Jurors Say Statement by Penn Helped Them Decide

SAN DIEGO — Sagon Penn’s own statement to police on the night of March 31, 1985, was a crucial piece of evidence that helped persuade jurors that Penn was not guilty in San Diego’s most controversial police killing case, jurors said Thursday.

Jurors who acquitted Penn on Thursday of charges of manslaughter and attempted murder in the 1985 shootings said afterward that they were strongly impressed by the seeming truthfulness and consistency of Penn’s rambling, two-hour statements.

“When he made them, it was a very short time after the incident,” said juror Thomas Rizzuto. “It was still fresh in his mind. I don’t think he had time to make up a story. . . . They helped us out tremendously.”

Without the statements, juror Debbie Trujillo said, “We wouldn’t know what we were dealing with.”

Witnesses’ Inconsistencies

In interviews Thursday, jurors said the prosecution failed to disprove Penn’s version and prove that he truly intended to kill the victims. Some said the prosecution failed to prove its case because of inconsistencies in the statements of its own witnesses.

But the jurors said the group remained divided on whether Penn acted in self-defense in response to overly aggressive police behavior. They said there was, to the end, disagreement on whether Penn’s actions were reasonable or unreasonable.

“In a situation like this, you want to be able to say: ‘OK, this was the guilty party and it’s black and white,’ ” Trujillo said. “But in this situation, it was just too gray all around. It’s even hard to tell who the victims were.”

Many of the jurors contended that the issue of race did not seem a critical factor in the events that precipitated the shooting. Some described race as one element but blamed other factors for the outcome, including a breakdown in communication.

‘Communication Skills Need Help’

“Personally, I don’t think the Police Department ever communicated to the kid,” said juror Janet Geisler, 25. “ . . . That was a very key issue to me. I just think that the communication skills of the Police Department need some help.”

The racially mixed jury returned Thursday after 23 days of deliberating to find the 25-year-old Southeast San Diego man not guilty of the most serious charges facing him. They deadlocked on three lesser charges in the killing of Police Agent Thomas Riggs and the woundings of Agent Donovan Jacobs and Sarah Pina-Ruiz, a civilian observer riding in Riggs’ car.

The deliberations included a period of self-imposed sequestration that began Monday. Jurors revealed Thursday that they asked to be sequestered after several jurors who were working night jobs during the trial found that they were being pressured and “badgered” by co-workers.

Repeatedly, jurors said Thursday that they were impressed by the statement Penn made to the San Diego Police Department after turning himself in on the night of the shootings. They described the tape-recorded statement as fresh, credible and apparently lacking in contradictions.

They said the statement seemed to be corroborated by eyewitnesses, who testified that the officers triggered the violence by using excessive force. They said they found the testimony of those witnesses for the defense generally credible and consistent.

“In reading Penn’s interviews, he’s a smart kid,” said Geisler, a bank teller with a night job at Burger King. “His religious background, his discipline for martial arts, all those things convinced me in his statements. I had to take those as the truth.”

At Penn’s first trial, in which the jury acquitted him of more serious charges but deadlocked on the charges decided Thursday, the judge ruled against a defense request to play Penn’s recorded statement for the jury. Superior Court Judge Ben Hamrick told the defense that Penn would have to testify if he wanted to give his account.

Penn did not testify at either trial. But Superior Court Judge J. Morgan Lester agreed in the second trial to admit as evidence Penn’s statement to the police.

The jurors appeared divided in their opinions of Jacobs, a key witness for the prosecution.

Rizzuto and Geisler said they did not find him credible; Rizzuto described his testimony as inconsistent. Juror Marc Zaccolo said: “There might be some (areas) where (his testimony) might be sketchy, but overall, I don’t think he was a liar.”

Pity for Jacobs

Trujillo said she felt pity for the officer.

“I felt really sorry for Donovan Jacobs,” said the 29-year-old administrative assistant and student. “Just seeing him testify, I just felt he was kind of broken.”

Many of the jurors said they were not impressed with the testimony of three former police officers who characterized Jacobs as a racist. Zaccolo said some of the jurors found the former officers’ statements “a little too strong to be believable.”

“Although I feel that (racism) was an element, I don’t feel that was the crux of the issue,” Trujillo said. “I feel demeanor was more important than racism. Their testimony did corroborate Penn’s statements that Jacobs’ demeanor may have been negative.”

Several jurors minimized the significance of an 8-year-old transcript of a Police Academy counseling session involving Jacobs. In the transcript, brought forward by police too late for the first trial, Jacobs’ instructors criticized him for his use of profanity and epithets.

“I personally think the transcript happened so long ago that too many years had elapsed,” said jury foreman Howard McDowell. Juror Emmett Cruz said the transcript “started to build a character of Jacobs, but in my eye and my mind and heart, it had nothing to do with (the 1985 incident).”

Several jurors faulted the testimony of other prosecution witnesses as well.

“They were not convincing,” Geisler said. “There were a lot of inconsistencies in their testimony. And inconsistencies to me mean untruth.”

Rizzuto described the testimony of Pina-Ruiz as unpersuasive. “She didn’t want to point the finger at the Police Department,” he said. “You know, she had the best view of all of it and should have seen it best. But she didn’t want to believe the police were wrong.”

Nevertheless, Rizzuto said he believed Penn was guilty in shooting Pina-Ruiz.

‘She Was Innocent Bystander’

“I thought that she was an innocent bystander and that she shouldn’t have been shot,” he said. “I don’t think he had justification to do that. She wasn’t a threat, she was not involved in the altercation, and he should have been convicted on that charge.”

Several jurors said the group failed to reach agreement on what would have been reasonable or unreasonable behavior in Penn’s position. They said some believed it was reasonable for him to react by defending himself, while others remained unconvinced.

“We had a hard time with reasonable and unreasonable,” Geisler said. “That was a very big problem in our deliberations. . . . We had one gentleman who was very strong: He felt self-defense was never an issue.”

Several jurors said Zaccolo, a postal worker from South Mission Beach, was the lone holdout against acquittal on one of the lesser charges. Zaccolo declined to say who was the holdout, citing an agreement among the jurors not to discuss each others’ roles.

But he said: “Self-defense was definitely an issue (in the deliberations), there was no doubt about it. It came down to, Was it justified to use self-defense? That was an underlying theme throughout.”

Geisler said the jurors managed to reach a unanimous decision on the manslaughter and attempted murder counts because they felt the state had failed to prove intent to kill. Because of that, she said, they did not have to resolve the self-defense question.

“You have to show intent to kill for murder,” Zaccolo said. “And I just don’t think the prosecution showed beyond a reasonable doubt that (Penn) had the intent to kill.”

Changed Feelings About Police

Several jurors said the trial had altered their feelings about the San Diego Police Department--but in several different ways. While Geisler was critical of the department for its failure to communicate, Trujillo said she emerged from the trial with new sympathy for police.

Most said they did not intend to send a message through their verdict.

“This was just one individual case,” Zaccolo said. “I think that’s what everybody had to look at--not say, ‘What will this do to the black community? What will this do to the Police Department? What will this do to San Diego?’ ”

Rizzuto, a supermarket cashier, said: “I’m sure there are going to be a lot of hard feelings out there. A lot of people will be upset by the way it turned out. But we just called it how we saw it, according to the evidence.”

Rizzuto added: “It was a hard trial. . . . It took its toll, I’ll tell you. The charges involved, a life was taken. . . . One thing we weren’t supposed to take into consideration was personal feelings. But it gets to you.”

Times staff writer Jenifer Warren contributed to this story.