L.A. Riots Weigh Heavily on Scales of Justice System : Courts: Unrest raises fair-trial issues in any further proceedings against officers and affects cases nationwide.

As scenes of flaming buildings and battle-scarred streets fade from public memory, the Los Angeles riots are creating sparks anew, this time in the arena that gave birth to the rampage of looting and fire: the nation’s criminal justice system.

Already, the ripple effects of the violence spawned by the not guilty verdicts in the Rodney G. King beating case are being felt in courtrooms as far away as Florida, Idaho and the state of Washington.

And locally, as authorities look toward a retrial of Officer Laurence M. Powell and the federal government determines whether to bring indictments against Powell and others involved in the beating, the specter of the riots is casting an even darker shadow.

From deciding whether to file new charges in the case to selecting a jury and a site for a possible new trial, legal experts and political analysts say any future prosecution will be indelibly colored by what happened in the streets of Los Angeles after the recent verdicts.

The political ramifications are enormous. The U.S. Justice Department, under extraordinary pressure from President Bush to investigate alleged criminal violations of King’s civil rights, now has little choice but to bring charges, experts say. Los Angeles Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner, who announced Wednesday that he will ask a judge to order another trial for Powell, is facing a tough election in less than three weeks and is in much the same situation.

If there is a second trial, the legal landscape will be fraught with land mines. Potential jurors, knowing of threats against those on the Ventura County panel that heard the first case, might be afraid to serve. Or, realizing that another acquittal could mean another round of rioting, they might be afraid to acquit. One question looms especially large: With news of the riots touching virtually every corner of the United States, where might a new trial be held?

“Los Angeles and every institution--government, politics, the judiciary--is going to be walking on eggs for a good long time,” said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a political analyst at the Claremont Graduate School’s Center for Politics and Policy. “The Earth has shifted.”

Said William Stuntz, who teaches criminal law at the University of Virginia Law School: “I’d worry a lot if I were in the Justice Department. They are really committed now. They’ve got to go forward and they’ve got to win, or there are going to be political consequences and maybe consequences on the street.”

Elsewhere, the riots are already affecting what goes on in the courts--particularly with respect to the racial makeup of juries. In Florida, a judge moved the manslaughter trial of a Miami policeman from Orlando to Tallahassee, which has an ethnic mix more like Miami’s. The case, which touched off riots in 1989, involves the death of a black motorcyclist.

“This court cannot ignore the national tragedy of the urban riots that followed the Rodney King verdict,” Dade County Circuit Judge Thomas Spencer said in his ruling last week. “That so many of our fellow Americans feel shut out from our judicial system demands our attention.”

In Idaho, a judge cited the riots in dismissing an all-Anglo jury in a lawsuit filed by a Latino farm worker. In Washington state, a judge postponed the trial of a former police officer out of fear that jurors, with the King case in mind, might treat him unfairly.

And in Los Angeles, a judge sent a civil suit filed by three former transit police officers--all of them Latino--to San Bernardino County. The former officers claimed that the Southern California Rapid Transit District and its former police chief had discriminated against them in promotions.

In his ruling in that case, Superior Court Judge Richard C. Hubbell noted that the King verdict “set off a firestorm of protest and violence that has risen to unimaginable levels.” He found that the RTD and its former chief, who is Anglo, could not get a fair trial in Los Angeles “amidst this background of turmoil and social upheaval.”

Meanwhile, California lawmakers are proposing legislation requiring demographics to be considered in trials, such as the King case, that have been moved to another county. New Jersey legislators have proposed a similar law in the wake of the King verdicts.

These political and judicial decisions may signal a turning point in a system that some lawyers and legal scholars say has paid too little attention to the ethnic makeup of juries in the past.

In the case of the four Los Angeles Police officers who were accused in the King beating, for instance, the trial was moved to largely white Ventura County even though Alameda County, with an ethnic makeup similar to that of Los Angeles, was available. When prosecutors objected, Superior Court Judge Stanley M. Weisberg said his decision was based on convenience--Ventura County is close to Los Angeles.

Now, said Cynthia McClain Hill, a Los Angeles attorney who was a television commentator on the King case, “justice is beginning to confront political reality. What we are seeing is an increasing awareness that while justice may be blind, it can’t be colorblind. You need ethnic interaction on juries in order to produce a just result, as much as you need ethnic interaction in society.”

Such factors will undoubtedly come into play should Judge Weisberg order a second trial for Powell, or should the federal government launch a civil rights prosecution in the King case.

Federal prosecutors declined to discuss their plans. But Reiner, in an interview Wednesday, hinted that he considered the riots in his decision to seek a second trial.

The district attorney said that as he and his deputies met for three hours on Tuesday to discuss the pros and cons of pressing forward with the case, they gave “a great deal of consideration” to the theory that to do so might “reopen painful wounds” in the city.

But although the first jury deadlocked 8 to 4 in favor of acquitting Powell on one count, Reiner said the evidence in the videotaped beating case was compelling enough to warrant a second prosecution.

No one, he said, worried aloud that a second acquittal might bring a second round of rioting. “Not specifically,” he said. “I don’t know that anybody used that expression.”

Many lawyers and scholars, however, say that authorities cannot help but realize that, with every decision they make, there is the possibility for public outcry--and, perhaps, renewed violence.

“This is going to be a prosecution under super scrutiny,” said Laurie Levenson, who teaches criminal law at Loyola Law School. “Now everybody on the streets believes that they have a personal stake in what happens in this case.

“There are thousands of cases that go through our criminal justice system every year,” Levenson continued. “Mistakes are made. Nobody knows, perhaps nobody cares. But this is one where every aspect is going to be under a microscope. The prosecutors know it and the courts know it and they will act accordingly.”

That the riots have raised the stakes considerably became evident in the immediate aftermath of the verdict, with Los Angeles still smoldering and the streets not yet cleared of the shattered glass that looters had left behind. In a televised nationwide address two days after the rioting began, President Bush announced that he had directed the U.S. Justice Department to step up its criminal civil rights inquiry into the King case.

It was an extraordinary presidential announcement, said Stuntz of the University of Virginia Law School, and one that would not have occurred had it not been for the riots.

“This would have been a relatively low-level issue but for the riots,” Stuntz said. “The riots made (bringing a federal prosecution) a very high-level issue, a political imperative.”

With Bush taking such a strong position on the case, Stuntz and others say the government must now guard against raising public hopes for a guilty verdict that may never come.

According to Peter Arenella, an expert in criminal law who teaches at UCLA Law School, it will be even more difficult to secure convictions in a federal civil rights trial than in a state case alleging use of excessive force because the federal government must prove that the officers intended to inflict punishment on King.

“There needs to be some public education and understanding before the trial takes place--assuming there is going to be a federal indictment--that the burden of proof is even more onerous than what the state had to show,” Arenella said.

Said Jeffe of the Claremont Graduate School: “What happens if they come down and it’s acquittal? If they don’t convict yet again? To me there are very grave risks involved. There are political risks. There are social risks. I’m just happy that I don’t have to make these decisions.”

If there is a second trial, either at the state or federal level, experts agree that selecting a jury and a site also will be more difficult than it was the first time around. “It’s not going to be simple,” said Thomas Munsterman, director of the Center for Jury Studies at the National Center for State Courts. “You’d have to leave the planet, almost.”

As yet, it is unclear whether a Powell retrial would be moved out of Los Angeles County. Although an appeals court ordered that the first trial be held in another county, that order may not apply to a retrial. And because federal trials in Los Angeles draw jurors from a seven-county area, changes of venue are rare.

If there is a second trial, wherever it is held, jurors are likely to harbor fears that their decision could touch off another round of urban unrest--or make them subject to personal threats. Those factors would make powerful arguments for defense lawyers, who are likely to maintain that their clients cannot get a fair trial anywhere in the United States.

“We’re not just talking now about a lot of press attention or rumors that there might be violence,” said Stuntz. “That’s something that the criminal justice system deals with from time to time. What we have here is 50 people dead (in the riots). We have the same people back in the system again. . . . It seems to me that if (a jury) did not feel comfortable convicting on the merits, there is a substantial risk that they might do it anyway.”