A Slap for a Broken Head

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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."