Video Alone Won’t Settle Beating Case

At first glance, the home video recording of an Inglewood police officer beating 16-year-old Donovan Jackson seems to leave little in doubt. The images are clear and disturbing: Officer Jeremy J. Morse slams the youth onto the trunk of a patrol car and then punches him in the jaw.

Case closed? Not by a long shot, say some legal experts in the use of force and jury selection.

Although the videotape means Morse’s attorney will have a lot of explaining to do if the indicted officer goes to trial on assault charges, prosecutors also will face problems, the experts say.

To start with, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office will have to deal with additional videotapes recorded by surveillance cameras at the Inglewood gas station where the incident took place July 6.

The grainy recordings, made public by the defense a week ago, appear to show about 1 1/2-minutes of scuffling between Jackson and several officers that occurred just before the trunk slamming was captured on tape by part-time disc jockey Mitchell Crooks from across the street.

Defense attorneys contend that the surveillance tapes provide visual evidence, along with the emotional impact it carries, corroborating police claims that Jackson resisted arrest before he was handcuffed. They also put Morse’s violent actions in context, they say.

Moreover, a video, even when seared into the consciousness of television viewers, does not necessarily ensure a conviction. That was demonstrated by the infamous 1991 video of four LAPD officers arresting motorist Rodney King.

The video shows King being struck with batons more than 50 times in 81 seconds. Nonetheless, a Simi Valley jury acquitted the officers. Later, however, the tape was used in a federal trial to help convict two of them.

“There is still plenty [on the Inglewood tapes] open for interpretation,” said Loyola Law School professor Laurie Levenson, a former federal prosecutor. “This case is not an absolute winner for either side.”

If prosecutors win a conviction, Morse, 24, could get three years in prison. His partner, Bijan Darvish, 25, charged with writing a false police report, also faces a possible three-year prison term.

The Crooks video is expected to be a powerful tool for prosecutors because, at first impression, such evidence is viewed by juries as an objective reflection of reality. That makes videos hard to challenge, said Harland Braun, who successfully defended LAPD Officer Theodore J. Briseno in the federal Rodney King trial. “They create a superficial impression that you know what happened because you saw it with your own eyes,” Braun said.

When tapes are enhanced or run in slow motion, they can make an image seem even more violent than at regular speed, said Joe Saltzman, associate dean of the USC Annenberg School of Communications. “Hitting someone with a fist is a [quick] boom, bang event, but when you slow it down, it looks much more horrific,” he said.

On the other hand, videotapes can be stripped of their impact when they are played over and over again, said Gary Blasi, a UCLA law professor who is conducting research on juror attitudes.

“If there is any lesson to be learned from the [acquittals in the] Rodney King case, it is that the jury saw them over 50 times, frame by frame, so that over a period it lost all meaning,” he said.

“Once you break it down frame by frame, it is no longer a story about an individual. It becomes an analytical thing, and it loses its emotional appeal.”

Reactions Heard on Tape

The Crooks tape reveals powerful details when viewed without enhancements or slow motion. For one thing, as Morse reaches the patrol car carrying Jackson by his shirt and the seat of his pants, the tape appears to show the officer, like a baseball pitcher rearing back to hurl a fast ball, hoisting the youth up higher so that he can throw him down harder.

Moreover, the shocked reactions of Crooks and his friends are clearly audible as Morse manhandles Jackson.

Yet as harsh as Morse appears, the Crooks tape still gives defense attorneys room for argument.

Darvish’s attorney, Ronald G. Brower, said one image will help him show that Darvish did not file a false report by failing to reveal Morse slammed Jackson on the car’s trunk. That image, Brower contends, shows Darvish looking away at the moment that Jackson’s body crashes on the car.

Attorney John Barnett, who is representing Morse, said the tapes carry a major advantage for the defense that the King tapes did not provide. Instead of having to explain a cascade of baton blows, he said he only has to explain two actions by Morse.

In addition, the Inglewood video lacks the extremely damaging audio sounds that the King video carried, said Barnett, who defended Officer Briseno during the Simi Valley trial in the King beating. “You could hear the bones breaking, and the metal batons clanging against the concrete and flesh,” he said. “It was a very unpleasant sound.”

Some experts said good defense lawyers also can draw attention to what cannot be seen on videotape. They say such a tactic probably will be used to support Morse’s claim that he hit Jackson in the jaw because the youth had grabbed him in the groin area.

Just before Morse struck him, Jackson is seen on tape bent over the trunk of the car, with Morse standing very close behind. Jackson’s hands are handcuffed behind him, but they are out of view.

“I would want to look at where Jackson’s hands could have been, and say, ‘Isn’t it possible that he could have been grabbing at the officer’s groin area?’ ” said Stanley Goldman, a Loyola Law School professor.

Although Jackson’s hands aren’t visible on the Crooks tape, Morse’s hands are. Moments before the punch, Morse moves his own hand down toward his groin, a movement that Barnett is likely to interpret as the reflex action of a man who has been grabbed in such a sensitive area.

Such arguments do not address why Morse harshly slammed the youth into the trunk of the patrol car moments earlier. The defense also will still have to contend with a jury pool that has seen the Crooks tape repeatedly and has heard a litany of condemnation of the officers, some experts say.

Statements by elected officials and community leaders have inflamed the public, said defense attorney Ira Salzman, who unsuccessfully defended LAPD Sgt. Stacey C. Koon in the federal King beating trial.

“These irresponsible comments that say there is no legitimate defense will make it more difficult to deal with the tape,” Salzman said.

Others, however, say that American society today is less susceptible to emotion-laden videos than it was when the King tapes stirred outrage around the world.

America has been around the block a few times since then, said Philip K. Anthony, head of DecisionQuest jury consultants in Los Angeles. People are still numb from the horrendous sight of airplanes crashing into the World Trade Center and remain preoccupied with terrorism and now a tanking economy, he said.

In today’s social and psychological climate, the Inglewood jury will be more insistent on hearing facts that explain what the videotape shows and less inclined to let emotions govern their conclusions, Anthony said.

“They may reach the same conclusions, but they will base it on facts,” he said.

Anthony said the surveillance videos of the fight between Jackson and the officers before he was handcuffed also may help Morse.

“It will be evidence that the victim deserved to be treated the way [Morse] did,” he said. “Other jurors will see it as police brutality.”

The surveillance cameras pick up the events after Jackson and his father, Coby Chavis, 41, pulled up in a Ford Taurus to the gas pumps at a Thrifty station on Century Boulevard. Because the tapes are so murky, officers can only be identified by linking the scenes to information in police reports.

Some defense experts say the surveillance tapes can help Morse’s lawyer explain why Morse slammed Jackson onto the trunk. That action, coming a few seconds after a long tussle in which Morse was injured, indicates that he still could have been in “the fight mode,” said Charles Duke Jr., a use-of-force expert for the Los Angeles Police Department and now a private consultant.

“His adrenalin must have really been flowing because he picked him up pretty easily,” said Duke, who usually testifies in court in favor of police officers. “It looked to me like he didn’t realize how strong he was at the moment.”

Station Tapes Grainy

Two gas station surveillance cameras record the events leading up to the fight. Although they are grainy, and neither had a wide enough angle to show the entire incident, together they cover a six-minute span through the conclusion of the scuffle. The violent encounter on the Crooks tape takes place out of the surveillance cameras’ view.

Four minutes into the sequence, one of the cameras captures the first clear images of a fight, when several officers and Jackson are seen entering the frame and tumbling to the pavement. But the poor quality of the tapes and their incomplete range makes it difficult to determine who started the fight or who was hitting whom.

Police said Jackson was swinging his fists at them, pulling on an officer’s uniform and at one point scratching Morse above his ear, causing him to bleed. Darvish said he hit Jackson twice. But, without any improvement to the quality of the video, those fight details aren’t clearly visible.

Near the end of the sequence covered by the system, Jackson appears to be motionless on the pavement for anywhere from 15 to 30 seconds before Morse is seen picking him up and carrying him to the police cruiser, where the Crooks tape shows him slamming the youth onto the trunk.

The two sides have already started putting their own spin on the surveillance tapes. Lawyers for the Inglewood officers say they show Jackson as a violent person just seconds before he became the limp, submissive body being manhandled by Morse.

Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., who briefly represented Jackson, said, “I think it’s going to help our side of the case,” because it shows that an officer “escalates the fray very aggressively.”

Salzman, one of the King case lawyers, said he is unsure whether the prosecution has to worry about the images on the surveillance tapes. “It was so grainy, I couldn’t really make much of it,” he said. “I couldn’t see any punches, but it may be of some use to the defense.”

USC law professor Erwin Chemerinsky said the surveillance tapes have little value for the defense beyond verifying police reports that a fight took place before Jackson was handcuffed.

“It’s hard to imagine anything [on the tapes] to justify a beating after Jackson was handcuffed,” he said.

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Times staff writer Daren Briscoe contributed to this report.