A CITY IN CRISIS : NEWS ANALYSIS : Television Leads Many Viewers to Second-Guess Jury

From the beating to the trial to the riots, the Rodney G. King case is a violent illustration of how technology is straining the institutions that were set up for an earlier age.

The jury system was conceived so that citizens could act as surrogates for the public to sit in judgment of crime. But with cameras increasingly trained wherever news is expected--from police cars, by citizen photographers and by free-lance camera crews who prowl the streets looking for footage to sell to TV stations--in a growing number of cases the public is beginning to believe that it can see and judge the crime for itself.

And in these cases, experts on the news media and legal matters say, citizens may no longer be so willing to accept the verdicts of their juries or their courts.

Some of them express concern that the problem is part of a broader loss of faith in institutions generally.

“Once again, television is replacing society’s intervening institutions,” said Robert Lichter, executive director of the Center for Media and Public Affairs in Washington. “American society is famed for the systems that were set up as a buffer against pure democracy, which the founding fathers saw as a kind of mob rule, and television tends to break those down. . . . There is no more intermediary.”

One problem, said communications theorist and New York University professor Neil Postman, is that things have different meanings in a legal context than in a social one, a confusion made worse when people watching television believe they have seen crimes for themselves.

Whatever the merits of the King jury’s verdict may be, “the judicial system is designed to be a kind of rigorous search for truth based on what is admissible and what isn’t admissible, and the public does not understand how that works, or what the rules of evidence are and even what is the legal meaning of truth or evidence,” Postman said.

Author Joshua Meyrowitz of the University of New Hampshire said potential erosion of public faith in social institutions such as juries is not unlike what happened to sports with the introduction of the instant replay. Audiences began to second-guess the authority of referees, and some games, such as professional football, began to use a second level of judges armed with videotapes to second-guess the first decisions. Yet, videotape can prove so imperfect at times that football has now abandoned the instant replay.

For television stations, many experts say, the issue is not whether to show video that would potentially become the focus of a trial, but how to show it and how often.

“There is a lot of evidence that the cumulative effect of television is what drives its meaning,” said Lichter. “If something is shown over and over, it can become an icon, like the Challenger explosion is a symbol for the space program, and it becomes hard to imagine there can be a different interpretation.”

In the Rodney King case, several experts said that during coverage of the trial television stations, always eager for the most compelling picture, would replay the tape rather than show the more mundane images from the courtroom itself. While that does not mean the verdict was correct, it may help explain why it seemed so shocking to much of the public.

Television can introduce a second problem into important court trials--not for the public but for jurors themselves--as they face the prospect that they may have to justify their decisions matched against the pictures of the crime and its effect on the community.

In the King case, one jury member’s explanation that King was in control at all times and that the force used against him was reasonable was shown on CNN written in text across the bottom of the screen while the pictures of the beating played above it.

Also on CNN, another juror on a phone line debated an attorney who had attended the trial and who disagreed with the verdict over points of evidence he thought were ignored. The juror was forced to acknowledge that her panel had forgotten about them.

On ABC’s “Nightline,” Ted Koppel asked a juror named Anna how she felt when she saw the rioting that the verdict had caused.

All this can have an effect. The guilty verdict in a 1989 police brutality case in Miami has been overturned, in part because jurors interviewed on television afterward said that they were worried that an acquittal might inspire riots.

Aside from these deeper social and political problems, video technology also has presented legal complications. In its brief presence in the courtroom, videotape seems to have cut both ways.

Juries, for instance, have frequently made decisions based on more than simply what they see on videotape. Auto maker John DeLorean was acquitted of selling drugs in 1984, and Washington Mayor Marion Barry was acquitted of all but misdemeanor charges involving using drugs in 1990, because their juries believed the pictures that caught them in the act did not tell the whole story.

Similarly, recent cases have all but put to rest the argument that the public might not be willing to accept jury verdicts if trials began to be televised.

In the case of the William Kennedy Smith rape trial, many attorneys and the Radio-Television News Directors Assn. argue that the public’s riveted attention to each step of the trial actually made a potentially controversial verdict more acceptable.

But there are other wrinkles to the use of video that are not yet so clear.

One of the newest is that increasingly lawyers are staging video re-enactments of crimes. Even in something as simple as car accidents, these videos are posing new challenges because camera angles, lighting and other techniques can lie.

This trend puts judges in the position of film critics because they must decide if a video is a fair representation of reality. If not, they can rule such tapes inadmissible.

“You can make the car coming across your bow to appear as if it is about to crash into you or as if you have time to turn out of the way depending on the camera angle,” said Georgetown University professor Paul Rothstein. This is the same problem that has made the instant replay more complicating than helpful as the final arbiter of sports decisions.

Southwestern University Law School professor Myrna Raeder, chairwoman of the American Bar Assn.’s committee on criminal evidence and procedures, said judges now generally overrule lawyers who tell juries that if they believe something on a videotape, then they must come to a specific verdict.

The difficulty, those who study television say, comes from the same confusion that Americans have whenever their reality is reduced to the parameters of the television screen--whether it is the Gulf War or the San Francisco earthquake or now the riots. Television has no peripheral vision.

And it is only an approximation of being there. The more complete picture of the Gulf War is becoming clear only now, a year later, as Americans learn, for one example, that not all of the bombing runs were as precise as the ones they were allowed to see on television.

To Jane Kirtley, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, perhaps “most worrisome is that videos can also be tampered with”--and not only by editing and camera technique. With digital technology, it is even possible to alter the images to the extent of adding objects or people who weren’t there, or deleting things that were.

And the potential problems are only increasing with the spread of video.

In Chattanooga, Tenn., a camera set up by a suspicious father caught baby-sitter Donna Walterhouse slapping a 6-month-old baby. She pleaded guilty and got a maximum of a year in jail. “It destroyed her life,” said her lawyer James Purple. “We have developed a better understanding of the power of the atom bomb than we have of the videotape.”

In San Jose, William Kiley videotaped his own beating at the hands of a neighbor who had harassed him with anti-gay taunts. The neighbor, Joshua Huff, was convicted of assault and battery.

In Chicago, activist George H. Clements, a Catholic priest, has begun a national campaign to persuade people to use video cameras to help police arrest drug dealers.

In Los Angeles, free-lance teams like Newsreel Video Service plumb the city streets all night, searching for crime and fires, then offering the night’s horrors for sale to television stations the next day.

In cities across America, this daily parade of violence and mayhem, sucked from a few alleys and ghettos, can become the emblem for entire races and entire towns, to an audience that knows only what it sees on the television screen.

That limited reality may now be doubling back on Los Angeles, as the nation watches the aftermath not so much of the case of Rodney King, but of the video version it became.