Angry Legislators Demand Reform on Change of Venue Law

The acquittal in the Rodney G. King beating case ignited bipartisan demands in the Legislature on Thursday for an overhaul of laws that enable highly publicized trials to be moved from one location to another.

“Not since I left the South have I felt so helpless and violated,” said Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco), one of those calling for new laws. An African-American who was raised in Texas, Brown said: “That was a Southern-type verdict. That is all it was.”

Sen. Ed Davis (R-Santa Clarita), a former Los Angeles police chief whose legislative district includes conservative Simi Valley, where the trial was conducted, said he was shocked by the acquittal of four white officers accused of using excessive force against King, who is black.

“If that kind of police conduct is lawful, as the jury said it was, then that is terrible and we’ll have to change the laws,” Davis said. “If what happened is lawful for a police officer, then I don’t want to live here.”

Republican Assemblyman Tom McClintock of Thousand Oaks, who also represents part of Ventura County and is one of the Legislature’s most conservative members, said he considered the King case a “rather open and shut” matter against the police as depicted by the widely replayed home video of the beating. “I believe my own eyes,” he said.

Speaker Brown, Senate Leader David A. Roberti (D-Los Angeles) and other legislators said they believed that the verdict would have been different if the officers had been tried by jurors drawn from a racially diverse area similar to Lake View Terrace in the San Fernando Valley where the beating occurred last year.

Brown denounced Simi Valley as a “very white, reactionary suburb” of Los Angeles and announced his support for legislation that would seek to ensure that when a trial is moved to another place the jury be representative of the defendant’s home environment.

“I don’t think there was anyone on the jury that didn’t have a residue of racism somewhere in their mind that this big, black fellow represented a threat unlike a little white fellow,” Brown told reporters, acknowledging that the jury included an Asian-American and a Latina in addition to 10 Anglos.

State Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Bill Lockyer (D-San Leandro) said his panel will look at several pending police misconduct bills “when there is an opportunity for return of public order” in Los Angeles.

Included on the legislative agenda is a bill by Sen. Art Torres (D-Los Angeles) that would transfer authority for prosecuting police misconduct cases from local district attorneys to the state attorney general. Another bill by Assemblywoman Marguerite Archie-Hudson (D-Los Angeles) would make it a misdemeanor for a police officer to fail to report an instance of brutality by a fellow officer.

But Davis, who is carrying a bill that would require police officers to report brutality by fellow officers or face criminal charges and be banned from law enforcement, voiced concern that an African-American man, Terry White, was chosen to take the lead in prosecuting four white policemen in a Ventura County community with relatively few African-Americans.

Stressing that he believed White performed well, Davis said: “Looking back, I am just wondering about the wisdom of having a black prosecutor. It probably would have been fine in Los Angeles, but apparently it didn’t play as well as it could in Ventura. . . . Who knows how these racial things play in the minds of jurors?”