European Stars and Stripes (Newspaper) - May 7, 1992, Darmstadt, Hesse                                Page 14 a the stars and stripes thursday May 7, 1992 commentary Wiley a. Hall ii blows on videotape merely bounced off jury some observers say the jury in the Rodney g. King Case saw the videotape of his beating at the hands of police More than a 100 times during the trial. They saw it in real time and in slow motion Normal sized and magnified. Then they saw it All Over again still shots Frame by Frame by Frame. Experts counted every blow and made careful notations of where each blow fell. Kings motions during this Savage assault were charted Analysed and debated. So maybe the jurors just got bored. After All we see worse atrocities every Day in the movies a and the blood there at least is filmed in color. Bear with me in a trying to understand what happened Here How a jury of reputedly sane human beings could have voted last week to acquit the four men charged with the assault so in a thinking that maybe the jurors stopped caring about poor Rodney King who was struck kicked or clubbed some 56 times by four police officers and May have permanent brain and facial injuries. Lets say boredom began to set in of at about the third showing. By the 20th repetition each juror probably despised King for getting himself in that mess despised him for making a spectacle of himself. That happens a people become desensitized to pain especially other Peoples pain. After All King 26, is an sex convict unemployed and single. The officers who assaulted him were family men who wore suits and ties in court. Maybe the jury believed these Fine upstanding citizens had suffered enough. King got nothing More painful than a broken Skull which can be mended with aspirin and some tape. These men faced irreparable damage to their Good names. Or maybe the jury was swayed by their defense. Caught red handed on videotape the men never denied that they had assaulted King. They argued instead that King deserved the whipping he got. The defendants three current officers and a Rookie who was dismissed after the beating a said King acted a a bizarre after they stopped him for speeding. His eyes were watery he swayed a bit and he was slow to obey their commands to lie Down. They said that when he got out of his car after leading police on an eight mile High Speed Chase King had the effrontery to look up at a circling helicopter and laugh. King was compared to reptiles other animals and a baseball. The officers complimented each other on their club wielding technique. In the Hospital emergency room one officer asked King if he Felt up to another round. Could you a could anyone a punish men who so enjoy their work then there is what i Call the a a message theory. In this our communications age it seems As though everyone is trying to Send someone else a message. In this Case the jurors were All residents of Simi Valley an affluent residential Community outside los Angeles. Every Day i bet these suburbanites pick up their newspapers and read about incidents of violent crime in los Angeles. They must be constantly appalled. And so they May have decided that the time had come to Send a message to the grass roots we will no longer tolerate crime in our newspapers. If you Speed if you act suspiciously and if your eyes water the consequences will be severe. Finally some people have mentioned race As a Factor in Trie verdict. That a a possibility. King is Black. The four defendants arc White. The jury was made up of 10 Whites a hispanic and a filipino Ameri can. But we must remember that the Constitution guarantees defendants trial before a jury of their Peers. Nowhere does it say that a victims Peers must be on the jury As Well. Some say the prosecutor went to heroic lengths to ensure the defendants a trial by their Peers not Kings. Of course we can Only conjecture about the jury a motivations. The for woman of the jury asked everyone to understand that sitting on such a Case had not been easy. In a glad she put this in the proper perspective for us. I suppose the jury must have gone through quite an ordeal indeed. It can to be easy watching another Man brutalized again and again by the supposed forces of Law and order. Even if you done to give a Damn. C the Baltimore Sun William f. Buckley  Over King verdict did t justify greed the expression of Public outrage Isnit always irrational. The outrage that followed the conviction of capt. Alfred Dreyfus in 1894 changed the politics of France and affected for the better the culture of Europe. There Are of course outrages and outrages. In some parts of the South in reconstruction Days outrages Over verdicts that found this or that defendant innocent resulted in lynchings. Some outrages Are Welcome and indeed provoked Martin Luther King or. Probably prayed from time to time that he would be arrested and charged with disturbing the peace or whatever in order to dramatize his continuing struggle for civil rights for Blacks. Some outrages Are directly trained against the apparent aggressors the Chavez sponsored Boycott of the grape growers in Southern California for instance. The difficulties of course mount when it Isnit obvious against whom to express that outrage. What happens then is what Herbert Agar once described As a the anarchic passion to  this is what happened immediately after the Rodney g. King verdict but instantly As with other acts of outrage of recent memory outrage became acquisitive. It is one thing to go to the courthouse and throw spitball because you Are convinced that Justice was t done and that the failure of Justice is intrinsic to the whole system. It is something else to say that the outrage entitles you to one free color television set taken from the local store. As the Scales of Justice Are visualized at this moment the suffering of Rodney g. King has been done to underwrite free hardware for Rodney g. King sympathizers. Or As a matter of fact for Rodney g. King detractors. There is nobody at the door of the department store checking the focus of indignation of the looters. For All we know there were backers of David Duke out there helping themselves to a free refrigerator to celebrate the judicial exoneration of the defendants. Civil Justice does no to have some of the defense mechanisms available to military Justice. In 1971, a Young lieutenant called William l. Calley or. Was found guilty by a court martial of presiding Over the massacre at my Lai in South Vietnam on a much grander scale Calley was guilty of atrocities the policemen in los Angeles were apparently guilty of but All of America exploded Over the verdict and president Nixon had to get into the act. What the american people were saying in effect was the hell with you colonels and generals up there sentencing to life at hard labor a lieutenant who was surrounded by a deadly enemy went bonkers and machine gunned every civilian in sight including women and children. The Public was saying in effect soldiers in combat can do no wrong. The jury in California is perceived now As saying that in a City like los Angeles where crime is becoming year after year the most pressing neighbor policemen detected in an act of brutality against one More suspected criminal who in fact had a criminal record can do no wrong. And the irony of the protest is precisely this that the outrages being committed in the name of Justice for Rodney g. King in which entirely innocent people have been killed do nothing More than to confirm that los Angeles is a City in which hoodlums and gangsters can at least temporarily take charge. Those Are the words a a hoodlums an gangsters a used to describe the looters and the Kil ers by Tom Bradley who is the Black mayor of los at getes. President Nixon was Able to distract the outrage Public by simply suspending the sentence against Calls and letting the Case against him dribble through a bureaucratic appeals Board which fiddled around unt the Vietnam War was Over and in a year or so Calk was out honorable discharged. To attempt to stanch the indignation of those we done to associate the Fate of Rodney g. King with the a it vent of free television sets and the right to set fire t the automobiles of random motorists and to kill a be of them for Good measure the authorities Are Tal Kiri about quickly bringing fresh charges against the Foi present or former policemen holding them up As Allej edly guilty of conspiring to deprive Rodney g. King his civil rights. This is a distraction almost guarantee not to work. With a fresh trial on new ground would take months to organize coming Well after it Angeles has exhausted its Supply of television sets t assuage the angry and in the second place almost certainly a conspiracy based on race wont succeed. Thos is a policemen captured by camcorder will be As ii visible a year from now As Calley has been for 20 years the opportunists of the Day Arentt Only those we want to loot the stores. They include politicians an commentators who Are always looking Tor any excuse the More lurid the better to bemoan american life. C Universal press Syndicate