COLUMN ONE : KING CASE AFTERMATH: A CITY IN CRISIS : What Swayed the Jury? : Experts say factors may have included the general tendencies of jurors to give law enforcement the benefit of the doubt and to listen sympathetically to pleas of self-defense.

In the days since the verdict in the Rodney G. King beating case blindsided the country and plunged Los Angeles into civil war, experts in jury behavior have scrambled to throw light on the logic behind the not guilty verdicts in the trial of the four police officers.

They have focused on the peculiar mind-set with which every juror is known to enter a courtroom--a complex jumble of attitudes and beliefs through which they filter the evidence before deciding what really happened.

Experts cite the difficulty of white jurors in identifying with a black victim--particularly one who is not “100% clean”; a documented tendency to sympathize with arguments of self-defense, and, possibly, such overexposure to the videotape of the King beating that the jurors became immune to its impact.

But chief among those attitudes, according to research, is a sympathy for the police--a willingness to give law enforcement the benefit of the doubt. It’s a tendency some trace to the popular notion that police form “the thin blue line” separating order from anarchy.

For these reasons, many experts were not as shocked by the verdicts as was the public.

“People want to trust police officers,” said Valerie Hans, a professor of criminal justice and psychology at the University of Delaware. “They’re (seen as) the force that draws the line between a safe and secure community and the forces of disorder, danger and harm.”

“Jurors say, ‘These cops, they may not be the best people in the world but they are the only thing between us and them,’ ” said Michael J. O’Donnell, a Boston lawyer. “This all-white jury north of Los Angeles views ‘them’ as the people down in Los Angeles.”

The Ventura County jury in the King case consisted of six men and six women, ages 38 to 65, half Democrats, half Republicans. Their professions ranged from cable splicer to computer analyst. Eight had served in the military. None was black.

They returned their verdict Wednesday afternoon and opted not to discuss it with the press. But since that time, several have spoken anonymously, not only to defend what they describe as an agonizing decision but to express anguish at what it has wrought.

Several have stressed that they had to consider more than the video--the 81-second recording that dominates most people’s knowledge of the case. One juror described King’s behavior before and after the tape as belligerent, concluding the police “had no alternative.”

“They’re policemen, they’re not angels,” the juror said, in a statement strikingly consistent with research on jury thinking. “They’re out there to do a low-down, dirty job. Would you want your husband doing it, or your son or your father?”

In interviews Thursday and Friday, psychologists, lawyers and others who have studied jury decision-making said it has long been difficult to convict police, primarily because of the special status and credibility accorded to law enforcement by jurors.

Police are respected “like priests and nurses,” said John D. Gilleland, a psychologist with Jury Analysts Inc., a trial-consulting firm in State College, Pa. They make highly credible prosecution witnesses; when they become defendants, that credibility carries over.

“There is this natural tension,” said Steven Penrod of the University of Minnesota. Police officers “are doing a job that most of us don’t want to do; we feel some reticence to second-guess. On the other hand, we want to hold them to high, but realistic, standards.”

That respect is especially strong among people psychologists describe as authoritarian, believing strongly in law and order and punishment for deviance. For such people, research shows that police officers are the only defendants with whom they generally sympathize.

Such deference is also strong in less urbanized areas, such as Ventura County, where crime is less common and contact with the police is rare, some said. There, residents tend to be homeowners with strong community ties who view the police as protectors.

“The big-city sense brings with it a little more cynicism about the system,” said Gilleland, whose firm assists lawyers in jury selection. “. . . You have different beliefs about the police and their ability and their right to do certain things.”

Gary Moran is a specialist in jury research and a professor of psychology at Florida International University in Miami, a city that has had several highly publicized police brutality cases. He said he believes juries are becoming “more tolerant of police misbehavior.”

Moran, who lives in Miami and disagreed with the King verdict, commented: “An awful lot of white folks . . . just regard certain areas of our cities as being so dangerous” that they are willing to excuse what he believes are abuses on the part of the police.

Interwoven with the willingness to take a police officer’s word is the issue of race, an area in which some said jury research is inconclusive. Experts said the impact of race on decision-making is poorly understood but that there is anecdotal evidence of an effect.

One psychologist recalled the case of Bernhard H. Goetz, acquitted of attempted murder in the 1984 New York subway shooting of four black teen-agers he said he believed intended to rob him. She described it as a similar case of a jury sympathizing with a white defendant accused of a crime against blacks.

There is no evidence that King’s race was an overt factor in the Ventura County jury’s deliberations, experts hastened to point out. But several said a person’s race and class can influence jurors’ ability to sympathize with their case.

“The extent to which any individual can put themselves in the shoes of anybody else is going to be a product of the experiences and values and orientations that they share,” said Penrod, a professor of law well-known for his research on juries.

The ability of jurors to empathize can influence the success of an argument of self-defense, such as the one used by the officers in the King beating. Some experts said research suggests many jurors are inclined to side with defendants who argue self-defense.

While jurors also consider the victim, King did not testify--a strategic decision that some experts suggested might have influenced the verdict. Rightly or wrongly, experts said many jurors suspect that a person who does not testify has something to hide.

“People want blameless victims,” said Hans, author of a recent book entitled “Judging the Jury.” Hans said jurors scrutinize complainants, often asking how they might have avoided getting hurt, as though the victim contributed to his or her victimization.

“The victim in these cases has to be 100% clean to get anywhere,” O’Donnell said. His Boston law firm in 1980 won America’s first civil judgment in an abuse case against police officers who had not first been convicted on criminal charges.

One other factor that worked to the benefit of the officers in the King case was the high standard of proof required for a conviction in a criminal case: Under the law, the jury must believe that the charges are true “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

The defense attorneys cultivated that doubt by repeatedly encouraging the jurors to put themselves in the shoes of the police, some said. That empathy, when combined with ambiguities in King’s own actions, may have left the jurors with sufficient doubt.

“One way to view it is that the prosecution was unable to dispel those last reasonable doubts,” Penrod said. Noting that the officers still face a civil suit, with a lower standard of proof, he said: “It’s entirely plausible that the verdicts in those cases will be very different.”

But Penrod and others suggested that the media may inadvertently have created the impression that guilty verdicts were more likely than they were in the King case by dwelling on a single, albeit disturbing, piece of evidence--the videotape.

Elizabeth Loftus, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington and a specialist in memory distortion, said the tape was so powerful that it not only convinced the public of the officers’ guilt but even affected the way other officers present at the beating remembered the incident.

“But there was much more going on than that tape,” said Loftus, who served as a consultant to the attorney for one defendant, Sgt. Stacey C. Koon. She suggested the jury placed equal weight on what they were told occurred both before and after the tape was shot.

“And this jury got to meet those defendants and really get to know them,” said Loftus, recalling how some officers’ family members appeared in court every day. “. . . That may explain why the jury arrived at a verdict that the public seems to feel is completely unfair and outrageous.”

The focus on the videotape may have had an additional effect. Ed Donnerstein, a psychologist at UC Santa Barbara, said research on videotaped violence has shown that repeated exposure quickly produces less emotional arousal and a reduced perception of pain.

“I’m sure you’ve seen that tape dozens of times,” he said Friday. In the trial, the tape was “dissected, like a cadaver. . . . Is it possible that individuals began to see less and less violence because they were repeatedly exposed? Very possible.”