Smith Case Prosecution Suffers Setback : Trial: Judge rules against rape trauma expert who might have explained accuser’s memory lapses. Defense lawyers call their first witnesses.

Prosecutors on Saturday ended their presentation of the rape case against William Kennedy Smith after being denied permission to take testimony from an expert who might have offered an explanation for the accuser’s memory failures.

Judge Mary Lupo said she would not allow prosecutor Moira K. Lasch to question Dean Kilpatrick, a psychologist and expert in “rape trauma syndrome,” because Lasch had not given the defense sufficient notice that it planned to call such a specialist.

Lasch said she wanted to question Kilpatrick about the general psychological effects of rape, which she said could explain the woman’s memory lapses, and why the accuser did not report the alleged rape to police until the following afternoon.

The 31-year-old Jupiter, Fla., woman has accused Smith, who is the nephew of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), of raping her on the east lawn of the family’s oceanfront compound March 30.

An expert offering a possible explanation for the weaknesses in her story could have boosted the prosecution’s odds of success.

But Lupo said Lasch had only signaled her intent to use Kilpatrick on Nov. 27, giving the defense insufficient time to prepare for the witness without a delay. And the judge said she would not disrupt the schedule of her trial, which she has told the panel of sequestered jurors will be completed by Dec. 20.

“The testimony of this witness, should it be admitted, might have a substantial impact on the jury,” the judge said.

She rejected a defense contention that Lasch had made “any willful attempt to snooker or mislead the defense.” Lupo said the defense should have anticipated that the issue of rape trauma would be important in the trial at the outset.

The ruling, in the trial’s sixth day, was one in a series of setbacks for the prosecution. The prosecution seemed to hand the defense a public relations victory Friday when it put Sen. Kennedy on the stand and heard him emotionally describe some of the family’s tragic history.

The defense hit hard Monday at prosecution witness Anne W. Mercer, a friend of the alleged victim; and the state on Monday also failed in an effort to win permission to present testimony from three women who alleged that Smith had attacked them.

However, many legal experts have said that the prosecution’s most important witness--Smith’s accuser herself--gave a credible presentation on the stand Wednesday and Thursday.

The defense’s first witness Saturday was a bartender who testified that he had spent 15 to 20 minutes with the accuser on the night of the alleged rape, in a brief meeting that the woman never mentioned in her sworn statements about the night.

Tony Liott, 49, said the woman had set the casual date for a drink five days before and that she met him at a restaurant called Ta-boo between 12:30 a.m. and 1 a.m.

Under defense questioning, Liott denied that he and the woman had a romantic interest in each other and that she had discussed selling him drugs or using drugs with him that night. In response to prosecution questions, he described the woman as “never loud . . . she’s on the shy side.” And he said that she was a “a floppy-type dresser,” except on formal occasions.

Stephen Hatch, a botanist and grass specialist from Texas A&M; University, testified that particles of Bermuda grass found in the woman’s panties could have come from weedy patches on the east lawn of the Kennedy mansion.

But in cross-examination he agreed with a defense lawyer’s statement that “grass could easily be windblown on a beach from cuttings.”

The defense has argued that the two had consensual sex on the beach, after which the woman grew anxious and angry and accused Smith of rape.

David B. Lotman, an orthopedist whom the victim had been seeing because of a serious auto accident when she was 14, told the jury that the woman came to him six days after the alleged rape, upset and complaining of a rib injury. The woman was tender in several parts of her torso, and had a yellow-green bruise on her right shoulder.

Lotman, a prosecution witness, said that during the April 5 visit, “I saw anxiety but I did not see what I define as mental problems.” He did not think the woman was faking any of her symptoms.

Another defense witness, Susan Keresey, gave an account of the evening’s events that differed in timing from the account of the accuser and her friend Mercer. Keresey said Mercer and the alleged victim had spent about 45 minutes visiting her at her home the evening of March 30. The two women have estimated they were at Keresey’s from 8 p.m. until about 10 p.m.

Charles Sieger, a Miami architect, testified that with its plaster walls and tiled surfaces, the Kennedy house was “fairly loud” and carries sounds well from outdoors. The testimony was designed to support the defense contention that if the woman had screamed on the evening of the alleged rape, someone in the mansion would have heard her.

But Sieger acknowledged under cross-examination that he did no sound tests, is not an acoustical expert and did not research the history of the famous mansion.