Officer Penalized in Brutality Case : Courts: Ethnically mixed jury awards $18,500 in wrongful arrest and kicking of black man.

“They have to obey the law too,” David Yager said after the Superior Court jury on which he sat decided Friday that a Los Angeles police officer should pay an African-American man $18,500 in punitive damages for kicking him.

The panel determined Thursday that Donald Boyd was wrongly arrested and kicked by Officer Johnny Garcia, and it awarded Boyd $170,000 in compensatory damages from the city of Los Angeles. The case is believed to be the first involving an LAPD officer decided after the not guilty verdicts in the Rodney G. King beating trial.

Deputy City Atty. Mary Cooper, who defended the city and Garcia, said she found the jury awards after the five-day trial “outrageous. I believe it’s impossible for a police officer or the city of Los Angeles to get a fair trial based on the sequence of events that have occurred.”

Boyd, 31, a Los Angeles County probation officer, sued the city and Garcia over an August, 1987, incident. Garcia and another officer arrested Boyd without explaining why, and they ordered him to kneel on the ground with his hands behind his head, according to testimony in the case. Then Garcia kicked him, the jury found. Boyd was not charged with a crime.

Yager, 34, a maintenance man, was one of eight African-Americans on the panel, which deliberated a little more than two days. Like other jurors interviewed, he said the King trial, which resulted in full acquittals for three of four white LAPD officers, did not affect his decision.

“Right is right and wrong is wrong,” said Yager, a Los Angeles resident.

“We just felt overall that no matter what color you are, no one should be treated like that,” said Jill Federman, 30, a market research analyst who lives in Venice. She was one of three Anglos on the jury, which also included one Latino.

Neither Boyd, whose wife just had a baby, nor Garcia, now a training officer, were in court Friday to hear the jury’s verdict on punitive damages, which are awarded against a defendant as a deterrent. Both had been present Thursday to hear the decision against the city for compensatory damages, which repay a victim for lost earnings, medical expenses, pain and suffering. Cooper could not say whether the city will appeal the decision.

At the time of the incident, Boyd and a friend were in a car on their way to play basketball. Boyd claimed that the arrest and kicking were racially motivated because he and his friend are black.

During the trial, the Newton Division officers claimed they stopped the car because it had a broken taillight, an expired registration and because Boyd’s passenger wore a red cap, a local gang color. Garcia claimed he kicked Boyd in self-defense when Boyd, who was unarmed, made a movement in his kneeling position.

Jury forewoman Hazel Wickliffe, a black retired teacher, said the deliberations were difficult and bogged down mostly on the amount of damages. “Many people could not relate to what pain and suffering was like,” said Sheila Browning, 30, a black flight attendant from Inglewood.

“If he had been Caucasian, would he have been stopped? Just because he (the friend) had a red hat on doesn’t justify being stopped,” Yager said. He had had a somewhat similar encounter with police, Yager added without going into detail.

“I think every black man in my age group has encountered some sort of situation like that,” he said. “That’s the way the system is set up. It’s up to the jury to try to change that.”

One Anglo juror who did not vote in favor of assessing any damages against Garcia said he did so because he felt the officer deserved mercy. Theodore Goss, 38, a letter carrier, said he thought the kick had been a “reflex action, but most of the jurors didn’t believe that.”

The jurors were aware that they were dealing with an issue that was “currently on everyone’s minds,” Goss said. “I thought: ‘Here I am right on the cutting edge of what’s happening.”

Although the jurors never discussed the King beating trial among themselves, Goss said he thought about its effect during deliberations. “I know it didn’t affect me, but I wondered, was it affecting them?”

The jurors also knew their panel was more racially mixed than the Simi Valley panel of 10 Anglos, one Latina and one Asian-American. But Yager noted: “You had whites who voted for him (Boyd) and blacks that didn’t.” In civil cases, only nine jurors need to agree on a verdict.

“We all felt the impact of what had happened,” Federman said, referring to the riots. “We were open to being fair. We listened to the facts. We made our decision on the facts.”