Senate OKs Bill on Gender, Race in Moving Juries : Courts: Judges could examine makeup of a county in change-of-venue proposals.

The Senate on Thursday narrowly passed a bill spurred by the Rodney G. King verdicts that would authorize judges to consider race and gender characteristics when moving trials from one county to another.

The proposal by Sen. Milton Marks (D-San Francisco) was approved on a 21-9 vote, the bare majority required in the 40-seat Senate. Its outlook in the Assembly is uncertain.

Under the bill, a Superior Court judge, in deciding to move a trial out of the county in which the crime occurred, could examine the racial and gender composition of the county proposed as the location for the trial.

Critics have argued that if the trial of four white Los Angeles police officers accused of beating King, a black man, had been held in ethnically diverse Los Angeles County instead of predominantly white Simi Valley in Ventura County, the verdicts would have been different.

There were no blacks on the jury, which acquitted three of the officers in the videotaped beating and deadlocked on one charge against the fourth officer. The verdicts have been blamed for touching off the Los Angeles riots.

Supporters of the Marks bill contend that in changes of venue, judges should be empowered to consider race and gender in counties from which an unbiased trial jury might be drawn.

“Moving that trial from Los Angeles to Ventura County significantly affected the outcome,” Sen. Bill Lockyer (D-Hayward) said of the King verdicts.

But opponents of the bill, including Sen. Quentin L. Kopp (I-San Francisco), warned that adding racial and gender information would provide new grist for defense lawyers who want to delay trials. “This contains the seeds for days or even weeks of litigation on a pretrial motion,” he said.

The Marks bill was defeated by the Senate earlier in the month but was amended in order to gain approval Thursday.