A Slap for a Broken Head

By Richard Lacayo

In the collective mind, the beatings of Rodney King and Reginald Denny have become a matched pair -- two videotaped outrages, two tests of the criminal justice system. As it emerged last week, one parallel was still to be played out. Just as in the King case, videotape evidence was supposed to make the verdict in the Denny trial a foregone conclusion. Just as in the King case, that was wrong.

When one of the most tumultuous jury deliberations in recent memory ended with something close to acquittal for Damian Monroe Williams, 20, and Henry Keith Watson, 29, some of Los Angeles celebrated, but much of the city -- and the U.S. -- was stunned. Out of the 12 counts facing both men, the jury returned one felony conviction. For disfiguring Denny with a brick, Williams was found guilty of simple mayhem, which carries a prison term of up to eight years. Watson, who was convicted on a misdemeanor assault charge that carries a six-month prison term, was released from jail, where he had already spent 17 months awaiting trial. Though the streets of L.A. stayed quiet, the radio- talk-show lines were on fire for days.

Should the verdict have come as such a surprise? From the arrest of Williams to the uproar in the jury room, there were ample signs that the prosecution's case was harder than it looked. Here's some advice they should have heeded:

DON'T OVERCHARGE. Though they may have thought public outrage at the crime required it, prosecutors erred by hitting Williams and co-defendant Watson with the heaviest possible charges, including attempted murder and aggravated mayhem, both of which carry terms of life in prison. At trial, even videotape evidence couldn't prove the attackers had a specific intent to do harm -- the very thing jurors were required to decide before finding the defendants guilty on the most serious points. "From day one, we thought the prosecution would never be able to prove ((that))," said Edi Faal, the defense attorney for Williams.

Prosecutors thought they could prove intent simply by pointing to the ^ attackers' actions. "When you take a brick and hurl it at point-blank range as hard as you can into a helpless man's head, what other logical conclusion is there other than that you are trying to kill him or at least disfigure him?" asked Deputy District Attorney Lawrence Morrison. But the defense was able to convince jurors that the beatings arose from the wild circumstances of a riot and were not premeditated acts.

DON'T UNDERCHARGE. Despite the long indictment they brought against the defendants, who were also accused in connection with attacks on seven other people at the intersection that day, prosecutors failed to hit Williams with one crucial count: assaulting Denny with a deadly weapon. While conviction would not require proof of intent, the charge still carries jail time of up to four years in California. That could have been added to any other sentence the defendants received.

Through some adroit lawyering, Faal turned that mistake to a decisive advantage. Ordinarily, juries that fail to find a defendant guilty on a serious charge have the option of convicting on a lesser one not specified in the original indictment. At the conclusion of trial testimony, Faal took a crucial gamble. Exercising a right of defense, he moved successfully to have Judge John Ouderkirk instruct jurors that if they failed to convict Williams of premeditated attempted murder, they could not consider a lesser charge. That left jurors no choice between attempted murder and acquittal on that most serious count.

IN THE COURTROOM, DEFENDANTS BECOME REAL. To bolster his effort to prove that Denny's attackers acted with no specific intent to kill or maim, Faal sought constantly, and with some success, to humanize them. At one point, in a step that actually supported a prosecution contention that Williams had a rose tattoo that was visible on the videotape, Faal sent his client to the jury box so that jurors could not only see the young man's arm but also touch it.

On another occasion, when the prosecution attempted to identify Williams as the figure in a videotaped scene, Faal countered that the man in the tape, who had a gap between his front teeth, could not be his client. To underscore his point, he asked Williams to go before the jury and smile. When the defendant stood before them exposing a mouthful of gapless teeth, the jury had one of its rare moments of laughter. Faal considered it a turning point "when we were able to inject some levity into the proceedings and get the jurors to start laughing with us."

AND VIDEOTAPES BECOME UNREAL. Faal at first tried to prove that Williams was not the man seen attacking Denny on the tape. To counter his argument, prosecutors Morrison and Janet Moore had to replay the video for the jury over and over again, thus dulling one of the state's sharpest tools. Jurors were ultimately convinced that Watson was the man who could be seen putting his foot on Denny's neck and that Williams was the one who hit Denny with a brick, then performed a demonic high step for the helicopter news cameras. As it appears to have done in the first Rodney King trial, repeated viewing of the brutal videotape may have anesthetized the jury, so that it counted for less in their final judgment.

JURORS ARE ONLY HUMAN. This was the question that had Los Angeles in an uproar. In a community exhausted by 2 1/2 years of strife since Rodney King's arrest, jurors reached their conclusions under the influence of a number of forces inside and outside the courtroom. Were they scared? Were they moved by a desire to bring events to a close by meting out a punishment for Denny's attackers comparable to the one for King's? A day after the trial ended, one juror denied that anxiety about the potential aftermath of their decision influenced the verdict. "We weren't thinking, 'We'll have this verdict so another riot won't break out.' That wasn't on our mind," said a female juror, who appeared in silhouette on a Los Angeles news program with her voice altered electronically. "If a riot occurred, it would occur." But a day before the final verdicts, the jury forewoman told Judge Ouderkirk that "one juror has expressed fear for herself and her family."

The actions of police and prosecutors helped weight the trial with symbolism. The uncommon spectacle of Williams being arrested at home, in front of TV cameras, by no less a figure than then police chief Daryl Gates, strengthened the case of those who said the accused were being made scapegoats for the entire riot. When Williams and Watson, along with co-defendants Antoine Miller and Gary Williams, were booked on high bail -- $580,000 for Williams alone -- it added power to that argument. For the jury, signals from outside the court may have been too much, compelling them to aim for an outcome in the Denny trial roughly equivalent to that obtained in the Rodney King case. When the scales of justice were weighing the evidence, they may also have been balancing two videotapes.

With reporting by Sylvester Monroe/Los Angeles