Jury Deadlocks in Compton Officer’s Manslaughter Trial

After eight days of deliberating manslaughter charges against a former Compton police officer accused of shooting two Samoan brothers 19 times, a Los Angeles Superior Court jury told the judge Tuesday that it had reached an impasse and a mistrial was declared.

The deadlocked 9 to 3 in favor of acquitting Alfred Skiles Jr., who was the first law enforcement officer in Los Angeles County in a decade to be charged with killing someone while on duty. Skiles, a 12-year police veteran, was charged in the February, 1991, shootings of Pouvi Tualaulelei, 34, and Itali Tualaulelei, 22. Skiles recently retired, contending that the shootings and the stress from the trial left him medically disabled.

Skiles, who did not comment and was hurried from the courtroom, testified that the brothers had attacked him after he was called to their home to settle a domestic dispute. But the prosecution said Skiles committed a “vicious, cruel homicide,” shooting the unarmed brothers 13 times in the back and six times in the side.

The jurors’ task was to decide whether to believe Skiles’ contention that he had no choice but to defend himself, or the testimony of a third Tualaulelei brother, Ieti, 18, who said he heard Skiles order his brothers to their knees before gunfire erupted.

Skiles will be back in court June 1. Whether he will be retried will be announced at that time.

His wife, Alba, told reporters she was “shocked that 12 jurors could not agree” on her husband’s innocence.

The trial’s end Tuesday afternoon prompted Los Angeles and Compton police to go on tactical alerts--the level of readiness that precedes full mobilization--as a precaution against potential violence. Some had feared there would be violence similar to what followed the not-guilty verdicts in the Rodney G. King beating case.

In Compton, night supervisory officers were also called in early.

Samoan community activists were angry about the hung jury, but vowed that they would not be the source of any violence.

“It was agreed upon by the chiefs that if the verdict comes out any other way but guilty we will hold a peaceful demonstration,” said Chief Tuaau Pele Faletogo, head of the Samoan Council of Chiefs, a governing body for natives of Samoa, a South Pacific island.

“We are outraged by this verdict but we are not going to dignify the obvious stupidity of the jury with violence,” he said. “If there is any violence in response to this verdict it will not come from the Samoan community but from outside opportunists.”

A community march, he said, will not be held until next week to give anger a chance to cool.

“To hold a march now, when the people are angry and full of frustration, would be out of the question,” Faletogo said. “Things could escalate very fast.”

A meeting of Samoan community leaders was scheduled for later Tuesday in Carson. There are about 12,000 Samoans in Los Angeles County, according to the census, most of whom live in Carson, Long Beach and Compton.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert Healey and the defense attorney, George Franscell, cited the King case and the ensuing riots as a profound influence on the jury--made up of nine Anglos, two Latinos and one black. But they disagreed on the nature of the impact.

The jurors, however, denied they were influenced by the King case and its aftermath.

Healey said middle-class Americans, the group from which most juries are drawn, were frightened by the riots and as a result were more inclined to see police as being under siege and their last protection against crime. He speculated that such a view had been adopted by the nine jurors who wanted to acquit Skiles.

Franscell speculated that the three jurors who wanted to convict his client had been unwilling to reach a verdict that might be viewed as unjust and which would incite more violence.

Franscell said that he, Skiles and members of Skiles’ family had been physically threatened during the trial, which he said was conducted in a climate of hostility and heated politics that spilled over from the King case.

The Skiles trial had been in progress for two days when the verdicts was returned in the King beating case. The verdicts in favor of the four Los Angeles police officers sparked rioting in Los Angeles and several other cities. Superior Court Judge John H. Reid, who presided over the Skiles case, polled the jury at the time to determine if its members had been unduly influenced by those events.

The jurors denied that they had been affected. One juror, however, did not return from a recess during the worst day of the rioting and was replaced by an alternate.

Two prosecution witnesses testified that Skiles had fired two bursts of gunfire at the brothers, first hitting them with 10 shots before he reloaded his semiautomatic pistol and fired nine more times. Healy argued that the second burst was unnecessary and illegal because the brothers were already seriously wounded.

The shooting occurred after Pouvi Tualaulelei’s wife, Julie, called police and reported that her husband, a warehouseman, had hit her during an argument.

Skiles was working alone that night. Later, when Pouvi Tualaulelei drove up with the couple’s two young children in the car, Skiles locked Julie Tualaulelei in the patrol car and confronted her spouse.

As the two men argued, Itali, a sports scholarship student at El Camino Community College, came outside and joined the dispute. Skiles contended that at that point, the brothers attacked him.

Ieti Tualaulelei, who witnessed some of the incident from a kitchen window, disputed that contention.

A juror who would only identify himself as “No. 11” told reporters outside the Criminal Courts Building in downtown Los Angeles that he voted for Skiles’ acquittal because he did not believe Ieti Tualaulelei’s testimony that portrayed the police officer as an executioner.

Moreover, he said, the physical evidence did not support the assertion. There were indications, he said, that self-defense was involved.

“There’s about five scenarios that will work that way,” the juror said.

Healey disagreed with the juror, but conceded that he may not have made his points forcefully enough during the trial.

Times staff writers Tina Griego and Shawn Hubler contributed to this story.