Officers in King Case Become<i> Cause Celebre</i>

When former LAPD Officer Laurence M. Powell, convicted of violating Rodney G. King’s civil rights, is released from a halfway house in Garden Grove this month, don’t expect him to fade away.

Some conservative activists in Washington are working aggressively to turn him into a cause celebre.

He is not a vicious cop to members of the Legal Affairs Council, one of the many ideological fund-raising concerns operating in the nation’s capital. They look at the baton-wielding officer caught on videotape and see a public servant wrongly sent off to jail in a politically charged trial.

These Powell boosters, busy organizing a welcome-home dinner, say that history will be kind to Powell as his case is debated through the ages.

“The Dreyfus affair in France, the Birmingham Six and Guilford Four cases involving the Irish Republican Army in Great Britain, and the Haymarket Square bombing, Scopes, and Sam Sheppard trial in the United States are emblematic,” says Bruce Fein, a constitutional lawyer who represents the Legal Affairs Council.

Others compare Powell’s predicament to that of another Legal Affairs Council darling--Oliver L. North, the former White House aide convicted of obstructing Congress, destroying National Security Council documents and accepting an illegal gratuity. His conviction was later overturned.

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Name a cause, no matter how unpopular, and somebody somewhere is probably raising money for it. Many more are probably writing checks.

At the Legal Affairs Council--a group whose name is loftier than its Fairfax, Va., offices--the more conservative the cause, the better. The council was founded in 1986 by members of Young Americans for Freedom to aid North and others snared in the Iran-Contra scandal, including then-Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and aides Elliot Abrams, Clair George and Lyn Nofziger.

Since then, the group has moved on to other causes; liberals be damned. Recently, it backed California’s Proposition 187, the crackdown on illegal immigration, and it sent off a check to Paula Corbin Jones, the woman who has filed a sexual harassment suit against President Clinton.

Nobody is too contentious--including Powell, whom the group has used as another opportunity to bash the liberals.

“There is a direct connection between Oliver North and Larry Powell,” asserts the tough-talking president, Richard Delgaudio, who dishes out liberal doses of conservatism. “They are both victims of the left-wing element that is unfairly using political pressure to affect the courts.”

Since adopting Powell, the council has solicited checks from across the country to help Powell cover his still-mounting legal bills, but an exact accounting is tough to pin down. The group has also honored Powell’s trial attorney, Michael P. Stone, with the Freedom Legal Defender Award. Powell’s welcome-home dinner, however, has hit a snag. Under pressure from city officials, a nonprofit police group changed its mind about playing host to the affair at the Police Academy. The Legal Affairs Council has filed suit.

Many regard the council’s stance as a bizarre one.

“They are trying to make these officers martyrs and victims, which they are not,” said Rep. Julian C. Dixon (D-Los Angeles). “They have been found guilty of violating King’s civil rights. They are not heroes by any stretch of the imagination. These groups do have a right to raise money, but it’s ironic that they are doing it for people who were found guilty of violating someone else’s rights.”

Perhaps surprisingly, Delgaudio recalls being dismayed the first time he saw the grainy images of officers beating King on TV, just like Dixon was.

“I was simply horrified and I thought this would give a bad name to all police officers,” Delgaudio said. “I thought it was awful. The whole situation looked out of control. It looked indefensible.”

But Delgaudio now defends it. The more he watched the videotape and reviewed the court testimony, he says, the more he saw Powell as the victim. Delgaudio now relishes the opportunity to appear on talk radio to make his case that Powell was locked up by the liberals.

For him, the “Rodney King beating case” does not exist. It’s the “Rodney King violently resisting arrest episode,” thank you very much.

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Powell’s co-defendant, Stacey C. Koon, has not been forgotten by conservative Washington, either.

Another group, the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, has raised funds for Koon’s defense and filed a friend of the court brief on his behalf in the U.S. Supreme Court review of the two former officers’ sentences.

“We think that being a police officer and making decisions on the street that are second-guessed is the toughest job there is,” said attorney David Martin, a one-time aide to Ronald Reagan who heads the fund.

Martin’s group, which operates out of his Arlington, Va., law office, was created in 1994. It launched an ill-fated fund-raising campaign for rogue LAPD detective Mark Fuhrman earlier this year. The money came rolling in just fine but when the explosive tapes were released in which Fuhrman spewed racial slurs, the defense fund drew the line. It dropped its poster cop.