Foreman in Simi Valley Trial Says Riots, ‘National Hate’ Stressed Jury

A member of the jury during the first Rodney G. King trial said jurors suffered “all kinds of physical and psychological repercussions” after the not guilty verdicts for four police officers accused of wrongfully beating King led to deadly rioting.

“One of the male jurors . . . has stomach ulcers now, which he attributes to the stress he was under,” Dorothy Bailey, foreman of the jury in the Simi Valley trial, told ABC News “Nightline” anchor Ted Koppel during a taped interview broadcast Monday night.

“Some of them lost weight, (some suffered) sleeplessness,” she said. “It’s rather difficult to face the national hate that we experienced.”

As for herself, Bailey said, “I’ll never forget my feelings when the riots occurred.

“I didn’t sleep for, oh, probably two or three nights,” she said. “And at first I thought: ‘Did I really cause this?’ Did I really have anything to do with this?’

“I subsequently came to the conclusion that I didn’t cause it. The verdicts didn’t cause it. But the verdicts did serve as a catalyst or a trigger for it. So I have to accept that, and I have to live with that.”

Bailey’s interview came as the four officers are being tried a second time. Sgt. Stacey C. Koon, Officers Laurence M. Powell and Theodore J. Briseno and former Officer Timothy E. Wind face federal charges that they violated King’s civil rights during the beating after King was stopped for a traffic violation.

Although several jurors in the first trial were interviewed in the months after their acquittals of the officers on nearly all state charges, Bailey’s interview with Koppel apparently was her first in public since the verdicts.

Bailey said that when she first saw the videotape that showed King being kicked and beaten with police batons, “I was as (repulsed) as everybody else in the country was.”

But she said that during testimony in the state trial, the jurors learned that the baton “is a normal tool that the policemen use.”

“There was undisputed, unrefuted testimony by some of the experts--unrefuted by the prosecution--that batons are used to break bones, to immobilize,” she said. “It was extremely shocking for us to hear that.”

Bailey said the jurors were told that police are not supposed to strike suspects in the head.

“We spent a lot of time in the jury deliberation room trying to prove to ourselves conclusively whether there were or were not head shots,” she said. “We could not prove to ourselves . . . beyond a reasonable doubt . . . based on testimony and looking at the video . . .that there were head shots.

“In all the time in the deliberation room, in the jury room, I have a vague, nagging feeling that for at least the last 10 or 11 seconds of that tape, there was guilt,” Bailey said.

“But, Ted, you cannot convict a man on a vague, nagging feeling. You must have an abiding conviction to a moral certainty. . . . It would have been easy to go in and say: ‘I have a gut feeling’. . .and find him guilty. But we couldn’t do that.”