6 Policemen Tried for ‘Just a Frenzy’ : Miami: A jury again weighs law enforcement actions that end in death. The prosecutor points to brutality, the defense cites the daily risks to officers.

Leonardo Mercado was sitting on a tattered yellow couch in the front yard of a house in an inner-city Miami neighborhood that Friday afternoon when three cars roared up and six men jumped out.

The six were policemen, and Mercado, 35, was a small-time drug dealer who the police believed might be responsible for a death threat that one of the officers had received. The police officers patted down a few people standing around the yard, chased others away and then invited Mercado inside the house to talk.

No one but the six police officers knows exactly what happened next. But, within 10 minutes, Mercado was dead, a victim of what a police spokesman later called “just a frenzy.” He was beaten with fists, pummeled about the head with a flashlight or a nightstick and repeatedly kicked, according to the autopsy report. Mercado died of a brain hemorrhage. The date was Dec. 16, 1988.

Now, almost two years later, the six Miami policemen are on trial, facing federal charges of conspiracy and civil rights violations. If convicted, they face life in prison.

To prosecutors, “This is a case about police brutality,” as Assistant U.S. Atty. Edward Nucci said in his opening statement to the 12-member jury last week. The six plainclothes officers not only beat Mercado to death but then lied to cover up what had happened and fabricated evidence, the prosecution charged.

To defense attorneys, the case epitomizes the harsh reality of the war against drugs in which police officers daily risk their lives. Mercado, with a long rap sheet and traces of cocaine in his blood, caused whatever frenzy ensued by attacking the policemen, the defense argued.

To many in Miami, the trial represents another sad chapter in the tale of a city with a disturbing history of police actions resulting in death. Twice in recent years, Latino police officers have faced criminal charges after the fatal shootings of black men. Both incidents sparked riots.

Most infamous of all is the McDuffie case, named for black insurance man Arthur McDuffie, who was beaten to death on the street by white police officers in 1979. The subsequent acquittal of those officers on manslaughter charges touched off a vicious three-day riot in 1980.

Although allegations of excessive force by police officers are a central issue, this trial lacks the racial and ethnic tensions of previous celebrated cases. Mercado was a native of Puerto Rico. Two of the defendants are Latino, three are black and the sixth is a non-Latino white.

Nonetheless, the case is considered significant for what it discloses about police procedures in drug-infested Miami neighborhoods and about life in what the prosector called “the underbelly of society” where Mercado lived.

In U.S. District Court, the six burly defendants sit in a row behind their lawyers at the defense table. As members of the elite Street Narcotics Unit, they drove unmarked cars, carried guns strapped to their ankles and cultivated informants among Miami’s dope-dealing nether world. They wore jeans and sneakers to work.

Here in court, they are dressed in suits and ties, and they stare dispassionately at the young prosecution witnesses, teen-agers and school dropouts whose lives revolved around playing video games and serving as bicycle-riding lookouts for the man they called “Cano.”

Pedro Soto, 14 at the time of Mercado’s death, was expelled from school as a chronic truant and troublemaker. Although he reached the seventh grade, he cannot read or write. “Problems come to me,” he said in describing his life.

He testified that, when he came home and heard that the police were inside with “Cano,” a man he considered his stepfather, he climbed in a window to take a look.

Moments later, he said, officer Andy Watson, known on the street as “Rambo,” picked him up and threw him back out the window.

“How did you go out?” asked Nucci, the assistant U.S. attorney.

“Like Superman,” said Soto.

“Head first, in other words,” Nucci said.

“Yeah,” Soto replied.

Pedro Soto and his brother Jose, 18, who claims he was punched by the officers, have filed a $10-million civil lawsuit against the city. They were cross-examined vigorously, and defense lawyer Richard Sharpstein called them “Mutant Ninja Turtles,” willing to lie both to convict the police officers and bolster their chances of financial gain in the civil case.

Well before the trial began, Judge Stanley Marcus ruled as inadmissible statements four of the officers gave to other policemen immediately after Mercado’s death. In those statements, defendants Nathaniel Veal Jr., Ronald Sinclair, Charlie Haynes Jr. and Watson said they did not touch Mercado but found him, bloodied and nearly unconscious, in the room with Pablo Camacho and Thomas Trujillo.

Prosecutors contend that all six officers hit or kicked Mercado. Nucci said experts would testify that patterns from the soles of sneakers worn by Veal and Haynes matched bloody marks on Mercado’s body. Testimony is expected to continue two more weeks.

Meanwhile, Miami police officials say they have tightened screening procedures designed to detect officers who are prone to violence. In the three years before Mercado’s death, the six defendants had been involved in 38 “use of force” incidents on which they were required to write reports. Each instance was ruled justifiable by a supervising police officer.

Five of the six had shown up in an “early warning” system designed to identify officers prone to excessive violence.