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