BY JOHN STUDER
DES MOINES, Iowa - On October 2, a jury in Los Angeles
decided unanimously to reject the word of lying, racist
cops and voted to acquit O.J. Simpson on charges of
murder. Simpson's trial lasted a full year, during which
his legal team - reportedly paid over $5 million - was
able to show that the state's star witness, Los Angeles
cop Mark Fuhrman, was a racist and a liar.
In 1988, union and political activist Mark Curtis was found guilty in Des Moines, Iowa, on charges of rape and burglary. The central witness against Curtis was Joseph Gonzalez, a local cop who claimed he caught Curtis with his pants down. Curtis has explained since the beginning that he was standing on a porch of a house when Gonzalez arrived. The cop dragged him into the house and forcibly pulled his pants down so others could see, claiming he had caught a "rape suspect" red-handed.
Gonzalez's charge was repeated in the local newspaper the next morning and innumerable times since by supporters of the cops and prosecutors who put Curtis behind bars.
As recently as last month, Barbara Binnie, vice chairperson of the Iowa Board of Parole, trying to justify the fact that Curtis is still in jail more than seven and a half years after his frame-up began, told the press, "I keep pointing to the fact that he was caught with his pants down."
At his September 1988 trial, Curtis's attorneys attempted to introduce evidence that Gonzalez had engaged in brutality in a previous case and lied to cover it up. Judge Harry Perkins refused to let the jury hear these facts. He refused a defense motion to review the rest of Gonzalez's file to see if there were other instances of brutal, racist, or lying behavior in them.
Simpson was acquitted while Curtis was convicted and imprisoned. Fuhrman and the Los Angeles police department have been rightly branded as racists and liars. In contrast, Des Moines cop Gonzalez was able to keep his record secret and to suppress the fact that he had been suspended for lying and brutality.
One important reason for the difference in the two trials is that Simpson was a star sports figure with million-dollar advertising and TV contracts, while Mark Curtis was a packinghouse worker and a socialist. Curtis was framed for speaking out in defense of 17 of his co- workers from Mexico and El Salvador who worked at the Monfort meatpacking company. The 17 had been seized in an immigration raid at the plant and threatened with deportation and prison.
Fuhrman testified that he had not used the word "nigger" in over 10 years. Simpson's lawyers found lengthy interview tapes in which Fuhrman used the word, and other slurs against Blacks and other working people, dozens of times. The cop also bragged on the tapes about beating up numerous working-class people.
Under the pressure of this revelation, Judge Ito allowed Fuhrman to be recalled to the stand outside the presence of the jury. Simpson's attorneys asked him directly whether he had tampered with any of the evidence in the case. Fuhrman took the Fifth Amendment, claiming that if he answered he might incriminate himself.
Before Curtis's trial in 1988, his lawyers and supporters combed local newspaper records looking for public reports about Gonzalez. The court had denied them access to his police record. Furthermore, police "use of force" and internal affairs records in Des Moines are not considered public documents. The Des Moines cops label these files as "produced in anticipation of litigation," and therefore privileged and secret.
Des Moines cop's record
Curtis's supporters found a 1978 article in the Des
Moines Register reporting on how one instance of brutality
and lying by Gonzalez became public.
A political furor was unleashed when the Des Moines City Council was asked to shell out $851 to pay a damage settlement to a young worker who had been beaten and subjected to false arrest by Gonzalez and another cop.
A letter was read to the council from the city attorney's office explaining that Gonzalez provoked his suspect into a fight in the city jail and injured his head.
Council members demanded an explanation from then Chief of Police Wendell Nichols.
Gonzalez "was suspended from the police force for four days for using unnecessary force and 10 days for `lying' about details of the incident," the Register quoted Nichols. "I also put Gonzalez on probation for one year," Nichols added, "and if he screws up one more time, I'll fire him. I told him that."
Nichols said that instead of reporting what had happened, Gonzalez and the other cop "covered their tracks."
In Curtis's trial, the jury was denied the right to hear that Gonzalez had been suspended for brutality and lying. The judge ruled that this fact - as well as others that might be in Gonzalez's secret file - was not "relevant." The jury didn't need to know that he had lied before to make a judgment whether he was lying now.
This wasn't the only instance of cop brutality, racism, and lying kept from Curtis's jury. The judge ruled that they should know nothing of the fact that after Curtis's arrest, he was taken to the city jail and brutally beaten. As they beat Curtis, smashing his cheekbone, officers called Curtis a "Mexican lover, just like you love those coloreds."
The central question in Curtis's trial was whether the cops had demonstrated prejudice against him, but the judge refused to let the jury hear about the beating. At one point, the prosecuting attorney asked Curtis pointedly why he had not returned to work after his arrest and the judge refused to allow him to answer that he had taken a leave in order to recover from the savagery of the police beating.
Curtis later brought a civil rights lawsuit against the cops who beat him and won. In 1992, Federal Judge Charles Wolle ordered the cops and the city of Des Moines to pay $64,000 in damages and legal fees to Curtis.
When the tapes exposing Fuhrman were played in the Los Angeles courtroom, head Des Moines cop William Moulder told the Des Moines Register that he had not received reports of Des Moines cops using racist language in the 10 years he had been chief.
Moulder was having a bad memory lapse. Over the last ten years there has been ample proof of racist, brutal behavior by Des Moines cops.
Des Moines police officer Deborah Lynch filed a lawsuit against racist and sexist abuse from fellow officers in 1984 and 1985.
In the course of the Lynch trial, it was revealed that Des Moines police officers had donned Ku Klux Klan robes to terrorize a Black police officer. Testimony in the case, quoted in the Register, showed that another Black officer was kept out of a social because the cop holding the party said "he would not let a nigger in his house."
At the conclusion of the trial, Judge Michael Streit ruled that the police department and the city were fully liable for "ignorant," "disgusting," "intensely degrading," "crude," and "reprehensible, harassing conduct" against Lynch.
The Des Moines cops' response was to condemn the judge's ruling. In January 1989, Moulder released to the press a copy of a letter he had sent to one of the cops found to have harassed Lynch. "You will not be subject to any criticism or sanction," the police chief wrote. "I believe I am in a better position to make that judgment than the judge was."
In December 1991, Des Moines cops brutally beat Larry Milton, a Black worker. They called him a "nigger" and smashed his head with an extra-large police-issue flashlight. It took 22 surgical staples to close the wounds on his head.
This beating, which came shortly after the Los Angeles cop beating of Rodney King, caused an outcry in Des Moines. Thousands rallied against the cop violence, calling for the arrest and prosecution of the cops responsible.
Moulder's police department refused to act. Instead they prosecuted Milton. It was in the context of these mobilizations that Mark Curtis won his civil suit against the cops who beat him.
Milton also brought a civil suit against the cops. Milton won a ruling that the cops had violated his rights in brutalizing him. However, in a cynical decision making a mockery of the value of the life of a working person, Milton and his attorneys were only awarded $1 in damages.
Fuhrman is not an exception
Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and other workers are
subjected to racist comments and taunts from the cops on
the streets of Des Moines every day, just as they are in
every other city in this country. Today in Iowa's prisons,
one-quarter of the inmate population is Black, though
Blacks comprise less than 2 percent of the state's
population.
Police Chief Moulder and the Des Moines cops know these facts as well as we do. But they attempt to cover them up, hoping to minimize the impact of revelations of police racism, violence and frame-ups from Philadelphia to New Orleans, Los Angeles to Des Moines.
Des Moines police spokesperson Sgt. Judy Bradshaw put her finger on the problem. "Three months ago, if a defense lawyer in Iowa suggested evidence was planted by a police officer, people would have found it to be a ridiculous suggestion," she asserted. "Now, who knows what they might think?"
Mark Fuhrman is not only a Los Angeles phenomenon. Nor is he a freak, one bad apple out of a generally good bunch. He is what cops are like.
The one big difference between O.J. Simpson's trial and that of hundreds of thousands of workers who go to court every year is that because of Simpson's high-priced legal team and the widespread distrust of the Los Angeles police department, Simpson was able to get the kind of trial only money can buy in capitalist society. This stands in stark contrast to what working people face when they find themselves in court. In Mark Curtis's case, cop Gonzalez's past brutality and lying were not deemed "relevant."
Curtis's fight for justice is a contribution to exposing police departments for what they are: racist, anti-working class terror machines.