Curfew-Violation Charges Against Pair Dropped : Riots: The black CSUN students, arrested on the second night of the April unrest, contended that police had stopped them because of their race.

Prosecutors on Friday dropped curfew-violation charges against two black Cal State Northridge students who refused the plea-bargains accepted by most others arrested in the April riots and contended they were singled out because of their race.

The two 23-year-old engineering majors, Anthony Winston and Gary Hopson, said they were driving home from a campus peace vigil April 30, the second night of the riots, when they were stopped in Northridge.

Police who ordered them from their car at gunpoint “weren’t stopping whites; I noticed that right away,” Winston said Friday in an interview at the school’s Student Union, where he is a building manager.

“A great weight feels like it’s been lifted from my shoulders,” he said. “We took a stand, and it worked out OK.”

Instead of pleading guilty to breaking the dawn-to-dusk curfew in exchange for the typical sentence of probation and a requirement to perform 10 days of community service, Winston and Hopson demanded a jury trial, which was to begin Oct. 28.

Deputy City Atty. Victor Kalustian, who moved to dismiss the case Friday in San Fernando Municipal Court, repeated police and prosecution contentions that “race was not an issue” in the case. He said prosecutors decided to drop charges because “a jury could very well have found that these two men had a legitimate purpose for being out.”

Of the 3,156 people arrested for misdemeanor curfew violations during the four days of rioting, all but a handful agreed to plea-bargains, a spokesman for the city attorney’s office said. Although citywide and countywide statistics are not available, the spokesman said only five curfew cases went to trial out of 1,030 such cases in the downtown courts.

Defense attorneys and the American Civil Liberties Union have complained that many of the thousands of people picked up for being out after dusk during the riots were intensely pressured to accept plea bargains.

The alternative to a plea bargain was to return to court many times as their cases were repeatedly continued and to accept representation by a public defender’s office that was straining to defend a flood of clients. The charge carries a maximum of six months in jail.

Prosecutors and defense attorneys clashed in public statements shortly after the riots on how liberally to interpret the curfew ordinance in the cases of those who said they needed to be on the streets for a legitimate purpose.

But Sylvia Argueta, an ACLU attorney, said Friday this did not become a major issue because many defendants accepted plea-bargains.

James Blatt, Winston’s lawyer, said Friday that “a lot of innocent people probably agreed to those plea-bargains rather than fight the system.”

Blatt and his associate, Alex R. Kessel--Encino attorneys who frequently handle high-profile cases--agreed to represent the two students for free after reading about their case in The Times.

“We got lucky when they said they would go to bat for us,” said Winston, who credited the pair’s extensive research--including securing statements from witnesses--with persuading prosecutors to drop charges.

Winston said that after Blatt and Kessel agreed to represent them, a third black student--Meifaith Mims--who was riding in the car “told me he wished he hadn’t agreed to the plea.”

Hopson was unavailable for comment Friday, said the attorneys. They said they were trying to reach him to tell him that charges had been abruptly dropped.

Winston said the three left campus about 10 p.m. on Thursday, April 30, the second night of the riots and the first complete night of the curfew imposed by Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley.

They were heading to Winston’s Canoga Park residence after attending a school-sanctioned peace rally and candlelight march staged to let students and faculty members express their feelings about the riots.

Traveling west on Nordhoff Street in front of the Northridge Fashion Center, they were stopped by police who told them they were acting on a report that looters were about to strike the closed shopping mall, Winston said.

Six police cars quickly converged on them, Winston said, adding that the incident is “going to have a longtime psychological impact on us. It was scary.