Limited Access p.

By: M.L. Stein

News organizations upset with limited courtroom media seating,
sealing of juror questionnaires at Los Angeles beating trial sp.

A FEDERAL JUDGE in the new trial of four Los Angeles policemen charged in the beating of black motorist Rodney King has tightly limited media coverage of the major event.
The day before jury selection was scheduled to begin, U.S. District Judge John Davies refused to allow press and public access to a 55-page jurors' questionnaire to be filled out by 355 persons on the panel. He ruled they would be sealed forever.
Attorneys for the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Daily News and Capital Cities-ABC had argued that the importance of the trial to the community calls for openness in all aspects of jury selection.
But the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied a petition by the Times to rescind Davies' order, with one concession. The higher court said the completed questionnaires may be released after the trial at Davies' discretion if the jurors are deemed to be safe from "unreasonable invasion of privacy, risk of intimidation, duress and harassment."
This was small comfort to Times attorney Rex S. Heinke and the other media lawyers.
"By that time it won't make any difference as far as we are concerned," Heinke said.
Davies also ruled that only a three-person press pool ? to be chosen by lot each day ? would be allowed in the Los Angeles courtroom for verbal questioning of the prospective jurors.
Previously, the judge denied a request for a television feed from the courtroom to a nearby pressroom, although an audio feed will be permitted. The federal courts forbid televised coverage of trials.
Because of the courtroom's limited seating capacity for the media, the lack of closed-circuit television is especially galling to the nearly 100 reporters assigned to the trial, several from overseas.
Judge Davies said his ruling on the questionnaires was based on the jurors' fear for their safety, although the jury will be sequestered so tightly that the only visitors they can receive are family members, and then only in public areas.
At their hotel, deputy marshals will clip all newspaper stories involving the trial and will stand next to television sets and radios to flick off any program mentioning the King case.
"We don't want this case tried by 12 people who secretly or openly fear for their safety in the future," he stated.
The four defendants in the civil rights trial, Sgt. Stacy Koon and Officers Laurence Powell, Theodore Briseno and Timothy Wind, were acquitted of the beating charges in state court last year, setting off a riot of such magnitude that the city is still shaken by it.
Their trial in the semirural community of Simi Valley in Ventura County by a nearly all-white jury led to some threats against the jurors. There is fear among many Angelenos that, if the defendants are found not guilty in this trial, another riot will erupt.
When one defense lawyer asked for a delay in the trial until "passions cool" in the city, Judge Davies speculated that the dread of more violence in the event of acquittal may be unfounded.
"I have an intuitive feeling of optimism," he said.
However, both the Los Angeles Police Department and the National Guard have engaged in readiness training in the event of another outbreak.
AP special correspondent Linda Deutsch, a veteran court reporter who covered the Simi Valley trial, called Davies' decision on the questionnaires "horrible."
She said the press has not asked for the jurors' names, only for questionnaire responses.
"Now we will never know why people were taken off the jury," she told E&P. "We will have no profile of the jurors at all."
Davies will allow reporters to see only blank questionnaires, in contrast with the Superior Court judge in Simi Valley, who permitted access to the filled-out forms if the media made their own copies from the master copy.
The press crush for chairs in the 80-seat courtroom left William T. Licatovich, an administrator for the U.S. Marshals Service, a bit stunned.
Licatovich, who was sent from Washington, D.C., to process press seating, said he had never experienced anything like it in his previous liaison work with the media.
At first, he allocated only 32 seats for reporters, but later increased it to 47 as the media clamor rose. Even so, some major news organizations, including the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Newsweek, the Washington Post, Time and the Orange County Register, will have to share a seat on alternate days.
Among those given full-time seats were AP, Reuters, Copley News Service, City News Service, CBS, NBC, UPI, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, five sketch artists, and American Lawyer magazine.
The latter selection irked Wall Street Journal reporter Amy Stevens, who remarked, "I can't believe a lawyers' magazine takes precedence over us, USA Today and Time."
Observed Licatovich, "I know I didn't please everyone, but I had to make decisions, and there are only so many seats."