Los Angeles erupted and the jurors who acquitted four white policemen in the Rodney King case were condemned. But Stanley M. Weisberg, the trial judge, has emerged relatively unscathed.
True, Weisberg was criticized for moving the trial to overwhelmingly white Simi Valley, a staunchly law-and-order community close to Los Angeles. But no one has questioned Weisberg's management of the proceedings themselves. "Stan always gives good trial," quipped one of his former associates. "That's probably why he was chosen for this one." Weisberg, 47, the son of a sheet metal worker who moved from East Los Angles to middle-class Palms, was a deputy district attorney for 18 years and a Municipal Court judge for two before his appointment to the Los Angeles Superior Court in 1986. "He's a very level-headed, sane type," notes Leah Purwin-D'Agostino, an assistant prosecutor who worked with Weisberg at the municipal courthouse in Van Nuys. "He's not easily rattled. He's very calm, professional." Amid the debris of post-riot Los Angeles, the Jewish community has drawn some satisfaction from the fact that the prominence of a Jewish judge in a case with such clear-cut racial overtones never became a cause for concern among Jews or blacks. "If there had been criticism of his handling of the case," said a Jewish judge who asked not to be named, "we would have heard something from the black community by now. We haven't, because he ran a good trial." Sheli Teitelbaum / Los Angeles