Whines, Cynicism Follow in Wake of LAPD Trial for Beating of Rodney King

It’s a worrisome moment in American journalism when a writer feels he must whimper explanations before revealing his heartfelt beliefs, and then whine apologies afterward.

But these are unusual times.

Attorney Roger Parloff watched most of the so-called Rodney King trial, and he thinks, he says oh-so-hesitantly in the June issue of American Lawyer, that the jury probably reached the appropriate verdict.

One reason so many people will hate him for thinking that, he suggests, is because the media was even more timid than he--subtly self-censoring or simply bungling their trial coverage.

As Parloff points out, commentators from Sen. Bill Bradley to ABC’s Cokie Roberts publicly said what most Angelenos feel--that the most-often played part of that infamous videotape was enough, on its own, to persuade them that the officers whaling on King were guilty as hell.

But Parloff goes on to explain, in great lawyerly detail, why the evidence presented in court raised doubts in his mind and, he believes, the minds of the jurors.

The King case certainly raised important societal issues, the “liberal leaning” Parloff acknowledges.

At some point in his one-sided struggle with the police, for instance, King became “heroic” in the eyes of many observers.

“I think the nation is captivated by the powerful image of a black man rising up from the ground, never submitting, while uniformed white men try to beat him down with batons.”

But, “the jury can’t convict four real people because, while doing their jobs, they got caught up on the wrong side of a metaphor,” he writes.

Moreover, “the purpose of this criminal trial was not to determine what sometimes, often, or usually occurs when black suspects encounter white police officers. The purpose was to determine the conduct and intent of the four defendants on March 3, 1991.

“I can’t remember a time when I have felt so hesitant to say what I believe,” Parloff writes in his final paragraph. “ . . . I am concerned about the reactions of friends, relatives, and people I work with who will see this article’s headline and byline and never read the rest. And I am terrified at the prospect of quotation out of context. After all, imagine if the media were to summarize this article the way it summarized the trial.”

Not to worry. The media didn’t pay much attention to Parloff’s story. But at least one person will probably react to the piece with gratitude.

Lindy Miller was an alternate juror in the trial that sparked the riot. In the July issue of Los Angeles magazine, Sally Ogle Davis profiles the high school social-studies teacher, who started out a true believer in American justice and wound up a cynic.

Miller gave two months of her life to the trial, and listened to Judge Stanley Weisberg read some 81 pages of instructions. And although she didn’t actually vote, she believes that the judge’s admonition about “moral certainty” in the decision came to seem like “an almost impossible burden of proof.”

Given the facts, Miller would have voted with the impaneled jurors. But that doesn’t mean her old notions of American justice went unshaken.

Today, Miller appears a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown, Davis writes.

From the moment the judge “betrayed” the jury with what Miller interpreted as a look of “disgust,” to the Ventura Star-Free Press’ publication of the jurors’ home addresses, to the badgering by reporters and the congratulatory letters she and other jurors got from the KKK, Miller felt that she’d been used by the system and then abandoned “to the sharks.”

Miller’s only emotional support system has been other jurors, with whom she talks for up to six hours a day.

Ironically, Miller and some of the other jurors harbor quasi-conspiratorial views of “the system,” similar to those of the more radical activists who condemned the jury as racist.

Miller and others, Davis reports, think that maybe the whole trial was “a setup.”

“They point to the extreme inappropriateness of this particular jury: three members of the National Rifle Assn., an ex-military policeman, an ex-naval shore patrolman, a park ranger, a retired program manager for a company that receives military contracts and a man whose brother is a retired police sergeant.”

“The system is set up to protect the police,” Miller says. “The district attorney and the judiciary are on the same side. If you discredit the police, you discredit the system of which they are a part.”

Miller’s husband, Paul, attended a jurors’ reunion and told Davis that many shared his wife’s “seemingly bizarre” conclusion that they were pawns in a bigger game.

“They were squeezed to the point of mental exhaustion, and then they were thrown to the wolves. It’s like Vietnam--they went to war together, and when they came home, nobody liked them.”

Like many Vietnam vets, Miller has lost faith. She didn’t vote in the last election. “The system rapes me, and then it expects me to participate,” she says.

On the other hand, in his preface to Parloff’s story, American Lawyer editor Steven Brill argues persuasively that the King verdict underscores the enduring health of the American justice system.

” . . . You do not have to agree with the King verdict,” writes Brill, who waffles whether he does, “in order to vote not guilty on the indictment of the system.”

The trial, he says, sheds light on problems for which Americans should feel shame: “But we should be proud, enormously proud, that we have a country that gave four extremely unpopular defendants a fair trial.”

REQUIRED READING

* Capital punishment proponents will undoubtedly be revolted by Michael Kroll’s death row “friendship” with Robert Alton Harris, a man executed on April 21 for the murders of two San Diego teen-agers.

But Kroll had an unusual perspective. He sat beside Harris’s brother and attorney during the execution. His account, in the July 6 issue of the Nation, of the “ritual’s” dispassionate nature is unsettling in ways that so many dispassionately journalistic accounts have not been.

* It seems like every magazine in the country has a river rafting story this month. But the white-water described in the June 15 issue of American Way, the in-flight magazine of American Airlines, is different. It smells of chlorine. And it froths along in Los Angeles’ own concrete-lined steam bed.

At once poetic and fact-filled, Michael DiLeo’s story may be the best to date on the Los Angeles River and efforts to return it to a more natural state.

* Newsweek sports “raptivist” Sister Souljah on its cover and a big story on “Rap and Race” inside.

But Time has the best analysis of the Souljah brouhaha in its end-of-the-book essay.

Jack E. White points out what anyone who has listened to Souljah’s records knows: Despite her posturing that her comments to the Washington Post were misunderstood, they were moderate compared to some of her lyrics.

Souljah has done good works for black children, White writes. But she gained notoriety for “three dubious achievements: helping a record company make a buck, furthering the agendas of two opportunistic politicians, and distracting voters from what really matters in the campaign.”

Ironically, this week’s Time arrived in the same mail as the annual report from Time-Warner, which got some bottom-line help from another profitable and controversial rapper du jour: Ice-T.