Moral Uncertainty: Inside the Rodney King Juries

by Bob Almond, Dorothy Bailey, Kathleen Neumeyer

Overview

In 1991 the world recoiled from a shocking videotape showing white Los Angeles police officers brutally beating a black man caught speeding on the freeway.

A jury's failure to convict them of excessive use of force triggered the worst urban rioting in U.S. history. A year later, a federal jury looking at the same facts found two officers guilty of violating Rodney King's civil rights while exonerating two others.

Twenty-five years later, Moral Uncertainty tells the story for the first time of what went on inside both of those jury rooms.

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The first Rodney King trial nearly destroyed Los Angeles. The verdict was inexplicable to many. King was shocked with a Taser, kicked, clubbed and beaten by police officers whose actions were videotaped by a neighbor.

When the video was shown on TV, viewers were stunned. They were even more stunned when a jury in the suburb of Simi Valley acquitted the policemen of most charges. As the news spread, rioting broke out, fires were set and Los Angeles was on the verge of anarchy.

A year later, a second jury hearing federal charges convicted two of the officers, who went to prison.
As a special correspondent for The Associated Press, I became familiar with all of the facts except one. The question that lingered for me over the decades was how the two juries could have come to such different conclusions.

Now, twenty-five years after the case changed policing in the nation's second largest city and focused world attention on a toxic racial divide, jurors from the two cases reveal the secret deliberations that led them to their historic verdicts. This book contains surprising details of the personal interactions and legal interpretations that led to the devastating verdicts. -- Linda Deutsch, Associated Press

Product Details

BN ID:	2940157306786
Publisher:	Andalou Books
Publication date:	04/09/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	360
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

BOB ALMOND, a professional engineer for the Port of Los Angeles, was forty-nine when this book was written. He recounted his memories verbally, relying on his courtroom notes, to veteran journalist Kathleen Neumeyer in the weeks immediately after the trial. Born in Glendale, California, Bob Almond lived in the Los Angeles area until 2006 when he moved to Bellingham, Washington. He studied engineering at California State University, Los Angeles, where he met his wife, Clairene, a retired Los Angeles County librarian.

DOROTHY BAILEY was sixty-seven years old when she wrote her account of her experience as foreman of the first Rodney King trial, using the comprehensive shorthand notes she had taken during the testimony. She and her husband of twenty-eight years had eight children between them, twenty-seven grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. Before her retirement two weeks after the verdict in the Rodney King trial, she had held the position of Program Manager for a small, black-owned business engaged primarily in government contracts to supply newly constructed U.S. Navy and foreign military ships with technical manuals for each piece of equipment aboard. After the trial, she and her husband sold their house, which was in a small town near Simi Valley, and returned to their home state of Utah. She never lived in Simi Valley. Dorothy Bailey died in 2012.

KATHLEEN NEUMEYER, as a trial reporter for United Press International, covered the murder trials of Sirhan B. Sirhan for the assassination of United States Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and of Charles Manson and the Manson Family, as well as the Daniel Ellsberg Pentagon Papers trial. Later she covered the federal drug trial of John DeLorean for The Times of London; and the murder trial of Elisabeth Broderick, a San Diego woman who killed her ex-husband and his new bride, for Ladies Home Journal. She has written extensively about the law for California Lawyer, Lawyers Weekly of Canada, the Massachusetts Law Quarterly, Los Angeles Lawyer and the Western Law Quarterly. She was a contributing editor of Los Angeles Magazine for twenty years and taught journalism for forty-two years.