VAN NUYS — Prosecutors and defense attorneys Monday painted starkly contrasting pictures of what happened last year when violence broke out at a protest against ex-klansman David Duke's appearance at a Cal State Northridge debate on affirmative action.
Prosecutors contend that a group of student radicals from the Bay Area traveled to the protest intending to incite other students into fighting with police to gain publicity for the movement opposing Proposition 209. The measure later passed, eliminating state affirmative action measures.
Defense lawyers alleged that police overreacted and then tried to cover up an assault on protesting students by falsifying police reports and overstating the threat by the crowd.
Both sides presented closing arguments in the case against Sergio Gutierrez, 23, and Edward Vasquez, 21, which is expected to go to the jury today. They face up to a year in jail if convicted of the misdemeanor charges.
Prosecutors in the two-month-long trial allege the two men were instigators of violence during a raucous and much publicized debate on Sept. 25, 1996, between Duke--a former Ku Klux Klan leader who was a candidate for the U.S. Senate in Louisiana--and civil rights leader Joe Hicks.
Police in riot gear were called in to quell the protest. Four other students were also arrested and received probation after pleading guilty to lesser charges.
Vasquez, a junior at UC Berkeley, is accused of throwing 2-pound rocks at police officers who held back the noisy crowd. Gutierrez is charged with grabbing the reins of a mounted police officer's horse.
The officer said he clubbed Gutierrez in the head because the student refused to move. Gutierrez received 17 stitches and his bloodied face dominated newspaper and TV coverage in the protest's aftermath.
In his closing statement Monday, Deputy City Atty. Robert J. Fratianne said the two men, allied with a student group called the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action By Any Means Necessary, were "militants" who knew that their actions would provoke police retaliation.
"You can't just hurl a rock at someone and then say it's self-defense," Fratianne argued to the jurors.
Fratianne acknowledged that there had been some errors in the processing of evidence, such as the failure to introduce a helmet worn by an officer who was allegedly hit on the head with a rock. But he said none of the defense's arguments about the handling of evidence take away from the fact that rocks were thrown with the intent to harm the officers.
