The Jury Was Never Meant to Be Rational : Bias: In America, which witness you believe has a lot to do with what walk of life you come from.

As Los Angeles smolders in the wake of the acquittal of the officers who beat Rodney King, people everywhere are astonished, asking, how could the King jurors have acquitted the police officers?

The answer, in part, is that the jury is not an entirely rational fact-finding institution, and was never meant to be. Judges are perfectly capable of hearing evidence and deciding guilt or innocence. Historically, juries were conceived as a check on judges who were perceived to be so close to the authorities that ordinary folks would be treated unfairly in the courtroom. The independence of juries is so valued that they are allowed to nullify the evidence and fail to convict, when it is perfectly clear, as in the King trial, that the defendants are guilty.

The problem is that those who sit on juries are supposed to be representative of the community where the crime occurred. But tragically, when venue is shifted, that does not necessarily happen.

The verdict showed us how divided we are as a nation. America is, culturally speaking, two countries. One is urban,cosmopolitan and multicultural. It suffers disproportionately from crime, poverty and homelessness. The other is suburban, relatively prosperous, and most important, unicultural. Like Simi Valley, and the King trial jury, it is predominantly white and middle-class.

If one observes residents of the second America, one notices a distinct likeness between their appearance and those of the Los Angeles cops who were on trial in the Ventura County town. So the defendants charged with assaulting King committed their crimes in the first America, but they were tried in the second. Had they been tried in Los Angeles or San Francisco, Chicago or New York or Houston, they would not have been acquitted.

In the first America, even among a public earlier nurtured on “Dragnet,” or later on its raunchier and more realistic successors, like “Hill Street Blues,” viewers had not come to expect anything like the beating of Rodney King. Shocked by what they saw, many asked themselves: Is this what cops are really like? Like police corruption, with which it has much in common, police brutality in the first America shakes the confidence of the public in the police.

Let me illustrate this with a true story. A friend was called to serve on a New York City jury. Eight jurors were black or Latino, four were white. The defendant was a young African-American accused of a mugging. He had assaulted a woman and had run away with her pocketbook. A white police officer witnessed the assault, chased down and subdued the offender and testified in court. There was one other witness, an older women, who also saw the mugging and recited her testimony with a Chinese accent.

The police officer was a straightforward and articulate witness and his testimony could not be shaken by the able defense attorney. By contrast, the Chinese woman stammered out what she had to say. The defense attorney asked her if she was excited when she witnessed the event. She answered affirmatively.

The day before, the jurors had seen on television news the videotaped beating of Rodney King. They suspected that the cops who administered the beating would lie about it. Some of the jurors had disbelieved cops before. Nothing they had seen on the videotaped beating generated much confidence in the validity of police testimony, whether in Manhattan or Los Angeles. Consequently, they did not believe the New York cop.

Most of these jurors of the first America, however, credited the woman’s testimony despite her acknowledgement that she had been hysterical, and voted to convict the mugger. Had the woman not seen the mugging, and had she not corroborated the policeman’s testimony, the mugger would have walked out of the courtroom, free to find other victims.

It’s not that jurors in the first America are less susceptible to bias than those in the second--it’s just that they nullify different kinds of evidence. They tend not to believe cops.

In the second America, viewers have other biases, racial biases. They saw Rodney King and they thought he got what he deserved. So they did not perceive police brutality in the videotaped beating. Overzealousness, perhaps, but not brutality. When some of the officers testified that King, who suffered multiple injuries and bone fractures after repeated blows, displayed “superhuman strength” and resisted arrest when he first got out of the car, the jurors doubtless believed the officers, even though four were assaulting King and 15 were watching.

Sgt. Stacey Koon testified that King had not responded to a torrential number of blows, leading Koon to fear that he would have to shoot or choke King. Koon explained that King was “buffed out,” that is, muscular and black, a sure sign that King was an ex-con. Koon decided to go with the option of serious injury and severe pain. This was when he instructed his officers to do and, Koon told the jury, they did exactly as they were told and exactly as they had been trained.

The jury believed him despite testimony to the contrary by an LAPD captain that the officers violated their training. The jury understood that the defendants were cops, not criminals, and that Rodney King, an ex-con, was a criminal. They voted accordingly.

Should we eliminate the institution of the jury? That’s not the answer. But we need to be sure that when a crime occurs in the first America, jurors are representive of that venue, not the second.