No More ‘Media Jury’ in King Case

“Her testimony is not believable!”

The statement was unequivocal, matter of fact, leaving no room for doubt or debate: “Not believable!” Case closed.

The speaker was Michael Stone, forceful attorney for Laurence M. Powell, one of four Los Angeles police officers charged with using excessive force on motorist Rodney G. King following a high-speed car chase.

The “her” described by Stone was Melanie Singer, a California Highway Patrol officer whose testimony for the prosecution he has sought to discredit. However, this highly vociferous attack on Singer was not made before jurors in the Simi Valley courtroom where the King case is being tried. Holding forth in front of television cameras in a separate courtroom reserved for reporters covering the case, Stone was speaking to the news media.

Or was he?

An agreement that Judge Stanley Weisberg worked out with opposing attorneys in the King case Wednesday has apparently ended one of the more bizarre aspects of this trial being televised live, gavel to gavel, by KTTV Channel 11. Under the voluntary arrangement, attorneys will no longer speak to the media until after the trial, which may continue for weeks.

It wasn’t announced just who initiated this voluntary gagging. But it likely wasn’t Stone, who has argued his case even more bluntly and dynamically during televised press conferences--held during lunch breaks and after each day’s testimony--than in the courtroom.

Lead prosecutor Terry White also appeared before the media, but only sporadically and for brief periods, giving terse replies to reporters’ questions in these sometimes extraordinary sessions carried live by Channel 11. Other defense attorneys occasionally made brief appearances too.

But this was Stone’s media stage. His lively trashings of prosecution witnesses inevitably surfaced as sound bites in nightly newscasts.

At one point in the media room, Stone even gave his own demonstration of police baton power swings. Another of his primary visual aids was a series of enlarged photographs showing areas of King’s face where Singer and her husband and fellow CHP officer, Timothy Singer, testified that King was repeatedly struck by Powell. As he did in front of the jury, Stone used the photos to argue that King could not have been struck as the Singers described.

It was almost as if Stone regarded reporters as another jury, sometimes even addressing them as “ladies and gentlemen.”

In his 20 years as a reporter, Dave Bryan had seen nothing like it. “At times it was almost like performance art,” Bryan, who has been covering the trial astutely for Channel 11, said by phone Thursday.

Almost as if this were one of those tightly formatted courtroom TV series, moreover, there were times during breaks when Stone would disclose in televised one-on-one chats with Bryan the broad outline of what his next strategy would be. Shortly thereafter, with TV looking in, he would be in the courtroom attempting to execute that strategy.

To what end this televised talkiness?

Although not sequestered, the jury each day is given the standard admonition by Weisberg to hermetically seal themselves off from the case when not in court. No newspaper coverage of the trial. No television coverage. No discussions about the trial with anyone.

Thus, what had Stone to gain from giving the media what sounded like previews of his closing argument? Is he just a gregarious guy who likes to hang out with reporters? Sure he is.

Stone was “adroitly manipulating what time he has,” Bob Ross, one of Channel 11’s expert commentators, said on the air Wednesday. Despite the judge’s warnings, added Ross, a defense attorney himself, “you know darn well, life being what it is, some of it (Stone’s comments) . . . filters back” to the jury.

Whether disregarding the judge’s instructions and watching Stone on TV themselves, or hearing from others what he said, jurors at the very least could be affected subliminally by Stone’s words, Ross argued.

Quite apart from Stone, moreover, there’s always the chance that while watching a prime-time TV show a juror will inadvertently hear and be influenced by a local news promo on the trial.

Stone’s apparent tactic is hardly a new one in the argue-your-case-in-the-media television age. For years now, media-fluent attorneys have sought to try their cases in part on the courthouse steps, hoping through TV to detract from their opposition or add king-sized exclamation points to the arguments they’re making inside the courtroom.

Stone, however, has ratcheted the process up a couple of notches. And Bryan--recalling the public furor that greeted the suspended sentence given grocer Soon Ja Du last fall in the shooting of Latasha Harlins--believes that Stone may have had a wider audience in mind than merely the King jury.

Bryan speculates that Stone, seeking to avoid a repeat of the outrage resulting from the outcome of the Du/Harlins case, may be trying to create a climate of acceptance on the part of the public should Powell be acquitted or given a sentence that some would consider lenient. “It would take a public relations masterpiece,” Bryan said. “This is perhaps the most dramatic example I’ve seen in which public opinion was so completely one-sided going into a case.”

In any event, Ross said on Channel 11 that he believed the attorney-media sessions were canceled at a good point for Stone. Testimony so far has mainly focused on the initial baton blows that King received from police at a point when he was allegedly being unresponsive to them. But Ross theorized that Stone would have found it much more difficult to justify for the questioning media the entire clobbering given King as he was on the ground.

For that attempted public-relations masterpiece, stay tuned to the courtroom.