American Travesty : How justice failed the Rodney King cops

Briseno, the fourth officer, had an adequate record during nine years of LAPD service marred by a 1987 suspension for using force against a handcuffed child-abuse suspect. He had been warned that another improper use of force meant dismissal, and no complaints were made against Briseno after 1987 until the King incident, in which he was a marginal participant. Briseno struck no blows; he was indicted for a single stomp to the neck or upper back of King. His defense was that he was trying to keep King down so that Powell would not hit him again. In the state trial, he testified that Powell was out of control while beating King. Briseno changed his mind after viewing an FBI-enhanced tape of the beating and did not testify in the federal trial. But the state trial had been televised, and Judge Davies allowed federal jurors to see key sections of Briseno's taped state-trial testimony.

By the time of the federal trial the plight of the officers had won sympathetic attention from conservatives who saw them as scapegoats for the riots. The attention focused on Koon, who carried his defense beyond the courtroom in newspaper interviews and a book, Presumed Guilty, published by Regnery Gateway. (The manuscript was seized before publication by the FBI, ostensibly for evidence.) Publisher Alfred Regnery organized a defense fund for Koon that in 1994-95 raised more than $2.4 million after fundraising expenses. Half of this paid Koon's legal bills-the rest was placed in trust funds for Koon, his wife Mary, and their five children. Powell did not do as well-he filed a pauper's declaration and sold his home to pay legal bills. But his father Edwin, a retired U.S. marshal, in time organized a defense fund that raised an undisclosed amount of money for his son's legal appeals by selling copper bracelets patterned after those used for prisoners of war and T- shirts that read, "To Protect and To Serve-Time."

Prison can be perilous for police officers, but the Bureau of Prisons promised that Koon and Powell would be kept away from violent inmates. The bureau kept its word but then inexplicably released Koon to a halfway house in a rough area of Riverside County where a drug-crazed gunman from the neighborhood tried to kill him on Thanksgiving Day 1995. Koon had been given a home furlough for the holiday, and the gunman instead killed a bystander before he was shot dead by sheriff's deputies. Koon served the final few weeks of his sentence in house arrest. He had made prison what he called "a positive experience" by losing 45 pounds, reading two or three books a week, and completing correspondence courses in a program to become a Catholic lay teacher. After his release, he did some consulting and investing but spends the bulk of his time as a self-described "Mr. Mom" who tends the house while his wife, a nurse, works outside the home. "I take care of the kids, cook the meals, go to the ballgames," Koon says. "I don't look back."

Powell, who also served two years in prison and another two months in a halfway house (in his case without incident), married after his release from prison. He and his wife moved to the San Diego area, where he works in a computer store that makes use of his technical abilities.