Rodney King, Live

A VIDEOTAPE IS NOT FLESH. IT COULDN'T COMPARE with Rodney King himself, taking the witness stand as federal prosecutors sought to convict four white police officers accused of depriving King of his civil rights in a 1991 beating. Calmly, politely, King testified that he led police on a chase because he feared a return to prison. He described being shocked by a police stun gun; he said police taunted him. Defense lawyers tried to rock King. One tried to pin him down on whether officers called him "killer" or "nigger." King was blurry on details, but Laurie Levenson, a law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, says, "When the jury went back into the jury room, they had a human being on their minds, not some blip on a TV screen."