NEWS ANALYSIS : L.A. Trials Show ‘Blind Justice’ Is Hard to Achieve

Once again, a jury has emerged with verdicts that pose a difficult question for the criminal justice system: Has outside pressure--either by activists or politicians or jurors armed with private agendas--tilted the outcome of Los Angeles’ triumvirate of racially charged trials?

That question was raised after last year’s verdicts in Simi Valley, which some attributed to racist jurors. It was posed six months ago, when federal jurors were accused of convicting two Los Angeles police officers because they were afraid of another riot.

And last week, it surfaced yet again, this time from the chorus of conflicting opinions that arose from the acquittals of Damian Monroe Williams and Henry Keith Watson on all but one felony count and several misdemeanor charges. Supporters of those defendants proudly proclaimed that pressure carried the day.

“We stepped in with an African presence in that courtroom,” said Don Jackson, a spokesman for the Williams family. “We were attentive and vigilant. We showed up every day, and the jury could see that we were there. . . . We had an impact, and if people don’t like it, too bad.”

Purists may be bothered by that. In theory, the justice system is portrayed as blind, weighing guilt and innocence by an objective scale, unconcerned with what is popular, immune to public pressure. But the reality is far less pristine. The system is shaped at almost every stage--from the filing of charges to the return of jury verdicts--by powerful political and social forces.

After all, district attorneys usually are elected officials, state judges can be recalled and the Justice Department is headed by political appointees who report to the President. Their decisions are guided by law but also by politics and public opinion.

Because of that, justice has never operated in a political vacuum, nor is it realistic to pretend that it could--or even that it should. “You don’t want prosecutors who are not responsive to the community,” said Laurie L. Levenson, a Loyola law school professor and former federal prosecutor. “It’s the job of the prosecutor to listen to the community but then use independent judgment.”

When then-Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner, in the midst of a reelection campaign, threw the book at Williams and Watson, their supporters argued that Reiner’s political ambitions overshadowed his legal judgment. When President George Bush, also fighting for reelection, announced his shock at the Simi Valley verdicts, supporters of the police officers accused him of launching a politically motivated campaign to indict the officers in federal court.

And when federal prosecutors in Los Angeles and Washington sit down in the coming months to decide whether to bring charges against Williams and Watson, their decision will be partly based on legal factors--assessing what, if any, federal laws the two men broke. But it will also be very much a political decision: Prosecutors will have to weigh the consequences of antagonizing the African-American community and of putting Los Angeles through yet another wrenching trial.

Such decisions dramatically illustrate the dichotomy of a system that is at once independent and influenced by public opinion--simultaneously objective and subjective. In the end, verdicts often appear fair only to those who agree with them.

“Justice,” said activist Jackson, “is in the eye of the beholder.”

For proof of that, one need look no further than the three cases that stand at the center of modern Los Angeles history.

Some people who never saw the inside of the Simi Valley courtroom or set foot in the federal courthouse nevertheless conclude that the Simi Valley jurors were fair-minded and the federal panel was weak-kneed. Many of the same people who attack the Simi Valley jury for ignoring the plain truth of the videotape in the Rodney G. King case argue that the shocking videotape of the Reginald O. Denny beating is inconclusive.

With the clamor in both cases so intense, is it any wonder that public officials would respond to it or that it would find its way into the courtroom?

“The jury is there because we value the idea of bringing community feeling into a criminal trial,” said criminal defense attorney Harland W. Braun, a former prosecutor who later represented Officer Theodore J. Briseno in the King civil rights trial. “But when the community becomes a lynch mob, we ask the jury to shut that out. I don’t see how they can.”

Complicating the matter still further is who ends up as a juror. Many observers suggest that justice in America has long been skewed by the disproportionate representation of whites on juries. That is changing, however, and the new face of juries may be in the process of overthrowing the nation’s sense of how justice is administered in the courtroom.

It has been more than 100 years in the making. For decades after the Civil War, blacks were systematically excluded from juries because jurors were drawn from voter registration rolls, and African-Americans were blocked from registering. Federal civil rights laws helped redress that problem.

Then, in 1986, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that prosecutors could not remove black prospective jurors solely based on their race, a ruling it later extended to defense lawyers as well. Both sides in the Williams and Watson trial touted the importance of a racially mixed jury, and they got one that resembled Los Angeles: The 10-woman, two-man panel included four Latinos, four blacks, two Asian-Americans and two Anglos.

“I think that in Los Angeles, because it is so dynamic and changing so much, we’re going to see new types of outcomes in jury trials that reflect different perspectives,” said Armando Torres Morales, a UCLA professor of psychiatry who testified for Williams and Watson at their trial. “There is no right, no wrong, but rather a different perspective of reality. What I’m feeling good about is the fact that finally we’re beginning to see democracy more at work.”

Jurors insist that they were unaffected by the pressures that muscled their way into the recent criminal trials. When Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti accused the Denny jury of reaching compromise verdicts to preserve the peace, an incensed juror came forward to respond. “He’s dead wrong,” the juror told KCAL-TV, Channel 9. “That was the last thing on our mind.”

Still, the threat of riots is a hard fear to ignore, either consciously or subconsciously. And it highlights the enormous pressure that weighed on the 36 Southern Californians who decided the two King trials and the Denny case. Almost all other cases pale in comparison.

Take the prosecutions of Lyle and Erik Menendez, accused of murdering their parents so that they could inherit the family fortune. Or the rape trial of William Kennedy Smith. Rare is the person who has not heard of those cases, and yet little, if any, social consequence rides on their outcome.

At the end of those trials, jurors may return home to find that their neighbors disagreed with their verdicts. But no one rioted when Smith was acquitted, and it does not appear likely that Beverly Hills will go up in flames if the Menendez brothers go free or if they die in prison.

It is the real threat of violence that sets the King and Denny trials apart from almost all others. But although that makes them difficult to compare with other cases, many longtime jury analysts believe that even in the face of gut-wrenching conflicts, jurors usually rise to the occasion.

“When people become empowered like that, they are elevated by the experience,” one experienced trial lawyer said. “They become the public servants they always wanted to have.”

That may be true, but pressure is an insidious force. And neither lawyers nor judges care to leave much to chance in cases where they fear jurors may be overly influenced by community pressures and publicity.

In Florida, a judge moved the case of Miami Police Officer William Lozano half a dozen times before arriving on a venue that he considered an appropriate one for that manslaughter case. In the trial of former National Security aide Lt. Col. Oliver L. North, jurors’ identities were kept secret and they were sequestered under such strict conditions that their news was censored, their telephone calls were monitored and they were prevented from meeting alone with anyone other than another juror.

Sequestration, anonymity and changing venue can help keep the public at arm’s length from the jury deliberations, but such tactics create other problems, observers say.

“I think sequestration helps insulate jurors, but it can’t do it completely,” said Joel Levine, a defense lawyer and former federal prosecutor. “It creates animosities among jurors, and their isolation reminds them of the pressure outside.”

What’s more, it does nothing to hide jurors from their own biases--the two-edged sword that underlies the jury system. Jurors are expected to be fair, but they also are encouraged to consider their own life experiences, to be the “conscience of the community.”

Most important, however, is the fact that juries only affect one sliver of the process. Changing the composition of juries and shielding them from pressure may protect them from some public pressure, but those moves only address one aspect of the process. By the time jurors ever hear the first word of a trial, much of it already has been decided for them--by politicians.

When the public cries out for more attention to street crime, elected leaders and police chiefs scramble to round up suspects. When the public appears to favor tougher drug sentences, Congress leaps at the chance to pass strict sentencing laws. Those issues are not argued during any criminal trial, but they provide the larger context for every trial, influencing who is arrested, who is charged and how they are punished.

Even more direct influence is exercised by prosecutors, who themselves are political figures. District attorneys in most areas, including Los Angeles, stand for election. They are officers of the court, but they also are politicians, and they frame the issues that a jury will decide.

When Reiner decided to charge Williams and Watson with attempted murder, aggravated mayhem and torture--among other things--he was locked in a reelection battle and confronted with the humiliating loss of the case against the four police officers. Reiner could have chosen to charge those men with assault with a deadly weapon, a felony, but a lesser one than attempted murder or aggravated mayhem. Instead, he rolled the dice, a politically popular but strategically risky gambit.

“If (then-LAPD Chief Daryl F.) Gates and Mr. Reiner had not injected politics into the case,” said Edi M.O. Faal, Williams’ attorney, “I don’t think our clients would have been facing the charges they were facing.”

Peter Arenella, a UCLA law professor, guardedly echoed those comments. “Ira Reiner, I think one can safely speculate, brought the most serious charges possible,” he said. “It probably did reflect the community’s horror and outrage at what it saw.”

Jurors did not bite. They rejected all of the most serious charges against both defendants. Faal attributed part of their verdicts to revulsion at what he called the politically motivated overcharging.

Many observers also argue that public pressure influenced the federal government’s decision to seek indictments against the four LAPD officers accused of violating King’s civil rights. From the day that Bush took to the airwaves to denounce the Simi Valley verdicts, supporters of the police officers would accuse the federal government of waging a politically motivated prosecution.

Prosecutors vehemently denied it, but observers as varied as Jackson, the Williams family representative, and Levine, who represents Sgt. Stacey C. Koon on appeal, believe politics was at work. “What would have happened if George Bush had gotten up and said: ‘Justice has been done’?” Levine asked. “That would have been the end of it.”

The coming months will bring yet another test of the influence of public pressure on the criminal justice system. When they were arrested in 1992, Williams and Watson both were charged with violating federal interstate commerce laws because Denny was a trucker transporting a load--evidence that federal authorities believed both men had broken federal law and could be prosecuted in federal court.

Those charges were dropped so that the state could proceed with its case first. But now that the state is about to conclude its effort, there is nothing to prevent federal prosecutors from pushing ahead with their case. Nothing, that is, except public opinion.

“While there was a great deal of pressure on them to file in the King case, just the opposite is true in Denny,” Levine said. “The people who make these decisions and the people they work for don’t want to be perceived as coming down hard on these black defendants.”

The decision about whether to prosecute Williams and Watson federally will be partly a legal one, made by prosecutors who weigh the evidence and decide whether they could win in court. But it is equally a political one, and a tricky one at that.

Some critics of the Williams and Watson acquittals would no doubt cheer a federal indictment. But federal prosecutors won an enormous outpouring of support from the African-American community when they convicted Koon and Officer Laurence M. Powell on the civil rights violations charges. They would undoubtedly squander much of that good feeling if they prosecuted Williams and Watson.

Furthermore, new indictments would expose Los Angeles to yet another agonizing criminal trial just as the city seems eager to shrug off the last three years. That may not be a good legal reason to let a suspect go, but it’s a hard political reality to avoid.

And if the King and Denny trials have taught Los Angeles anything, it is that politics, public opinion and justice are sometimes inextricable. In fact, just one day before the jury in the Denny trial returned the last of its verdicts, the lead prosecutor in that case wondered whether the case may simply have been too much for any group of people to weigh dispassionately.

That day had begun with one juror reportedly telling her colleagues she was afraid for herself and her family. It ended early, with two jurors ill.

“We may be asking the impossible for the people of this community to listen to evidence in this case and to set aside absolutely everything that’s going on in the community,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Janet Moore told reporters that day. “All of us know about the riots. All of us know about the emotional effects. All of us know about the political ramifications of this case. Hopefully, these jurors put that out of their minds.”