The King Case as a Modern-Day War Crimes Trial

Stacey C. Koon, police sergeant and defendant, stood unnoticed at the back of the room. This was Thursday, the first day of trial for the four Los Angeles cops accused of beating Rodney G. King beyond all reason, and Koon was waiting for his lawyer to finish an impromptu news conference and go to lunch. Koon wore a blue banker’s suit and a thin, stiff smile. The smile receded when he realized he had been spotted.

One after another, reporters peeled off from the pack and attempted to pry something out of the 14-year LAPD veteran, who was in command that night in Lake View Terrace. Koon gave nothing away. He peered straight ahead, avoiding any eye contact, and provided only the barest answers.

“How do you feel about the trial finally starting?”

“I waited a long time for this day in court.”

“Are you optimistic?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“We’ll wait and see what the evidence shows.”

With that, the arm of Koon’s attorney shot through the gathering swarm like a hook and yanked Koon away, a reprieve from any further eloquence.

One year after the fact, the first reaction to the King trial starting is this: Why bother? We all have viewed the videotape, digested the leaked documents, weighed the Christopher report and heard the hipshot verdicts of guilty passed down from the mayor, the police chief and almost anyone else with access to a television.

Any presumption of innocence evaporated with the first broadcast of the videotape, and the action quickly shifted to ancillary pursuits--like canning Chief Daryl F. Gates. Then and now, the tape and its 81 seconds of ugliness have been considered an investigatory trump card. The thinking goes like this: Nothing that Rodney King--a paroled felon, drunk, speeding away in the opposite direction of his home--could have done justifies the way he was banged around like a human pinata, on a public street, under the glare of a helicopter floodlight, by sworn police officers who outnumbered him two dozen to one.

The accused don’t see it that way. They intend to mount a defense, and it might constitute the last interesting piece of business in the whole Rodney King affair. The opening statements by each of the defendant’s attorneys certainly promised a spirited, if at times far-fetched, presentation.

There was the suggestion, for example, by Koon’s attorney, Darryl Mounger, that Rodney King actually owed the defendants his life. To hear Mounger tell it, the Highway Patrol officer who led the chase of King’s Hyundai was all but ready to shoot him before L.A.’s finest stepped in and pummeled him into submission.

Another theory was that King had asked for it, had brought the rain of 56 “power strokes” down on himself by refusing to lie on the pavement. The lawyers brought enhancements of unfocused frames of the video, marked with outlines of a grainy form they said was King rising up to throw the first punch.

“You can see what you want to see in the tape,” said Michael Stone, Officer Laurence M. Powell’s lawyer.

At least one of the accused will defend himself by blaming the others. Officer Ted J. Briseno’s lawyer declared that his client pushed King down with his foot--”stomped,” was the prosecutor’s term--only to keep him from being struck again by officers “who were out of control.”

And finally, there was inevitable talk of just following orders, of dealing with King strictly “by the book.”

This last line of defense is potentially the most intriguing. Consider this case a war crimes trial. The cops are foot soldiers, sent out to battle crime, to contain it in certain sectors of the city written off by everyone but those who must live in them.

Like all war crimes trials, this one could make many people uncomfortable before it is over. You never know when a defendant will break the code of silence and tell all. Also, hypocrisy is inherent in these affairs. Carpet bombings are permitted, but cutting off corpses’ ears cannot go unpunished. Operation Hammer and battering rams are fine, but don’t get too rough with the bad guys--or, at least, don’t get caught at it.

More than anyone else, Sgt. Koon and the others are in a good position to answer--if they want to take things that far--the most important question raised by the King beating. Despite a year of politics, commissions, litigation and journalism, no one yet can say with any real confidence how many times incidents like this occur outside the range of a bystander’s video camera.

We’ll have to wait and see what the evidence shows.