On the 20th anniversary of the L.A. riots, Ice Cube remembers where he was when the uprising broke, and how hip hop fueled the insurgence

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Twenty years ago, when the L.A. riots were ignited on April 29, 1992, a single man’s life became catalyst for a rap revolution led by Ice Cube and a handful of other hip-hop icons. By the time of Rodney King’s beating, rap had already put its stakes firmly into the American musical underpinning, giving birth to both intellectual discourse on race relations and social injustice, as well as unabashed verbal rebuke in the form of gangsta rap. Loud, observant, and demanding attention, gangsta rap, in particular, became soundtrack to this era of racial instability, believed by many to not only have led the nation in cultural exploration, but to have actually prophesized the insurrection.

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A prominent voice in the movement, Cube became a rapper and actor who pioneered this subgenre of west coast hip-hop with his anti-authoritative gang of poetic nihilists, N.W.A.. At the time of the riots, he was onto his own initiative, releasing solo records and focusing on a burgeoning career in the movie business.

Listen To Ice Cube’s “We Had To Tear This MotherF**ka Up“

“I was actually in a movie meeting when the fight broke out,” Cube told theGrio, backstage at K-Day’s annual Krush Groove concert in Hollywood, on the eve of the riots’ 20th anniversary. “When I heard the verdict, I really wanted to end the meeting, you know? I really wasn’t into it after that. And I was on my way home, and you know, I could hear things going down…on Florence and Normandie…. I was like basically, ‘What did they expect to happen?’ It was like a big slap in the face.”

Go to theGrio for the rest of the story!

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Yet she was its youngest victim when her mother, Elvira Evers, (pictured left) was shot in the stomach on April 30, 1992, the second day of the riots, the Daily Mail reports.

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Ms. Evers told a local TV station that she noticed cars full of looted items in her Compton neighborhood, prompting her to seek safety.

Watch Jessica and her mother, Elvira, talk about the L.A. Riots below

The Daily Mail has more:

Fearful, she ushered her children home. ‘I started getting nervous,’ she recounted.

But as she went inside, she felt her body was on fire. She did not notice she had been shot in the stomach until a neighbor pointed out the blood oozing onto her white dress.

‘I didn’t know I’d been hit,’ Evers said after the incident. ‘I just felt a little tingling.’

Knowing that an ambulance would take too long to arrive in the midst of the violence, a friend drove her to St. Francis Medical Center, where an emergency caesarian section saved her baby.

Elvira had been asleep for a week when she awoke and immediately began to cry. ‘I was just like, oh my God, my baby,’ she said, certain her daughter had not survived.

But baby Jessica, now 19, did in fact, survive. Read the rest of the Daily Mail article to learn how Jessica is doing now.

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It was a day that marked the beginning of one of the deadliest, most destructive race riots in the nation’s history, and one in which Watson’s spur-of-the-moment decision to take part made him one of the enduring faces of the violence.

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He was at home that day like thousands of others when he heard the news that was racing across Los Angeles: A jury with no Black members had acquitted four police officers in the videotaped beating (pictured) of Rodney King, a Black man stopped for speeding nearly 14 months before.

“I got caught up in the emotions like everyone else,” Watson says 20 years after a riot that would leave 55 people dead, more than 2,300 injured and himself forever recognized as one of the attackers of White truck driver Reginald Denny, who himself became the enduring image of the innocents victimized during the chaos.

Watch King and the L.A. Race Riots here:

South Los Angeles, where the riot began, has changed considerably two decades later, as has Watson. But many things remain the same.

While racial tensions fanned by the verdict and the general feeling of disenfranchisement and distrust of police among LA’s black population have moderated, residents of the city’s largely Black and Hispanic South Side complain that the area still is plagued by too few jobs, too few grocery stores and a lack of redevelopment that would bring more life to the area.

One place in particular that time seemingly forgot is the intersection of Florence and Normandie, where Denny was attacked on that dark day the riot began. It remains a gritty corner that’s home to gas stations where men rush up to incoming cars and pump fuel for spare change, as well as a liquor store with more foot traffic than any other business in sight.

“Have things changed? Not really. People are just more mellow these days,” Frank Owens says with a smile. The unemployed landscaper sat on a bus stop bench near the intersection recently, visiting with friends before going across the street to buy lottery tickets at the liquor store and joke with its owner, James Oh.

Much like Los Angeles as a whole, the neighborhood’s Latino population has grown while the black population has declined.

In this part of town, high school dropout rates are higher than for the city as a whole, and only 8 percent of the area’s residents have college degrees, compared with 30 percent for all residents of Los Angeles, according to American Community Survey estimates from 2006 to 2010.

More than three times as many households in the area reported yearly incomes of less than $20,000 during the same period than homes with yearly incomes of more than $100,000. That’s in stark contrast to the city as a whole, where there were more households with incomes above $100,000 than those with incomes of less than $20,000.

The economic disparity, coupled with racial animosity and distrust of the police created the powder keg that was the neighborhood on April 29, 1992, Watson says. Then word of the King verdict set it off.

“The riots were the last spark,” said Connie Rice, a director of the civil rights group Advancement Project and an attorney who has brought numerous civil rights lawsuits against the Los Angeles Police Department. “People had had enough.”

As the liquor store at the intersection of Florence and Normandie was being looted and white passersby were fleeing a barrage of rocks and bottles, Denny stopped his big rig to avoid running over someone.

He was quickly dragged from the cab and nearly beaten to death by Watson and a handful of others. As the attack unfolded on live TV, Watson stepped on Denny’s head after Damian Williams smashed the trucker’s skull in with a brick.

Rioting spread across the city and into neighboring suburbs. Cars were demolished and homes and businesses were burned. Before order was restored, more than 1,500 buildings were damaged or destroyed. Almost a quarter century had passed since the tumultuous urban riots of 1968, and even longer since LA’s Watts rioting in 1965. The magnitude of this new racial paroxysm shocked a nation that thought it had moved on.

Today, Watson still struggles to explain why he took part in the destruction. Known as Keith to his family and “KeeKee” to friends, he was a 27-year-old ex-Marine with a wife and a job who came from a good family. His father had been his neighborhood’s block captain, no less, and he acknowledges his family didn’t raise him to be a troublemaker.

“I guess you could say, you know, looking at my background and whatever, how could I have gotten caught up in it?” he mused on a recent sun-splashed morning as he sat on the front porch of the home he grew up in, located just a few blocks from the intersection.

After a long pause and a sigh, he continues: “You know, honestly, it was something that just happened, man. I never even knew Reginald Denny. Just the anger and the rage just took hold to where I nor anyone who was out there that day was in their right frame of mind.”

Watson was convicted of misdemeanor assault and sentenced to time served for the 17 months he spent in jail before his case was resolved.

But that day was a rage, he and others in the community say, fueled by years of high unemployment, abuse and neglect by police, and rising tension with recently arrived Korean store owners.

“We wanted jobs around here, we wanted respect and we didn’t get none of that. And then the police just harassed us all the time,” says Sharon McSwain, who for 22 of her 45 years has lived within walking distance of the intersection where Denny was attacked. He was saved by a black truck driver who rushed out to help after seeing the brutal beating on television.

Tensions in the community had been running high before the riot, fueled in part by the case of a Korean grocer who shot to death a black teenager she had accused of trying to steal a bottle of orange juice. The grocer, Soon Ja Du, was convicted of manslaughter for killing 15-year-old Latasha Harlins, but received a sentence of only probation and community service.

Like King’s beating, the shooting had been captured on videotape, by Du’s store surveillance camera. The images stoked the anger.

The store shooting occurred just two weeks after George Holliday stood on the terrace outside his San Fernando Valley home and videotaped four LAPD officers kicking King, using stun guns on him and delivering more than 50 blows from their police batons.

On April 29, 1992, it seemed Holliday’s videotape would be the key evidence leading to a guilty verdict against the officers. When they were instead acquitted, violence erupted immediately.

Police, seemingly caught off-guard, were quickly outnumbered by rioters and retreated. As the uprising spread to the city’s Koreatown area, shop owners armed themselves and engaged in running gun battles with looters.

“I think we did the right thing,” says attorney David Kim, who had gone on Korean-language radio to encourage people to take up arms because the police weren’t protecting them.

Not that violence had been totally unexpected.

In the weeks before the verdict, nearly a dozen black community leaders had been meeting regularly with then-Mayor Tom Bradley, discussing what to do if there was an acquittal, the Rev. Cecil “Chip” Murray recounts.

When the verdict was announced, some 150 volunteers fanned out across the city, urging calm, says Murray, retired pastor of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church and now a religious studies professor at the University of Southern California. They were successful in some instances and likely would have been more so if police had backed them up, he says.

King himself, in his recently published memoir, “The Riot Within: My Journey From Rebellion to Redemption,” says FBI agents warned him a riot was expected if the officers walked. They advised him to keep a low profile so as not to inflame passions.

He did until the third day, when he went on television and made an emotional plea for calm, famously asking, “Can we all get along?”

In the aftermath, much of the blame was placed on Police Chief Daryl Gates, who resigned under pressure soon after.

Before the uprising, Gates had been hailed in national police circles as an innovator, widely credited with helping pioneer both the modern police special weapons and tactics team and the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program that partners police with schools.

Until his death in 2010, he angrily defended his actions, accusing his officers of failing to carry out a plan he said was in place to stop any trouble. He was particularly critical of his command staff for leading the retreat.

“The captain, lieutenant, deputy chiefs, commanders – they all screwed up in my judgment,” Gates, who had been chief for 14 years, told The Associated Press in 2002.

Whoever was to blame, Gates remains a polarizing figure in LA’s black community, where words like Gestapo, Nazi and racist are routinely used to describe the way he ran the LAPD.

After the riot, a number of reforms were instituted, including limiting a police chief to a maximum of two five-year terms. Stricter guidelines in the way the LAPD investigates civilian complaints and disciplines its officers were also implemented after both federal officials and an independent review board concluded the department had for years been guilty of a pattern of civil rights abuses.

Anger toward the department as a whole is less intense now.

“Cops are still cops,” says Marqueece Harris-Dawson, president of the Community Coalition of South Los Angeles. “They do lots of things we don’t like but this idea you’re under threat of assassination or torture or beating, it’s just not as present anymore.”

“There is no figure on the scene in this region that has the vitriol, the racism and the open disregard for the citizens of this city that Darryl Gates had,” Harris-Dawson adds.

Violent crime fell citywide by 76 percent between 1992 and 2010, according to Los Angeles police statistics.

Meanwhile, tensions between the black and Korean communities have lessened over the years, according to both sides. Rioters targeted and caused $400 million worth of damage to Korean-American businesses, many of them liquor stores that residents said were blights on the community. Language barriers and cultural differences were also key.

Tom’s Liquor, on the corner of Florence and Normandie, was once notorious in the neighborhood for selling hardly anything but booze and for allowing drunks to congregate out front.

The Korean-born Oh, who took ownership three years ago, says he has gone out of his way to treat all his customers as special and to learn the names of his regulars.

“It’s just common sense to communicate with people, to understand each other, to know each other’s cultures,” Oh says.

Since taking charge, Oh says, he has asked the drinkers to leave, painted over the graffiti and expanded his inventory to include a selection of food, baby items and other goods he says people have told him they are hard-pressed to find in the neighborhood.

About a mile from Florence and Normandie things have gotten better. A popular strip mall has sprouted, developed by Magic Johnson and others. It boasts a Starbucks, a grocery store, several name-brand shops and a Jamba Juice where $4 fruit smoothies were selling fast on a recent day.

Many problems still persist in nearby neighborhoods, however.

Some businesses never returned after they were destroyed, including Maria Muniz’s father’s welding workshop. Unable to buy new equipment, he never reopened. Eventually her parents divorced and her mother took a job in a sweatshop.

“I don’t know what would have been of our lives if the riots hadn’t happened,” says Muniz, who now works for Community Coalition.

Watson, meanwhile, has gotten on with his life. He’s become a successful businessman, having “taken lemons and made lemonade,” he likes to say with a laugh.

He has two daughters in college and for years has operated his own limousine business. Following a drug possession bust a few years after the riot he has stayed out of trouble and now helps keep watch on his neighborhood, just as his late father once did. He has spent most of his life in the neighborhood, returning to the house he grew up in last year to care for his elderly mother.

His limo customers, he says, have included everyone from a Saudi Arabian princess he chauffeured last year to people from the neighborhood celebrating birthdays and weddings and, as more Hispanics have moved into the area, quinceaneras.

“You get a sense of pride and accomplishment when you can help a person’s evening or event and you see the smiles and the love and the joy on their faces,” says the burly Watson, breaking into a smile himself.

Asked if he feels badly about what he did to Denny, he says simply that what happened to the trucker that day was “unfortunate.”

“But I can’t take it back. There’s nothing I can do.”

Watson did apologize personally to Denny some years ago, the only one of his attackers to do so. Another time he offered to send a limo to pick him up and take him to Florence and Normandie, then somewhere afterward where the two could have a drink and talk.

He says Denny, who lives quietly in Arizona these days, declined. The trucker has shunned interviews for years, and repeated attempts to contact him by mail, phone and in person for this story were unsuccessful.

“He chooses to remain in private,” Watson said. “And we respect his privacy. So be it.”

He’s been a record company executive and a reality TV star among many other things.

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To millions of Americans, though, he will always be either a victim of one of the most horrific cases of police brutality ever videotaped or just a hooligan who didn’t stop when police attempted to pull him over.

He’s indisputably the black motorist whose beating on a darkened LA street led to one of the worst race riots in American history.

It’s been an up-and-down ride for King since he went on television at the height of those riots and pleaded in a quavering voice, “Can we all get along?”

He’s been arrested numerous times, mostly for alcohol-related crimes. In a recent interview with The Associated Press he said, “I still sip, I don’t get drunk.”

He has been to a number of rehab programs, he said, including the 2008 appearance on “Dr. Drew” Pinsky’s “Celebrity Rehab” program.

Still, he was arrested again just last year for driving under the influence.

It was his fear of being stopped for drunken driving on March 3, 1991, King said, that initially led him to try to evade police who attempted to pull him over for speeding.

After he did stop, four LA police officers hit him more than 50 times with their batons, kicked him and shot him with stun guns. A man who had quietly stepped outside his home to observe the commotion videotaped most of it and turned a copy over to a local TV station.

After a jury with no black members acquitted the officers on April 29, 1992, the city’s black community exploded in rage. Fifty-five people died, more than 2,000 were injured over three days.

King received a $3.8 million settlement from the city, but said he lost most it to bad investments, among them a hip-hop record label he founded that quickly went broke.

He makes money these days taking part in events like celebrity boxing matches. He’s also promoting his just-published memoir, “The Riot Within: My Journey From Rebellion to Redemption.”

A tall, physically imposing man who is disarmingly friendly, self-effacing and soft-spoken, King, 47, maintains he is happy.

“America’s been good to me after I paid the price and stayed alive through it all,” he says. “This part of my life is the easy part now.”

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King’s 1991 traffic arrest and beating by four Los Angeles police officers became national news, and subsequently shaped America’s conversation on police brutality.

He was booked into jail for investigation of DUI, and bail was set at $2,500.

Riverside County Sheriff’s spokeswoman Courtney Donowho said no arraignment date has been set.

Read more at the Huffington Post.

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With new technological advancements and the Internet, anyone with a cellphone now can lend a watchful eye on the police.

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Today, things are far different and the tape that so tainted the LAPD has a clear legacy in how officers think about their jobs. Police now work in a YouTube world in which cellphones double as cameras, news helicopters transmit close-up footage of unfolding police pursuits, and surveillance cameras capture arrests or shootings. Police officials are increasingly recording their officers. Compared to the cops who beat King, officers these days hit the streets with a new reality ingrained in their minds: Someone is always watching.

“Early on in their training, I always tell them, ‘I don’t care if you’re in a bathroom taking care of your personal business…. Whatever you do, assume it will be caught on video,’ ” said Sgt. Heather Fungaroli, who supervises recruits at the LAPD’s academy. “We tell them if they’re doing the right thing then they have no reason to worry.”

Read more at LAtimes.com

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The interview will air this Friday at 8 p.m. on CNN and will be live tweeted by both CNN and NewsOne.

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Radar Online is reporting that Rodney King, the victim of the infamous L.A.P.D. beatdown that lead to the L.A. riots, is engaged to one of the jurors who awarded him a $3.8 million dollar settlement.

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The Nation Remembers 17th Anniversary Of L.A. Riots

Jury deliberations are expected to begin this week in Los Angeles in the trial of former BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) police officer, Johannes Mehserle, who shot and killed 22 year-old Oscar Grant on New Year’s Day 2009 as the victim lay face down on a subway platform in Oakland.

As many of you know –or have seen the Youtube videos taken by camera phones of this brutal and unnecessary shooting– Grant was face down on the ground and in a totally compromised position when Mehserle clearly looks at his gun –not the bright yellow Taser he said he meant to employ—before unlatching the revolver and firing point blank into Grant’s back.

The now resigned officer, who is white and had previous complaints against him for aggression, doesn’t deny shooting the African American Grant but contends it was “an accident.”

This is yet another tragic example of the challenging relationship the African American community has with those sworn to uphold the law. For when it comes to our community, these two words –the law—have many different connotations attached to them and provoke a variety of emotions, both good and bad.

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On one side, the laws of our land have served to oppress us as a people, as was the case with slavery and Jim Crow.

On the other hand, however, the law has also been the tool of choice for providing a framework for ending our enslavement, stopping segregation, and securing our civil rights.

So it’s a pretty unique and mixed relationship… black folks and the law.

Click here to view photos:

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Unfortunately, the enforcement of the law has too often been less than equitable when it comes to our community. And there are a number of disturbing issues about the Grant case, even prior to the verdict. The case was moved from Oakland to Los Angeles allegedly because of “pretrial publicity” in the Bay Area, a move that pretty much ensured there would be no African Americans on the 12 member jury which, in fact, turned out to be the case.

And things could get ugly. The media is comparing this to the Rodney King beating because of the blatant aggression of the officer, the sizable protests around the court, and the looming potential for violence and disruption in the event of an unfavorable verdict. Oakland area businesses and authorities are preparing for the worst in case the verdict doesn’t go the way the community believes it should.

But what’s already ugly is that a young man, a son, and a father of a young child is dead, and is not coming back ever again.

As a lawyer, I certainly know that the law should ideally be about facts and evidence and not emotion; that defendants should be innocent until proven guilty; that the rule of law needs to be respected for the sake of order; and that, whatever the verdict, it should be accepted, or at least appealed through the legal process.

That said, I sure hope the law gets this one right.

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Because the rule of law commonly runs into trouble if it ceases to be a two-way street.

By all means, we –as a community– certainly need to respect the law.

But the law should respect us as well.

Stephanie Robinson is President and CEO of The Jamestown Project, a national think tank focused on democracy. She is an author, a Lecturer on Law at the Harvard Law School and former Chief Counsel to the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy. Stephanie reaches 8 to 10 million listeners each week as political commentator for the popular radio venue, The Tom Joyner Morning Show.  Visit her online at www.StephanieRobinsonSpeaks.com

In a most surprising and shocking new twist (not), Rodney King, the victim-turned-celebreality-star, has found yet another way to effectively exploit his famous ordeal.. you know, the small incident where the ^$#! was beaten out of him by some LAPD officers and which catalyzed the infamous L.A. riots… yea, inconsquential matter of no historic significance…

The world never ceases to confound us..

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OPINION: 5 Other Police Victims Obama Should Invite To The White House

President Barack Obama’s “beer summit” with James Crowley and Henry Louis Gates brought a rare opportunity for the nation to focus on the relationship between the police and the Black community. Still, most Black victims of the police are not Harvard professors with connections to the White House. Often times tensions with the police and innocent African Americans do not result in disorderly conduct arrests, but in injury, embarrassment or death. So, if Obama really wants to address the relationship between the Black community and the police, here are five more people he should bring to the White House for a beer.

1.    Rodney King

Rodney King became the face of police brutality during the early nineties and was the symbolic figurehead of the 92 riots in Los Angeles after he was beaten by police in L.A.. By bringing him to the White House, the President can showcase the negative, longstanding effects that police beatings can have on people and help give the nation an understanding of the still present tensions that led to Rodney King’s beating and the riots that followed.

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2. Nicole Bell

Nicole Bell had her fiancée and the father of her children, Sean Bell, killed the night before her wedding day in 2006 in Queens, New York. Police open fired on his vehicle, under the wrong assumption that someone in his car had a gun. Bringing her to the White House would show the country what happens to families when police go too far and show that the government feels some compassion to families who have lost loved ones due to police brutality.

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3. Danny Reyes

In 1998, Danny Reyes and four friends were traveling to a basketball camp in North Carolina from New York, when police pulled them over on the New Jersey turnpike. Reyes accidentally put the car in reverse and the police open fired on the vehicle, shooting Reyes six times and ending his chances of playing basketball on a higher level. Despite the fact the officers were acquitted of all charges, the case brought forth an investigation into racial profiling on U.S. highways. Meeting with Reyes would show the country the devastating consequences that happen to innocent people, when racial profiling and trigger-happy police are combined.

4.   Malika Calhoun

Malika Calhoun was arrested for joy riding in her mother’s car in Seattle when she was 15. Once in a cell, she was viciously beaten by police officers. Having her at the White House would show that police brutality does not just affect men, but women and children as well, and highlight the need to teach police officers restraint.

Watch The Video of Malika Calhoun Getting Beat By Police

5.   Wanda Johnson.

Wanda Johnson’s son, Oscar Grant, was shot in the back, while lying on the floor at a train station by a transit cop in Oakland. The officer who killed him claimed he thought he was using a taser. Meeting with his mother would help remind the country that the U.S. does not support police brutality, but that it does support the victims of it. It would also show that the President understands the frustrations that resulted in the riots and protests that unfolded after Oscar Grant’s killing.

Watch The Video Of Oscar Grant Being Brutalized And Killed

From LotusRoot.com:

Rodney King’s famous line, “Can we all just get along?” still resonates with us today.  On this day, seventeen years ago, approximately 53 lives were lost with as many as 2,000 people injured.  At the time, Los Angeles was home to the largest Korean population outside of Korea.  Koreatown was overtaken by some of the worst scenes of civil unrest in recent history. Amidst the chaos, the Korean community became a prime target of violence as the riots revealed deep-seated racial tensions in one of the most multi-ethnic cities in America.

Click here for the full story.

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Suing police officers is good business for civil rights lawyer John Burris.

Over the past 30 years, the former prosecutor has earned millions of dollars for handling hundreds of police brutality suits, other racially charged cases and high-profile lawsuits.

Burris, 63, helped win a $3.8 million jury verdict for Rodney King over a videotaped beating in 1991 at the hands of Los Angeles police. He defended basketball star Latrell Sprewell against reckless driving charges in 1998. And he obtained a $42,000 settlement for the late rapper Tupac Shakur in a 1991 brutality suit against the Oakland police.

So it came as little surprise in legal circles that Burris was hired by the family of Oscar Grant, the 22-year-old black man gunned down by a white transit police officer as he lay face down on a Bay Area Rapid Transit platform here on New Year’s Day.

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Prosecutors allege that Grant was restrained and about to be handcuffed when BART officer Johannes Mehserle shot him once in the back. Murder charges have been filed against Mehserle; Burris has filed a $25 million claim on behalf of Grant’s family.

Burris said Grant’s death is one of the two most unsettling cases he has handled since graduating from the University of California, Berkeley’s law school in 1976. The other is the lawsuit he filed for the family of Mack “Jody” Woodfox, who was fatally shot in the back while fleeing Oakland police after a traffic stop in July.

“It’s the shooting in the back that causes people to go nuts,” Burris said of the sometimes-violent demonstrations here over Grant’s death. “That’s as bad as it gets.”

Burris’ portfolio and his visibility as a television commentator have helped forge his reputation as an aggressive advocate for Northern California’s black community.

Burris figures he takes about 50 police brutality cases a year. Many are relatively small, such as ex-convicts getting teeth knocked out by police or black women accusing officers of conducting illegal strip searches.

But in 2006, he helped secure $1.3 million in settlements from the city of Oakland after Iraq war protesters accused police of using excessive force to break up a raucous demonstration.

In 2003, Burris won a $10.9 million settlement from Oakland to settle the notorious “Riders” case, in which police allegedly arrested and planted evidence on 119 innocent suspects. It remains the city’s largest settlement.

“Every case begets another case,” he said.

His biggest target, by far, is the Oakland Police Department.

Neither Oakland City Attorney John Russo, whose office routinely fights Burris’ lawsuits, nor Oakland Police Department union president Dom Arotzarena were willing to share their thoughts about Burris.

Burris has sometimes been in trouble with the law himself. In 2005, a federal judge sharply rebuked him for failing to properly investigate a claim before filing one lawsuit.

U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker fined Burris and another lawyer $10,800 for filing a lawsuit after only a single interview with the clients, who accused the police department of wrongly killing a mentally disturbed Oakland resident who stabbed an officer.

Burris defended himself before the judge by pointing to his long track record of filing successful lawsuits.

“Indeed, Burris’ years of experience and success serve to magnify the egregiousness of the conduct at issue in this case,” Walker said in ordering sanctions.

Burris’ clients fired him in 2007, and the judge filed a complaint to the State Bar last year. Burris said he hired a lawyer to write a letter to the state bar, and that officials there “closed the file” without taking any disciplinary action.

It wasn’t the first time Burris got into legal hot water. In 1996, the State Bar suspended him for 30 days for sending misleading solicitations to victims of mass disasters, which he blamed on overzealous underlings. He was also chided at the same time for improperly mixing clients’ money with his own, and the bar found that he “recklessly failed to perform legal services with competence,” according to bar records.

But it was that same year that Burris worked on what would be his proudest case.

Burris said he defended for free a six-year-old boy charged with assault for dumping an infant out of a bassinet and then beating him. Burris convinced a juvenile court referee to put the boy into foster care rather than the criminal system.

Burris said he has kept in contact with his client, who is soon to be released from state care as an 18-year-old.

“He made it,” Burris said.

Riots have long been a prt of American history. Riots represent the collapse of law and order in our society, when people feel the only way to have their voice heard is through vandalism looting and chaos. Here is a gallery of some of the many riots over the past 40 years.

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