BART shooting draws Rodney King case parallels

(01-14) 17:47 PST OAKLAND -- To an outraged public that watched an amateur video of the scene, it looked like an open-and-shut case of police brutality. But after lawyers for four white Los Angeles police officers dissected the video footage and told jurors to put themselves in the shoes of officers under stress, a jury delivered not-guilty verdicts in the 1991 beating of black motorist Rodney King. After six days of riots and 54 deaths, federal prosecutors filed civil rights charges and won convictions against two of the officers. The King case becomes a cautionary tale for prosecutors now that Alameda County District Attorney Tom Orloff has filed murder charges against Johannes Mehserle, 27, the former BART police officer who fatally shot an unarmed and prostrate Oscar Grant at the Fruitvale Station in Oakland early New Year's Day. As in the King case, the defendant is white, the victim black. Once again, onlookers' videos appear to show a criminal assault, this time fatal. Two local elected officials, Oakland City Councilwoman Desley Brooks and County Supervisor Keith Carson, have referred publicly to the shooting as an execution. The president of the NAACP in California, Alice Huffman, said Mehserle could have been motivated by racial prejudice. As in King's case, in which the first trial was held in suburban Ventura County, intense media coverage and public anger might persuade a judge to transfer the Mehserle case to another county. And, as in King's case, the guilt of the officer, if he goes to trial, will be determined not by what he did but by a jury's assessment of why he did it. That won't necessarily show up on a video, said a lawyer for one of the officers in the King case. 'Both useful and deceptive'"Videotapes can be both useful and deceptive," said Harland Braun, whose client, Theodore Briseno, was acquitted at both trials. SOURCE OF THIS POST