American Travesty : How justice failed the Rodney King cops

Lou Cannon

Suppose that two defendants were tried on felony-assault charges and acquitted by a jury, then tried for the same acts before another jury and once more acquitted. Suppose that the victim of the purported assault then sued for civil damages and that a third jury found the defendants not liable for his injuries. And suppose that after this legal vindication the defendants were fired from their jobs, denied employment in their profession, and ostracized.

This account describes the fate of Timothy Edward Wind and Theodore Joseph Briseno, two former Los Angeles police officers with small roles in the violent real-life drama that is remembered as the "Rodney King beating." They and two other LAPD defendants were acquitted by a pro- police suburban jury on April 29, 1992, in verdicts that ignited the deadly Los Angeles riots. Wind and Briseno were again acquitted in 1993 by federal jurors who were more sympathetic to King than to the police and who feared another riot unless they returned convictions-one of the factors that led them to find the two other officers guilty of violating King's civil rights. In 1994, the third jury awarded King $3.8 million in damages after the City of Los Angeles conceded liability; but the jury found that none of the officers was liable for King's injuries when he was beaten and subdued after a high-speed pursuit in the early morning hours of March 3, 1991.

Few know these facts. For most Americans the words "Rodney King" evoke a graphic videotape that appears to show a multitude of police officers savagely beating a helpless man. This videotape, shown so often on television that a principled CNN news director complained about its use as "wallpaper," is burned into our collective memory. Because the officers are white and King is black, many who saw the videotape assumed that those doing the beating were racists as well as brutes, an opinion disputed by the state prosecutor, an African American, who said that King was not beaten because of his race. But words cannot match the emotional power of the videotape. President George Bush said he was "sickened" by it and all but promised during the riots that the four LAPD officers would face prosecution on federal charges, as they did. When, on April 17, 1993, Sergeant Stacey Cornell Koon and Officer Laurence Michael Powell were convicted of violating King's civil rights, black teenagers danced in the streets. The next day, a week after Easter, Mayor Tom Bradley hailed as "the first day of a new life for Los Angeles." But even those celebrating the convictions might be surprised to learn that the two defendants who were acquitted the day before have arguably suffered more than the two who were sent to prison.

The incident began near midnight on March 2, 1991, on a Los Angeles freeway when two California Highway Patrol officers clocked a car at speeds up to 115 miles an hour. The driver wouldn't stop. He led police cars on a 7.8-mile pursuit on freeways and city streets before being forced to pull over because another vehicle was blocking his path. The driver was Rodney King, a tall, muscular man weighing 250 pounds who had recently been paroled after serving a state-prison term for robbery. King and two friends spent the evening of March 2 drinking malt liquor before deciding, as one of them later testified, to go "cruising around . . . looking for some girls." King's blood-alcohol level when he was arrested was .19, nearly two and one-half times the legal limit.

After King pulled over, his friends complied with police orders to get out of the car and lie face down on the ground. They were not harmed. King, however, was slow to get out and slow to obey police commands once he did. He danced and wiggled his buttocks at the female CHP officer who had initiated the pursuit. When she advanced upon him with gun drawn, Stacey Koon feared there might be a shooting, took over the arrest, and ordered officers at the scene to holster their guns. He had noticed that King was "buffed out," a term applied to muscular men who have lifted weights in prison, and decided that King was an ex-convict who could be fleeing the scene of a crime. When he shouted at King to lie face down with his arms outstretched, King did not comply and stared back at the sergeant with a glazed look. Koon then ordered four officers to jump on King and subdue him. One of them put a knee in King's back, trying to force his left arm behind him so he could handcuff him, but King was too strong. With a quick motion, King tossed Officers Briseno and Powell off his back, while the other two officers backed away. Koon next tried to immobilize King with an electric stun gun known as a Taser, which fires darts carrying a charge of 50,000 volts. This didn't work either. King writhed when hit by the first two-dart volley but did not go down. Koon fired a second volley. This time King fell, but he was soon back on his feet and charging toward Powell. By now, Koon was convinced that he had more on his hands than a strong, combative drunk-he believed King was under the influence of the drug phencyclidine, or PCP, which can endow its users with extraordinary strength.

Koon's efforts to take King into custody without harming him lasted several minutes and were not videotaped. The famous video, shot from an apartment balcony across the street by an amateur cameraman, begins with a three-second segment of King climbing to his feet after the second Taser volley and running toward Powell, who swings wildly with his baton and apparently hits King on the right side of his face. These three seconds are followed by ten seconds of blurry footage caused by a shifting of the camera. In the next clear sequence, Powell and Wind begin the torrent of blows, many of them delivered while King is on the ground, that subdue him. The entire videotape, from the moment King charges at Powell until he is handcuffed, lasts 81 seconds. But the version shown the following evening on KTLA, the local station to which the cameraman gave his videotape, had been shortened to 68 seconds. Gone with the ten seconds of blurry footage were the initial three seconds of the video in which King runs toward Powell. There is no evidence that the editing was the product of anti-police bias-it seems to have reflected television's preference for visual clarity even at the sacrifice of meaning. The edited tape was given to other stations and is the familiar footage seen so often on TV. It is a partial version of a video that is itself a partial record.

In any version the videotape is hard for most people to watch. The officers, mostly Powell, unleashed more than 50 baton blows. Not all of them landed, but Koon testified at the first trial that he had "not seen anything that is as violent as this in my fourteen and a half years [as an LAPD officer]." But the editing eliminated any trace of motivation, making it seem as if the officers were beating King for the fun of it. It also had the ironic effect of undermining the prosecution in the state trial, which was moved by a judge to Simi Valley, a conservative community where jurors suspected that the media had not told the full story of the incident. When the unedited tape was played in court, the jurors were confirmed in their views, and the prosecution was placed at a disadvantage from which it was unable to recover.

The full videotape was extensively analyzed by Internal Affairs, the FBI, investigators for the district attorney, and the defendants' lawyers, two of whom were former police officers. Out of this analysis and other inquiries came three basic versions of events. The prosecution contended that the beating was egregious police brutality, while the defense version was that the officers had conducted a proper arrest, escalating their use of force gradually as they had been taught. The third and (to me) most persuasive version was developed principally by a capable LAPD detective named T. Z. Tzimeas, who headed the Internal Affairs investigation. He repeatedly watched the video and questioned every officer involved in the arrest except Briseno, who evaded an interview. Tzimeas concluded that the incident was a well-intentioned arrest gone wrong. Powell was inept in the use of his baton and panicked when King came at him. Powell and Wind and probably Koon had suffered from "tunnel vision," a stress-produced affliction in which officers see nothing except what is happening directly in front of them. Koon had been too involved with the stun gun to supervise the arrest and may have lost his focus when the Taser failed to halt King. As Tzimeas saw it, what happened that night was the product of mistakes, not criminal brutality. This version, ruinous to the contentions of both prosecution and defense, was never presented at any of the trials. The report remains secret to this day.

Truth will out, however, and a similar version of events emerged from an analysis by U.S. district judge John G. Davies, who presided over the federal trial. Davies, a naturalized citizen who had won an Olympic gold medal in swimming for his native Australia and practiced law for 27 years before being named to the bench by Ronald Reagan, was thorough and fair. He had no access to the Internal Affairs report and undertook his own moment-by-moment examination of the videotape before sentencing Koon and Powell. The judge's analysis suggested to some trial observers that he might have found Koon (and conceivably even Powell) innocent had the decision been his. But because the jury had spoken, Davies was limited to determining when the unlawful conduct began. He decided the officers had behaved legally until the final 19 seconds of the incident when they continued to hit King after he was no longer resistant. This meant that King's injuries were the result of lawful action. King's broken cheekbone and facial cuts were caused by Powell's first blow. His other significant injury, a broken right fibula, occurred at the forty-third second of the video. In summary, Davies found that the officers had been caught up in a difficult arrest of a resistant suspect but should have stopped the beating slightly sooner than they did. This had also been the finding of Tzimeas, the Internal Affairs detective.

The government, cheered on by black leaders, sought long sentences-nine to ten years (the maximum) for Koon and seven to nine years for Powell. Davies was hemmed in by federal sentencing guidelines that have transferred discretion from judges to prosecutors, who can increase sentences by tacking on "enhancements" for particular acts. In this case the government sought an enhancement because of King's injuries. Davies demurred. In a bold sentencing memorandum, he cited several mitigating factors, starting with the fact that "Mr. King's wrongful conduct contributed significantly" to the incident. Davies noted that the defendants would be punished by losing their livelihood and that the successive prosecutions of the officers in state and federal courts, "though legal, raise a specter of unfairness." He sentenced Koon and Powell to 30 months in prison and also rejected the government's demands for fines, saying that Koon "has five dependent children who would be unduly burdened if a fine was imposed" and that Powell was unable to pay. The government appealed the sentences, contending that Davies had strayed from the federal guidelines. After a liberal panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with the government, the sentences were unanimously upheld by the Supreme Court and have become, in the words of Briseno's attorney, Harland Braun, "the seminal case in restoring a modicum of judicial discretion." (The biggest beneficiaries of this discretion, incidentally, have been blacks and Latinos.)

The four "Rodney King officers," as they were now known, were no peas in a pod. They had little in common except assignment to the LAPD's Foothill Division, which polices a chunk of the San Fernando Valley and its surrounding hills. Sergeant Koon, then 41, was an admirable but contentious officer who had earned some 90 commendations and was known for courage, honesty, and stubbornness. He came to Foothill from the LAPD's tough 77th Street Division in the heart of South Central Los Angeles, where he had once shot and wounded a gang member just as the gangster was about to shoot a police officer. In another incident Koon was on duty when a black transvestite prostitute with bleeding sores on his mouth and lips was brought into the station and suffered a heart attack. Without hesitation Koon dropped to his knees and applied mouth- to-mouth resuscitation in a vain attempt to save the prostitute's life. Koon's bravery made him an instant legend among his fellow officers but displeased his superiors, who thought he had taken an unnecessary risk, an opinion in which they were confirmed when an autopsy showed that the prostitute had AIDS. Koon was no go-along, get-along cop. In Foothill, he had displeased old-guard white officers with a vigorous investigation of another veteran sergeant accused by two homeless blacks of striking them with his baton when they refused to leave a street corner. Koon persuaded the sergeant's rookie partner to tell the truth about what happened. The sergeant retired and was convicted of using force "under color of authority," for which he received probation.

Powell, who had a better aptitude for computers than for police work, was a problem officer. Twenty-eight at the time of the King incident and the youngest of the officers, he was described by superiors and colleagues as enthusiastic but immature. Powell had with repeated baton strokes broken the elbow of a man he was arresting, prompting a lawsuit that the city settled for $70,000. He was reprimanded in another case by the LAPD for hitting a suspect with a flashlight. Powell had advanced rapidly in Foothill because he made many arrests, but he was out of shape and tired from a change in shifts. In a coincidence too strange for fiction, Powell had been ordered during roll call at the beginning of his shift on March 2, 1991, to demonstrate proper use of the baton. The test was conducted not against a moving suspect but a stationary stack of tires. Powell flunked it. In hindsight some of the department's best officers said he should then have been assigned to desk duty until retrained. But Foothill was short of street officers, and Powell was sent into the night to face Rodney King.

After Powell failed the baton test, Tim Wind was called upon to perform it and did so flawlessly. Wind, who looked younger than Powell but was two years older, had been in the Green Berets, served for seven years as a police officer in a small town in his home state of Kansas, and had been regarded as an exceptionally promising officer in his class at the Los Angeles Police Academy. Despite his police background he was a probationary or first-year officer in the LAPD and was assigned to a supposedly more experienced officer for training. Powell was Wind's training officer.

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.

When Koon and Powell went off to prison, Wind and Briseno were left to fend for themselves with little money or support. They had been declared innocent in two trials by 24 jurors of vastly divergent views-one woman juror in the state trial believed police officers could legally use any amount of force on anyone who did not obey them; one male juror in the federal trial thought that LAPD officers routinely use their stun guns to torture suspects. But even the most opinionated, anti-police jurors could see when they examined Wind's conduct on a slow-motion version of the videotape that he had stepped back to evaluate the impact of his baton blows, as he had been trained. They also realized that Briseno's involvement in the incident was marginal and gave him the benefit of the doubt.

While the findings of these diverse jurors spared Wind and Briseno from prison, their careers as police officers were over. Briseno carried the additional burden of hostility from fellow officers who resented his testimony against Powell and Koon in the state trial. While an LAPD Board of Rights went through the motions of hearing Briseno's appeal for reinstatement as an officer, it was obvious from the opening moments that he had no chance. Nor would other police forces hire him. With help from his brother, a police officer, and his attorney, Braun, he found a low-paying security job in the Los Angeles area. But he lives in near- poverty and is frequently depressed. "It's particularly hard on Ted because he's not accepted by either side," says Braun. "But it's hard on all of them because they have lost their earning power and can never work as police officers again. That's all Briseno knew or wanted to do."

Wind was popular with his fellow officers but no more successful than Briseno in his efforts to continue his police career. As a probationary officer he was not entitled to a Board of Rights hearing but was allowed a lesser proceeding known as a "liberty-interest hearing" before Robert Gale, an LAPD captain. Gale reviewed Wind's conduct, finding that he had used his baton properly but that six kicks of King had violated LAPD policy. Saying that Wind was "honest and sincere" and had conducted himself in a "professional and dignified manner" at the hearing and three trials, Gale recommended he be given a six-month suspension and returned to duty. But Willie Williams, the LAPD police chief at the time, promptly fired Wind and also upheld the Board of Rights report dismissing Briseno.

Wind struggled for three years to find work while his wife Lorna supported them and their son, an infant at the time of the King arrest. Life, which had seemed so good in Kansas, was hard for Lorna Wind. She endured a miscarriage and broke down on the witness stand at the civil trial as she described the family's hardships. Meanwhile, her husband had serious medical problems that required operations and plunged him into a continuing battle with the City of Los Angeles over disability payments. He was sometimes a political target-the rap singer Ice Cube wrote a song urging that Wind be sent back to Kansas in a casket. In 1994, over protests from blacks, Wind was hired for a $9.32-an-hour part-time job as a community-service officer in Culver City, where one of his duties was washing the police chief's car.

Determined to make a new life for himself, Wind enrolled in a community college. He was a bright and curious student who earned high marks and transferred to Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, from which he graduated with honors and a degree in urban studies this May. But the Rodney King case lurks always around the corner. At a professor's request, Wind founded an urban-studies club at Loyola Marymount that was doing well until its members learned of Wind's background and stopped attending. All of his post-graduation applications for entry-level planning jobs have been rejected with form letters, even though such positions are plentiful in booming California. Wind is 39 years old and feels that time is running out on him. He has given up looking for planning work and intends this fall to seek admission to law school. That he was twice proven innocent in the Rodney King affair has been no help.

If this does not seem fair, it is of a piece with the Rodney King case, about which very little has been fair.

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