officers - The Black Vault

•
l{odnt"Y King
try to work it out. ... Let's try to work
it out."
And then, taking no questions, he was
escorted back inside. It was a remarkable
performance, and none were more pleased
with it than Steven Lerman and James
Banks, who had advised King as to the
tone, and even the phrasing, of his words.
"I told him that there are certain things
that people will probably want to hear him
say," notes Lerman, "but that what he
said would ultimately be·his decision."
''The telephone lines were really buzzing,"
says Banks. "Glen and I talked just
like two guys sitting around just shooting
the bull, as to what we wanted to come
out of this. We talked about Dr. Martin
Luther King. And I said, 'Glen, you
know; I was there when he made that
speech, "I have a dream." ' I wasn't
physically there, but I was around then.
And I never dreamed that one day I would
be associated with a speech· that is a thousand
times more important, in all due respect
to Dr. King. . . . ·
"And we talked about the phrase-and
I'm so glad that he .said it-I said, you
know, 'Glen, this is just a battle we lost,
160
"I used to know a clever toast,
But pshaw! I cannot think it­
So fill your glass to anything,
And, bless your souls, I'll drink it."
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•
hut we're )!Onna win the war.' And I was
very pleased that he talked about that. It
had a strong resonance. And the one that
was all his own was when he said. 'Can't
we work it out'! Can't we work together
on this?' That was right from the heart.
That tore everybody apart."
While King's·plea seemed to guarantee
the peace, it brought a near-universal reaction:
Why didn't this man testify at the
trial?
"He would have been a fantastic
witness," Lerman says, "afantastic witness."
King himself later criticized the decision
not to call him to the witness stand.
Deputy District Attorney Terry L.
White, who prosecuted the four cops, gets
edgy when he hears statements like that-.
The case had been a political nightmare
for the D.A. 's office-which ordinarily
works with the police department, not
against it-and it was White, still only in
his thirties and far from the department's
most experienced assistant D.A., whose
career might be on the line.
White had to have heard the gossip
that District Attorney Ira Reiner, a veteran
L.A. politichm, chose him, a black
attorney, as an insurance policy. If they
lost. the case-unlikely as it seemed,
with that videotape as evidence-"the
black community would have to trash
one of its own to get to Reiner," as one
L.A. lawyer puts it.
Almost from the beginning, the question
of whether to call Rodney King as a
witness was a central dilemma for White
and Reiner, and the subject of intense debate
for weeks. All but Lerman agree that,
on some obvious levels, King was a vulnerable
witness. Not only was he an excon-and
if he'd taken the stand, the
defense would have tried to explore his
conviction for a violent crime-but he'd
also been drunk the night of the beating
and had led police on a high-speed chase,
running lights and driving erratically
along the way.
Moreover, King had rendered his testimony
"impeachable" by giving inconsistent
statements on several key points. He
made early statements that he hadn't been
speeding and that he'd pulled over immediately-statements
contradicted by one
of the passengers in his car, Pooh Allen.
In his early interviews after the incident,
King said he couldn't identify the
officers who~d beaten him, but later he
identified all four defendants in the criminal
case. "You know, my memory is
coming back," King explained to the
D.A.'s investigators. "I've been able
to, you know, !hink at times and my
brain, you know, it would come back different
parts, different little parts. little
hits.··
King's most glaring contradiction was
on the matter of whether the officers uttered
racial epithets while they were beating
him. At his first press conference. on
leaving jail, King said that there had been
no racist remarks, a statement he repeated
to the police investigators. Lerman said
the same thing, as did Rentzer.
But as Lerman shaped his civil suit
around civil-rights violations, race became
a central point. King now told the
D.A. 's investigators that the cops had
stood over him, taunting, "Whatsup,
how're you feeling now, nigger? Whatsup,
nigger? Nigger, whatsup, nigger, killer?
Killer, whatsup, killer? Whatsup?"
He also said that when he got up and tried
to run-a moment, according to the defense,
that showed he was belligerently
resisting arrest-it was because an officer
had said, " 'I'm gonna kill you, nigger,
run!' ... And when I heard that, when I
heard that, that's when I was gonna bre*­
for the fucking, for the hills." That would'
have been especially useful testimony in
the trial, except for the fact that King
hadn't mentioned it earlier.
Lerman explains that .Rodney w.as
·afraid at first to charge racism because he
thought the police might raflroad him into
jail and never let him out. He also says
that Rodney's mother requested that race
not be made an issue in the case.
Then why did Lerman subsequently
charge racism so loudly? Lerman's critics,
including the district attorney's office, lay
it off to inexperience in civil-rights cases,
and the mistaken belief that racial animus·
has to be part of a violation of rights. (In
fact, most excessive-force claims are
based on a section of the U.S. Code that
says nothing about race; rather, the civil
right being violated is the individual's
Fourth Amendment right to be free from
unreasonable search and seizure.)
Lerman says he brought race into the
case after hearing a sound-enhanced version
of the Holliday videotape on which
the racial epithets could be heard. The district
attorney's office, which also hired a
sound-enhancement expert, says that no
racial taunts could be discerned. "I don't
think this is malicious on Rodney's part,"
White says of King's changing story. "I
think Rodney's been manipulated to believe
these things. And I don't know if it's
just Steve Lerman. I think he's been
around so many people he actually believes
what he is saying now."
White also faults Lerman and his associates
for accompanying King to meetings
with the D.A. 's office, where they would
VANITY fAIR/JUlY 1992