Supreme Court to Write Next Chapter in King Case

After five years of legal battles and social upheaval, the case that helped shape the modern history of Los Angeles makes its way this week to the nation’s highest court, where government lawyers and attorneys for two former police officers will engage in what could be the last debate of the Rodney G. King beating.

As the saga marks yet another milestone, the principals still are battling to put their lives in order. Three of the defendants have struggled to make ends meet, but the fourth has raised millions of dollars from sympathetic supporters--more than King received in his lawsuit.

That irony is not the only one underlying the sensational case. In the arguments to be presented Tuesday, two of the former police officers are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to validate their controversially short prison sentences and, in effect, endorse the right of judges to impose sentences outside the ranges called for in federal guidelines. Such an endorsement would give judges more leeway to disregard the guidelines and could free them to hand out shorter prison terms to drug dealers, money launderers and the like.

The result: If the U.S. Supreme Court agrees that U.S. District Judge John G. Davies had the right to depart from the guidelines and send Stacey C. Koon and Laurence M. Powell to prison for 30 months each, no one will be happier than criminal defense lawyers and their clients--the very people Koon and Powell spent their careers opposing.

“If the defendants win in this case,” said Laurie Levenson, a Loyola law school professor, “it is going to be a windfall for other defendants, including some whom society may view as more threatening than these two.”

But if the high court finds that appellate judges acted correctly in overturning the sentences, the King case will return to Los Angeles for at least one more volatile session: the resentencing of the two former officers, who were freed last month after serving their 30-month sentences--but whom the government wants resentenced and back behind bars.

Koon-Powell Rift

That would reunite the defendants one more time in a case that upended Los Angeles with the 1992 riots, led indirectly to the ouster of its police chief and ushered in a mandate for sweeping reform of the LAPD. Five years later, it continues to cast a long shadow across the lives of King, Koon, Powell and two other fired officers, Timothy E. Wind and Theodore J. Briseno.

The former officers have little to do with one another now. Wind relied heavily on Koon and still admires him, but they have only spoken once in months. Powell took orders from Koon on the night of the beating and went to prison with him, but their relationship has cooled amid disputes over fund-raising. Briseno, who testified against his colleagues in state court, has lost all contact with his fellow officers.

The rift between Koon and Powell may be the most surprising, because they were the principal defendants in two criminal trials, and Koon steadfastly supported Powell throughout.

“In many respects, Stacey put his head in a noose for Larry when he said he’d seen and approved every blow,” said Ira Salzman, who represented Koon in the federal trial. “Stacey tried mightily to help.”

It was not until they were behind bars that the relationship between the pair soured, according to people close to both. Koon launched a fund-raising campaign in which he blamed liberal media, overzealous prosecutors and cowardly politicians for putting him and Powell in prison.

That appeal struck a chord. More than 150,000 people contributed to Koon’s fund-raising effort, which grossed more than $4 million--more than King won in his civil lawsuit against the officers and the LAPD.

Although only a fraction of that sum made it to Koon’s wife and five children--and none went to Koon directly--it has paid for additional lawyers and for family expenses during his incarceration. But advisors to the two men say Koon’s camp has not shared the money with Powell, who has gone into debt and whose efforts to raise money, including a failed attempt to hold a welcome-home dinner at the Police Academy, have been halting and ineffective.

Compounding the Powell family’s bitterness is that representatives of the former LAPD sergeant refused to allow them to use Koon’s picture in Powell’s fund-raising. Tensions flared so high over that issue that Koon’s lawyers threatened to sue Powell’s family.

Salzman acknowledges that there has been friction, but declines to comment on it in detail.

“We wish him well,” Salzman said of Powell. “Stacey feels no distance between himself and Larry.”

Today, both former officers are unemployed and idle. Powell emerged from custody embittered, according to his father. And Koon, who spent 30 months reading religious works and Tom Clancy novels, is home but in limbo, waiting for the Supreme Court to act before getting on with his life.

Although Koon and Powell endured months behind bars, their acquitted colleagues also have struggled since the trials and remain locked in their legacy.

Briseno, who stepped on King near the end of the beating but was twice found not guilty of any criminal misconduct, unsuccessfully fought to keep his job with the LAPD. He found work as a security guard, a job that lacks the salary and benefits he enjoyed with the Police Department. And though he seeks anonymity, he still is regularly recognized.

At 35, Wind is the youngest of the four, but he too has found it difficult to get on with his life. He works for $9 an hour at the Culver City Police Department, part-time work that does not allow him to carry a gun or patrol the streets. When news of his hiring was reported, protesters formed the “Committee to Remove Tim Wind.”

Wind, an intensely private man who rarely smiles, was incensed.

“People don’t have a right to extract a pound of flesh from me,” he said. “It’s already been extracted, and it didn’t pan out. But people feel they have this right to a personal vendetta.”

Without any real prospect of returning to full-time police work, Wind instead would like to make a clean break with the past by enrolling in law school. He hopes a sponsor will emerge to help him foot the bill.

Meanwhile, he acknowledges that it has been difficult to see Koon lionized while he has struggled to earn a paycheck.

“We’ve managed to keep our credit, but it’s by the hair of our chinny-chin-chin,” he said. “Each day, I manage to slip back into debt.”

King Also Struggles

King also has struggled. Although a $3.8-million judgment from a federal jury left him financially well off, his lawyer says the beating left him scarred, and his frequent scrapes with the law have provided a steady source of updates on this troubled life.

“He has had a lot of emotional traumas,” said Steven Lerman, King’s lawyer. “He really hasn’t gotten over the incident.”

Still, King bears no animus toward the officers who struck him, and does not particularly want to see them sent back to prison, his lawyer said. According to Lerman, “He would just as soon have what is commonly referred to as closure.”

But the issues being presented to the Supreme Court are complicated and reach far beyond the King case--ensuring that closure remains a long way off.

In the narrowest sense, the issue before the Supreme Court is what standard that appellate judges should use to review sentencing decisions by trial judges. In overturning Davies, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals applied what is known as a de novo standard of review, meaning that the appellate judges reviewed the same facts presented to Davies and concluded that he was wrong.

But the officers, in their briefs to the Supreme Court, argue that the 9th Circuit applied the wrong standard, and that trial judges should only be overturned on sentencing decisions when they clearly have abused their discretion. By that standard, they argue, Davies’ decision should be upheld and the 30-month sentences allowed to stand.

Judge Davies’ Ruling

That technical issue underlies the King case today, but beneath it are profound questions about how judges should apply the federal sentencing guidelines--a voluminous set of documents that attempt to quantify criminal offenses and set out sentences to match.

In computing the sentences for the officers, Davies began by defining the offense they committed. The jury found both men guilty of civil rights violations, and Davies concluded that the underlying offense was an aggravated assault on King.

The judge, after determining that their police batons constituted “dangerous weapons” and that King had suffered bodily injury, concluded that the guidelines called for prison terms of 70 to 87 months.

He then proceeded to whittle that away. Over the objections of prosecutors, Davies found that King had contributed significantly to the illegal beating inflicted on him--and that King’s provocation warranted a reduction of roughly 29 months. Then he concluded that knocking off about 11 additional months was justified by a grab-bag of other factors.

He ruled, for instance, that trying the officers in federal court after they were acquitted on state charges raised a “specter of unfairness.” And he concluded that the officers faced the loss of their jobs and could be unusually at risk of abuse in prison because of their notoriety. Given all those factors and the unlikelihood that either defendant would commit crimes again, Davies reduced their sentences to 30 months.

Prosecutors appealed, and the 9th Circuit agreed that Davies had erred in several ways. On the reduction for King’s behavior, Davies said the incident would never have occurred had King not been drinking, speeding and evading arrest.

Bill Kopeny, who will argue Powell’s case before the Supreme Court, agrees.

“The conduct that Davies found to be criminal occurred after King was Tased and got up and charged at Powell,” said Kopeny, who will be joined by Washington lawyer Theodore B. Olson, arguing for Koon. “That would provoke and scare anybody.”

But prosecutors argued, and appellate judges agreed, that victim misconduct is common in police abuse cases and that King’s conduct only provoked the lawful portion of the beating--the permissible blows at the outset of the incident--not the illegal strikes delivered to him after he was battered and prone.

Similarly, government lawyers maintain that the collection of other factors--susceptibility to abuse in prison, the dual prosecutions and the likely loss of employment--should not have been considered. Most people who are convicted of felonies stand to lose their jobs, and the federal government is specifically authorized to bring civil rights cases in the manner that the King officers were prosecuted. Why, prosecutors ask in their briefs, should Koon and Powell receive reduced sentences?

As for the susceptibility to abuse in prison, prosecutors acknowledge that more recognizable criminals may be more likely to be singled out for attacks. Over Thanksgiving weekend, in fact, a gunman broke into Koon’s halfway house in an attempt to kill him. Koon was not there at the time.

How Much Authority?

Still, prosecutors counter, should judges be allowed to reduce the recommended sentences of criminals merely because their acts were especially notorious?

Salzman acknowledged that government lawyers make some provocative points in their briefs. But, like many legal observers, he said the fundamental issue before the Supreme Court is not so much the specific grounds for Davies’ departures as it is a philosophical debate about how much authority judges should have in sentencing.

“What this case is about,” Salzman said, “is whether judges can look at people as individuals or whether they have to look at them as numbers.”

That is one of the hottest topics among federal judges, many of whom have grown increasingly disenchanted with the guidelines. The King case gives the Supreme Court justices--one of whom, Stephen G. Breyer, helped draft the guidelines--a chance to address that debate.

But Supreme Court rulings govern judges nationwide, not just defendants in a single case. Some analysts question whether the justices will be eager to draft new rules that might help Koon and Powell but also benefit criminals charged with drug and money-laundering offenses.

Three thousand miles away, Wind would like nothing more than to assess those questions as a lawyer rather than as a former defendant and fired cop. But he is under few illusions: The night in Lake View Terrace will forever haunt his life, just as it haunts King and the other officers.

For proof, he needs look no further than his young son. The other night, as they flipped through the pages of a magazine, the 6-year-old spotted a picture of retired Gen. Colin Powell.

“Does he run the Army?” the boy asked. “Is he Rodney King?”

“I had to tell him no, that was not Rodney King,” said Wind. “Rodney King is someone else.”