King Case Prosecutors Must Scale Hurdles of History : Law: 1945 ruling puts burden on U.S. to prove LAPD officers intended to deprive motorist of his civil rights.

The case has a familiar feel. Three white law enforcement officers insisted that they were provoked into beating Robert Hall, a 30-year-old black man, saying that Hall reached for a gun and used insulting language as they brought him into custody. So they clobbered him--with a blackjack and fists--until he was subdued.

The setting was rural Georgia of half a century ago, far removed from Los Angeles of 1991, where the police beating of Rodney G. King became a watershed event for the city. But the Georgia case set the legal standards that will be used to judge the four Los Angeles police officers as they stand trial for a second time--and seemingly make it even tougher to get a conviction.

The beating of Hall, who died of his injuries, prompted federal authorities to dust off a Reconstruction-era statute to prosecute the sheriff of Baker County, Ga., and two colleagues for depriving a citizen of his constitutional rights. While the U.S. Supreme Court endorsed such a federal prosecution in a 1945 ruling, it also required a standard of proof that includes a legal hurdle the government did not face last year in state court when the Los Angeles Police Department officers were acquitted on all but one count.

In order to head off prosecutions that unfairly second-guessed officers acting in good conscience, the top court said the government had to prove that the sheriff did more than use excessive force in arresting Hall--it had to show that he violated the law “willfully.”

As a result, a fierce debate over the four LAPD defendants’ intent will occupy center stage in District Court in the coming weeks, molding the approaches of the prosecution and defense. The four officers are charged with depriving King of his constitutional rights to be free from unreasonable force, to be safe while in custody and not to be punished without a trial.

In the old Georgia case, Screws vs. United States, it was not hard to show that the three defendants intended to make more than a routine arrest of Hall, who was suspected of stealing a tire. The sheriff held a grudge against Hall and, as one justice noted, had “threatened to kill him.”

The sheriff and two friends--a police officer and a special deputy--”fortified themselves at a nearby bar, and resisted the bartender’s importunities not to carry out the arrest” before seizing Hall at his home and hauling him to the courthouse square, where they continued to pound him, while handcuffed, after he was unconscious.

In the Los Angeles incident, there were no such threats to demonstrate an overt conspiracy by the three officers and a sergeant to deprive King of his constitutional rights. A pair of well-respected federal prosecutors will therefore have to prove the officers’ ill motives through snippets of circumstantial evidence, most stemming from events after the beating.

In a pretrial memorandum, the prosecution began laying out the building blocks of its case: the “oops” transmitted over a police computer after the beating; the snickering during a call for an ambulance; the quip to King at the hospital: “I guess we played a little hardball tonight.”

The goal is to show that the officers did not merely overreact to a crisis on the night of March 3, 1991, but had a criminal purpose--to administer “street justice.”

Much the same evidence was offered in last year’s trial in Superior Court in Simi Valley, where Sgt. Stacey C. Koon and Officers Timothy E. Wind and Theodore J. Briseno were acquitted on all charges of using excessive force in beating King. The jury remained undecided on a single count against Officer Laurence M. Powell.

“Technically speaking, the federal prosecutors have to prove more than their state counterparts, and they could not secure a conviction,” said UCLA law professor Peter Arenella.

But he and other criminal law experts also believe that the tougher federal standards may help the new prosecutors by forcing them to assemble the old evidence into a cogent theory, “a powerful story for the jury,” to explain why the four officers may have lost control during the arrest of King. Thus, the “street justice” scenario.

At the Simi Valley trial, the prosecution believed that the infamous videotape of the beating would speak for itself. Not required to show the officers’ motives, they only hinted at a couple--perhaps racism, perhaps anger at an uncooperative suspect.

“Everyone knows that’s probably what happened, street justice,” said one Los Angeles county prosecutor, “but being able to show that is another thing. . . . We used words like punished and we tried to emphasize what happened after (the beating), the false reports, what happened at the hospital and the ‘oops,’ ” a comment that presumably demonstrated that the officers knew that their actions were wrong.

“But it apparently went over the jurors’ heads,” the prosecutor said.

The panel sided with the interpretation of the beating that was hammered home by the four defense lawyers, a rendition that placed a very sympathetic intent in the officers’ minds--self-defense.

The officers’ attorneys are expected to reprise that approach this time, suggesting again that the videotape shows a hulking, menacing King rising to challenge the men trying to arrest him. Furthermore, under federal case law, the defense could concede that the foursome overstepped their bounds a little and still win--as long as the jury sees the actions as the unintentional result of the pressure of a crisis.

“I think it’s simple,” said Harland W. Braun, who represents Briseno. “An officer who makes a mistake and uses excessive force isn’t guilty.”

Partly because of the extra element of proof, the Justice Department reports only a 75% conviction rate in cases brought under the civil rights statutes, compared to 90%-plus on other criminal trials. Federal authorities usually choose such prosecutions cautiously, recognizing their political sensitivity. But many observers say authorities had little choice but to step into the King beating case after President George Bush, locked in a close election battle, announced in a nationally televised speech that he was stunned by the not guilty verdicts in Simi Valley.

The federal indictment, unsealed Aug. 5, was based on statutes adopted after the Civil War to give federal authorities some recourse against violence in the South by the Ku Klux Klan or by law enforcement officers acting “under color of law.”

“Screws (vs. United States) and other cases were an attempt to create a parallel (justice) system when there was a total collapse of justice in the South, to erect a legal safety net,” said New York University law professor Burt Neuborne. “What you usually had was the state laying down on the job. They just didn’t try” to prosecute racist vigilantes.

Although federal authorities admitted that it seemed ludicrous to charge a killer with violating his victim’s constitutional rights, during the 1960s such prosecutions were seen as the only way to convict suspects in a series of murders of civil rights volunteers.

More recently, the laws have been used in a broad range of cases, including the prosecution of former President Richard M. Nixon’s aide John Erlichman for his involvement in the break-in at the office of anti-war activist Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. The civil rights statutes also have been used to prosecute misconduct cases that are unrelated to race.

In California, the civil rights statutes were used to prosecute California Highway Patrol Officer George Gwaltney after state juries twice failed to reach verdicts on charges that he raped and murdered a 23-year-old female motorist in 1982.

But the case of Gwaltney, who was sentenced to 90 years in prison, did not hinge on subtle assessments of his intent. Because the CHP officer claimed that he was innocent, that he merely discovered the woman’s body, “it was more like a detective story, a whodunit,” said former federal prosecutor Richard Kendall. The jury needed only to decide which side it believed.

In the current beating trial, the factual disputes are relatively minor, limited to such matters as whether King was struck in the head. Indeed, with a videotape capturing most of the incident, the case hinges largely on the widely divergent interpretations of the events--making the law’s intent requirement crucial.

Under that requirement, the government must win on two fronts to get a single conviction.

In their pretrial memo in Los Angeles, prosecutors acknowledge that the jurors first must find that the officers “deprived the victim of a (constitutional) right.” Then they take a second vote to decide whether the defendants “acted willfully.”

“I don’t think it will be very difficult at all for the jury to understand. It’s a two-stage process,” said defense attorney Braun. “That the force was excessive objectively, and that the defendants intended it to be excessive.”

As if arguing to the jury, he added: “It may be that an officer uses excessive force as a misjudgment, but he didn’t intend to use unreasonable force.”

But Neuborne, who followed the first King beating trial for the fledgling Courtroom Television Network, is among those who believe that the federal standard is a hidden blessing for prosecutors, forcing them to learn from the state case.

“In the first case, I couldn’t understand why the prosecution wasn’t providing a motive,” he said. “They had the hidden race thing . . . but it struck me they had a much more powerful one--rage for (King’s) having led them on the (car) chase.

“It forces the prosecution to give some plausible explanation for why these guys lost control,” he said. “Before, they left the field open to the defense to say: ‘Our intent was to protect ourselves.’ ”

The prosecution strategy is no secret to the defense attorneys. They are ready to respond.

“They’re (prosecutors) stuck with the street justice theory, but (it) doesn’t fit this case because (King) was never hit before he charged Officer Powell,” Braun said, “and (the beating) terminated when he was handcuffed.

“In those seconds, (the officers) didn’t get to speak together and say: ‘Let’s get this guy because he decided to run.’ . . . It was a spontaneous decision-making process.”

The defense plans to use its own major weakness at the first trial--dissension in its ranks--to rebut the theory that there was intent to abuse King. In Simi Valley, Briseno angered the other defendants by insisting that he tried to stop what he viewed as excessive force. The others, in turn, tried to brand him as a man lying to save his skin.

This time, the defendants can argue that the disagreement shows how difficult it was to tell right from wrong in the heat of the moment. How could the officers have intended to cross the line if they could not easily tell where it was drawn?

“Officer Powell did one thing and Briseno tried to modulate that. . . . If (prosecution and defense) experts under oath disagree (on excessive force), why can’t two officers under pressure disagree?” Braun said.

Legal experts expect heated debate between prosecutors and defense attorneys over how District Judge John G. Davies should instruct the jurors on the intent issue before they begin deliberations. But as in any jury trial, the legal language molded over half a century may mean less than the gut feelings of the panelists.

“There’s a possibility for slippage between how the judge states it and how a jury understands it,” said Robert Goldstein, a UCLA specialist in civil rights law. “Instructions are often unpenetrable . . . designed to survive appellate review. That puts enormous burdens on jurors. So they just do their best.”

“Jurors aren’t lawyers,” said Arenella, his UCLA colleague. “The jurors are going to be arguing about which basic story makes more sense. That these were officers doing the best they can under difficult circumstances . . . or the prosecution’s story, that it was street justice.”