Prosecutors Will Request Retrial of Powell

Prosecutors will seek a retrial of Officer Laurence M. Powell, the only one of four Los Angeles police officers who failed to win a Ventura County jury’s total exoneration for beating motorist Rodney G. King, Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner said Wednesday.

Declaring that “justice was not done in the Rodney King case,” Reiner said his deputies would make the request Friday before Superior Court Judge Stanley M. Weisberg. Weisberg declared a mistrial April 29 after a Ventura County jury deadlocked on one count of assault under color of authority against Powell.

It will now be up to Weisberg to decide whether to grant the second trial.

Both in his announcement at a packed news conference and in a subsequent interview, Reiner suggested that in making his decision, he took into account the riots that were spawned by the not guilty verdicts in the King case.

“There are many people that feel that to retry Laurence Powell on this one count would be to reopen some very painful wounds,” Reiner said. “I understand that, and I appreciate that. But my responsibility as the district attorney is clear. That is that healing begins with justice, and justice simply was not done in the Rodney King case.”

Although the jury hung 8 to 4 in favor of acquitting Powell, Reiner said the evidence against the officer--primarily the videotape of the beating--is so “compelling” that he felt bound to press ahead with the prosecution.

Powell’s attorney, Michael Stone, could not be reached for comment.

Reiner made the announcement in response to questions at a news conference he called to discuss criminal charges being filed against four South Los Angeles men in connection with the beating of truck driver Reginald O. Denny, whose assault became a symbol of the riots.

He said later that although he did not make a final decision until Tuesday afternoon during a three-hour meeting with his deputies, he had been leaning toward seeking a retrial since the verdicts were returned.

Reiner’s move brought immediate praise from leaders in the black community, who are also pressing for federal authorities to prosecute the officers involved for allegedly violating King’s civil rights.

John Mack, president of the Los Angeles Urban League, termed the decision “appropriate, an opportunity to try again to bring at least partial justice to a grievous wrong.” As to reopening wounds, Mack said: “Nothing’s been healed yet. The wounds are a wide-open ugly sore of a gross miscarriage of justice.”

Said Danny Bakewell, head of the Brotherhood Crusade: “Hopefully this will send a signal. The reality is all the events of the past two weeks lay at the feet of those guys, and we cannot allow them to walk away.”

For Reiner, the decision to retry Powell has political as well as legal implications. The district attorney is facing a tough primary election on June 2, and has been criticized by his opponents for his office’s failure to win convictions against Powell and the other defendants, Sgt. Stacey C. Koon, Theodore J. Briseno and Timothy E. Wind.

Latino activist Xavier Hermosillo accused Reiner of looking to get “political mileage” out of Wednesday’s decision. “The cat’s already out of the bag, the barn door was left open April 29 and it’s too late to close it,” Hermosillo said.

Reiner--who was intimately involved in the trial strategy--has also been criticized for his failure to put King on the witness stand. On Wednesday, he would not discuss whether his strategy regarding King would change, saying: “That is not a decision to be made at this time.”

However, Reiner did say that the prosecutors who handled the first trial, Deputy Dist. Attys. Terry White and Alan S. Yochelson, would remain on the case if a retrial is granted. And he said prosecutors would insist that a retrial be held in an urban county that reflects the ethnic makeup of Los Angeles.

However, whether a second trial would be moved out of Los Angeles remains unclear.

The first trial was held in Simi Valley after an appeals court agreed with defense lawyers that their clients could not get a fair trial because of the political fallout from the March 3, 1991, King beating. Prosecutors do not know whether that decision would apply to a new case.

The Ventura County jury that acquitted the four officers included no blacks and only two minorities--a Latina and an Asian-American.

Said prominent black attorney Johnnie Cochran: “If there is a change in venue I hope they will push for an appropriate county demographically. It’s the height of naivete that this case can leave Los Angeles County, go to someplace where there are very few minorities, no blacks, and get a fair trial.”

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