Jurors’ Biases on Trial in Alleged Racial Hate Case : Courts: After tough questioning, an all-white jury is selected to judge two black men accused of beating a white man.

The defense attorney looked squarely at the 12 potential jurors in the Vista municipal courtroom--11 whites and a Hawaiian--and asked them to assess how racially prejudiced they were.

“Does anyone want to admit to racial bias?” defense attorney David Pflaum asked, flat out.

No one raised a hand.

At issue were allegations of a racial hate crime, the first of its kind in North County since a new state civil rights law was enacted four years ago.

“Two black defendants are staring into a courtroom that, except for two people (in the audience) are not of their race. Can you take away their fear?” he asked rhetorically.

Then he tried to bait them.

“I have racial bias,” he admitted. “I grew up in a predominantly white neighborhood and went to schools that were all white. When I see a black person come into a white neighborhood, I have suspicion.”

He paused, looked at them, and again he challenged the potential jurors to assess their prejudices against blacks, on his “race scale, from 1 to 5, five being a little prejudiced, and zero being a saint.”

A former bank executive offered, “I don’t want to sound like a saint, but I don’t think I have any biases.”

Another man, an architect, said, “I grew up in England, and the only black people I saw were professionals. It was only when I came to the U.S. that I have come across this situation.”

Another man said, “I had been (prejudiced) before, years ago. But you change within yourself. You do away with prejudice. I feel I’m not prejudiced anymore.”

Pflaum pressed, asking, “There was a time previously when your bias meter was higher?” The man answered without hesitation, “Oh, yes.”

Another man sitting in the jury box spoke up. “Being a quality engineer, first I want to calibrate your meter. I deal with facts,” he said.

So Pflaum asked him, “Do you know any black people?”

“Certainly,” he answered. “I’m a member of society.”

And so it went Wednesday in Municipal Judge Harley J. Earwicker’s courtroom: the selection of a jury to decide whether two black men should be convicted of committing a racial hate crime by beating a white Marine in an Oceanside liquor store parking lot last August.

The allegation against the two defendants is only the second time in the memory of the district attorney’s office in Vista that the 3-year-old state law addressing hate crimes has been prosecuted in North County. The statute has been prosecuted less than half a dozen times elsewhere in the county, prosecutors said.

Ultimately selected to judge the two black defendants was an all-white jury of seven men and five women. The only black person in the 40-person pool of potential jurors was seated as an alternate.

About a dozen jury candidates were rejected for reasons the attorneys don’t have to give.

After the grilling of potential jurors, the prosecutor and two defense attorneys assessed the effect of the racial probing.

Did Deputy Dist. Atty. Browder Willis--himself black--believe everyone told the truth, that they harbored no racial prejudices?

“It’s a hard thing for people to admit to,” was all he would say.

Defense attorney Bob James said he didn’t think it possible that none of them had prejudice. “But they were asked a loaded question,” he said. “And they couldn’t answer it. I don’t see how they could say, ‘I’m biased as hell.’

“But the point has been made,” James said, that the jurors should “bend over backward to be fair.”

The attorney who asked the questions, David Pflaum, shrugged his shoulders at the question: “I think jurors generally give honest responses, and this panel did as well.”

At issue is the Aug. 12 beating of Cory Williams, a 21-year-old Marine private who was punched and kicked in the face after he and three other white Marines drove into the parking lot of a liquor store on Cleveland Street in downtown Oceanside.

Charged with misdemeanors in the attack are Derick Branch, 20, himself a Marine, and Kevin Smith, 27.

If convicted, each could be sentenced to a maximum of six months in County Jail for the battery and an additional six months if it is proved that the attack was racially motivated.

Such hate crimes, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Charles Bell, who decides which cases should go to trial in Vista, “just don’t happen that much and, if it does, it’s extremely difficult to prove.”

“You have to show specific intent to batter someone because of their race. . . . Otherwise, it is simple battery,” he said. “The defendant must make some indication why he is beating the defendant. It takes something physical and verbal. It (the racial motive) has to be voiced, or confessed to later.”

That was the focus of much of the opening-day testimony Wednesday.

The victim testified that he never heard any racial remarks when he got out of the passenger seat of his buddy’s car, to go into the liquor store to buy cigarettes. All he knew, Williams said, was that, after he got out of the car, he was slammed across the face by an assailant’s fist.

The driver of the car, 19-year-old Marine Lance Cpl. Brady Wimmer, said he remembered someone in the parking lot yelling after the attack: “This store is a black store, a blood store, and white boys aren’t allowed here.”

Branch is accused of hitting Williams in the parking lot, and Smith is accused of throwing blows toward Wimmer before then kicking Williams in the face through an open car window as the white Marines drove off to find a police officer.

The trial is expected to conclude today.