Most trials are not held under the klieg lights of celebrity. And federal reprosecutions of failed state efforts are nearly as rare as snow in South-Central Los Angeles. For those reasons alone, the case in L.A. tells us nothing about the overall state of American justice, or what typically befalls brutal inner-city cops.
Yet from the moment Rodney King’s prone and pummeled image materialized in living rooms across America, he became invested with huge symbolic weight. He became “a black everyman whose experience with police came to symbolize African-American encounters with law enforcement,” says Wade Henderson, head of the Washington office of the NAACP. Many would bristle at the description. What kind of everyman, after all, is a convicted felon who gets tanked up and then leads cops on a merry-if ill-fated-highspeed chase? Still, many Americans (especially blacks) found it impossible to view King in isolation. That was partly because, superficially at least, his experience evoked the tragic final trip of Arthur McDuffie, a black insurance executive, who in 1979 was beaten to death by police after a frenzied pursuit in Miami-and whose killers’ exoneration by an all-white Tampa jury ignited several nights of riots. But it was mostly because many blacks’ own encounters with police have been tense and fraught with danger.
King was never a real human being for many African-Americans, but a reflection of painful memories and projected experiences. Stacey Koon, Laurence Powell, Timothy Wind and Theodore Briseno were never just cops or even discrete persons, but apparitions from a nightmare. The legal proceedings (round one and round two) were not really about individual innocence or guilt. They were seen, by people of all ethnicities, as forums for opposing views of justice and race.
Before last year’s riot, researchers at UCLA’s Center for the Study of Urban Poverty asked residents of Los Angeles County how much confidence they had in the local police. Fifty-two percent of blacks said, “Not much,” but only 13 percent of whites agreed. That perceptual chasm was no aberration. UCLA’s researchers found that only 2 percent of blacks but 21 percent of whites agreed with the first King-trial verdict. And a host of studies provide some insight into why.
In 1990, the Sentencing Project, a Washington-based nonprofit group, reported that 23 percent of young black men were in prison, in jail, on probation or on parole on any given day. For whites, the figure was 6.2 percent; for Hispanics, 10.4 percent. Those figures reflected, in part, the effects of newly toughened drug laws that fueled a fivefold increase in state and federal prison populations since 1973. The laws hit blacks especially hard. Though blacks make up 15 percent of all monthly drug users, said Sentencing Project analysts, they account for 37 percent of drug-possession arrests; once caught, they are more likely than whites to do time.
Other studies also have found disturbing discrepancies. The Dallas Times Herald discovered that murder or rape of whites in Dallas County was punished more severely than similar assaults of blacks. The San Jose Mercury News found that whites in California got better plea bargains than blacks and Hispanics accused of comparable crimes. A number of scholars have concluded that blacks who murder whites are much more likely to get the death penalty than those who murder blacks. Charles Ogletree, of Harvard Law School, cites statistics showing that blacks are 10 times more likely than whites to be shot at by police, and he argues that cops in urban areas target minorities for searches. Such assertions have been challenged, but they coincide with the prevailing view in many neighborhoods. For “low-income AfricanAmericans and Hispanics … the Rodney King experience was symbolic of what they’ve felt and known for a very long time,” observes the Sentencing Project’s Marc Mauer.
The King videotape was regarded by some civil-rights activists almost as a gift of fate. Bobby Doctor, acting director of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, says he has seen several incidents of police misconduct that no camera caught. He wonders “what would have happened if the world had witnessed them.” For people like Doctor, the first trial served as something of a referendum on America’s will to respond to police abuse of minorities.
That trial failed the test. Probably any trial would have. Yet the federal reprosecution shouldered a burden just as daunting. As University of Southern California law professor Erwin Chemerinsky says, there was an “overwhelming public sense that justice was not done.” Trial Two was supposed to set things right-and allow America to move on after a ghastly riot.
But even as America endeavors to move on, some issues raised by the trial will linger-including the issue of whether, in trying to rectify a historic grievance and a symbolic wrong, federal prosecutors are misstepping morally-or even tactically. In his book, “Presumed Guilty,” Sergeant Koon grumbles about “Supreme Court decisions that permit double jeopardy.” And he found an ally in the American Civil Liberties Union, which, as the world watched L.A., reiterated its objections to dual prosecutions for the same acts.
Legally, the objections were irrelevant. In cases going back to the 1800s, the Supreme Court has consistently ruled in favor of the principle of dual prosecution, provided different “sovereignties” are doing the prosecuting. Yet even some high-court justices have found such suits troubling. In a dissent in an 1847 case concerning a woman prosecuted by Ohio for having counterfeited silver dollars, Justice John McLean pronounced the practice a “mockery of justice.” More than a century later, when a man acquitted in federal court of robbing a bank was retried in Illinois, Hugo Black objected: “Even in the Dark Ages, when so many other principles of justice were lost, the idea that one trial and one punishment were enough remained alive.”
However discomforting the practice may be, society is not likely to be irreparably harmed by it, especially since the Justice Department rarely sanctions such suits. In 1992, the department filed only two dual prosecutions (including the L.A. case) against police for violations of civil rights. Still, the moral issue of fairness for those prosecuted can hardly be ignored in a case so ripe with symbolic messages. Nor can the possibility that all of America would have been better off had the job been done right the first time. Some lawyers intimate that the very fact that the Feds can reprosecute removes an incentive for state prosecutors to do a good job. At the very least, suggests Susan Herman, head of the ACLU’s due-process committee, something is wrong with the Feds’ sitting on the sidelines during a state prosecution and then deciding “on a highly publicized case, to do it over again.”
The original justification for federal civil prosecutions was that the states refused to pursue them. The Ku Klux Klan Acts (which make it illegal for law-enforcement officers to deprive persons of their civil rights) date to the Reconstruction era. The same Congress that crafted amendments prohibiting slavery, guaranteeing due process and assuring ex-slaves the right to vote saw a need to give federal agents weapons against state officials who were more willing to lynch a black person than allow him to vote.
The need for such weapons existed as late as 1964, when three civil-rights workers were killed in Mississippi with the collusion of a deputy sheriff who belonged to the Ku Klux Klan. It’s difficult to imagine such an event occurring anywhere in America today. Still, reports of police misconduct continue to surface. The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund has sued Los Angeles County, accusing a group of deputies in the Lynwood Sheriff’s Station of rampant brutality. And in Reynoldsburg, Ohio, the NAACP claims, police formed a self-styled SNAT (Special Nigger Arrest Team) unit.
Even if the reports of police abuse are valid, the Justice Department cannot do very much about them. The Civil Rights Division’s criminal section receives upwards of 8,000 complaints a year but files an average of less than 70 cases–roughly half against law-enforcement agents. Hugh Manes, a California lawyer who specializes in misconduct cases, notes that “neither federal nor state prosecutors like to sue cops.” But even if federal prosecutors wanted to bring hundreds of suits, they could not. The Civil Rights Division has fewer than 200 attorneys, a smaller number than employed by some law firms. It is not equipped to monitor all of America’s police.
Some activists suggest that it be equipped to do so, and that Congress empower the Feds to bring an array of civil complaints against errant cops. For now, however, Americans seeking justice will do so primarily at the state level. New York University law professor Burt Neuborne finds that troubling. There is “still a qualitative difference in the nature of justice meted out in the federal courts,” he insists, in part because more than two thirds of the state’s judges are elected. Mauer, however, observes, “I don’t know how much of that [perception] is based in memories of when we couldn’t count on the state courts to do the job.” As Kevin Reed of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund acknowledges, police misconduct is more likely to change because of management pressure-“and an understanding that police officers engaged in excessive force will find themselves out of a job”–than because of lawsuits.
The evening before the reading of the verdict, Mayor Tom Bradley asked his city to “look beyond the trial.” It was primarily an appeal for peace, but it could also have been taken as an acknowledgment that the trial has few enduring lessons. If the Rodney King saga offers anything of lasting significance, it may be an incentive to Americans of different races to try to understand why our perspectives on justice tend to diverge so greatly. In doing so, we may conceivably bring them closer-or at least come to fathom why we can’t.
