12 unbiased jurors.

With 6 1/2 million adults, the Los Angeles jurisdiction has by far the nation’s largest jury pool.

In the Night Stalker case--which proved to be the toughest in which to select a panel--1,400 potential jurors were questioned before a jury was chosen. In the first of the two McMartin trials--the next toughest case--500 were questioned. Ray Buckey and other defendants ultimately were acquitted.

Ironically, the last case transferred from Los Angeles was much less famous. According to the trial judge in the King case, Bernard J. Kamins, it was the 1973 trial of three men charged with shooting to death a 4-year-old Hawaiian Gardens girl. The trial was sent from Norwalk to San Mateo County because of what a judge called “massive saturation” publicity.

Juanita Blankenship, Los Angeles County’s director of jury management, said she wonders how, given the national publicity on the King case, another county could do a better job than Los Angeles in finding unbiased jurors.

This is a quandary courts have felt in celebrated cases because of increasingly widespread mass communications. The King beating, like the wounding of President Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley, is an extreme example of this problem because it was captured on a nationally broadcast videotape.

But some experts say that nationally televised events still have a special and highly prejudicial impact in the localities where they occurred.

Edward Bronson, a Cal State Chico political science professor who has testified as an expert on numerous venue change requests, said that moving a case across county lines cannot eliminate prejudice, but can moderate it.

In Los Angeles, he said, the King beating is bound to be more of a “grabber” than in other counties, even among prospective jurors who may have seen the videotape.

The reason, he said, is that some people in Los Angeles now have more negative feelings toward their police and are more likely than people elsewhere to have been caught up in the unfolding political drama over the future of their police chief and proposed reforms of their Police Department.

The appeals court made the same points in ordering a change of venue requested by Koon, Officers Laurence M. Powell, Timothy Wind and Theodore J. Briseno.

But some other judges--faced with massive national publicity--have concluded that transferring a case is no solution to the problem.

A federal judge, for example, denied the change of venue request by Lt. Col. Oliver North, accused of crimes involving the trade of arms for hostages with Iran, reasoning that jurors outside Washington, where the crimes allegedly occurred, would be just as likely as jurors in the district to know about the case--and even perhaps as likely to have seen North’s televised congressional testimony.

Instead of a change of venue, he relied on questioning prospective jurors to find a panel that knew little or nothing about the Iran-Contra affair.

He had little trouble.

“There are a sizable number of people in this country who really don’t follow the news,” said Terri Waller, a trial consultant with the National Jury Project, a private consulting firm that, among other things, does public opinion surveys for lawyers considering change of venue motions.

But this raises another question. As commentator Newton Minow put it: “Must ignorance be a virtue in our search for justice?”