Smith Accuser’s Testimony Bolsters Case : Rape trial: Her appearance builds credibility and upsets the defense’s momentum. Pressure builds for the defendant to take stand.

She wept and she raged. She has one story now, a slightly different one a month ago.

But the woman who has accused William Kennedy Smith of rape managed during her two days on the stand last week to do what no corps of brilliant prosecutors could have done without her: She bolstered the credibility of the charges that she has endured so much to bring. And she did so at a time when some legal observers had concluded that the case was becoming hopelessly one-sided in the defense’s favor.

Some believe that her performance as a witness has made it more important than ever that Smith himself take the stand--as he has promised he would--and that he come across as highly credible in his own right.

“Her presentation was about the best you can ask for,” said Bill Wallshein, a Palm Beach County defense attorney and former prosecutor, adding that he believes the prosecution still faces a “very difficult” fight to convict Smith.

Said Paul H. Rothstein, a criminal defense specialist at Georgetown University: “The prosecution hit a home run with her testimony.”

The 30-year-old Jupiter, Fla., woman has charged that Smith, a 31-year-old medical school graduate, chased her across the east lawn of the Kennedys’ oceanfront estate in Palm Beach in the early hours of March 30, then tackled and raped her.

In her testimony Wednesday and Thursday, the alleged victim broke into tears over and over again when the questioning turned to the details of the alleged rape. She acknowledged inconsistencies in her testimony and explained repeatedly that her memory had failed because “I’ve been raped--I can’t remember.”

Even so, on many key points, she came across as cooperative, concise and forceful. Her outbursts of emotion seemed spontaneous and sincere.

Rape victims are bad witnesses “when they’re not forthright to questions, aren’t direct, (and) try to be evasive,” said Frank Kessler, a Palm Beach County defense lawyer and former prosecutor. Before the woman’s appearance, he had given the prosecution about a 1-in-10 chance of success. He now rates the odds as about 50-50.

Some lawyers said they had expected little of the witness, primarily because of defense statements dating back to last spring that characterized her as a psychologically troubled woman who ran with a fast crowd. And some acknowledged that so far, the defense team has seemed more savvy than the prosecution.

Legal observers disagree about the importance of the inconsistencies that defense lawyer Roy E. Black has brought out in the woman’s story. While some of the flaws and gaps in her testimony seem relatively inconsequential, the defense needs only to establish that there is a reasonable doubt that the alleged crime actually occurred to win acquittal.

Black has probably scored points, some lawyers say, by harping on the woman’s inability to recall where she took off the black Givenchy pantyhose that later reappeared, torn and shredded, on the passenger seat of her Mazda RX-7 sports car. If it turns out she took them off in front of Smith, jurors might take it as a sign that her interest in him was not, as she said, a platonic attraction to a physician-in-training whose medical knowledge could help her understand the chronic health problems of her 2-year-old daughter.

Black tried to establish, too, that the woman could not remember a brief drink she had after 11 p.m. that night with a bartender named Tony Liott, although she could remember that her dinner that evening consisted of a Caesar salad, a dish called rigatoni a la vodka and a single glass of Chianti.

The defense also may have scored points with the jury by noting that in some testimony, the woman said Smith’s body was to the right of her head during the alleged assault, and at another moment, that it was to the left of it.

Lawyers say juries tend to forgive some discrepancies and memory lapses, particularly those involving events that took place many months earlier; they can be especially forgiving in the case of people who have suffered traumatic events.

“People who are familiar with rape victims know that is typical of rape victims,” said Rothstein, the Georgetown University specialist. “They forget things. Juries understand there are bound to be some inconsistencies in the story of a person who had undergone such a traumatic experience. The whole profession (lawyers) thinks these discrepancies are important, but they are not.”

But many other lawyers said that Black is cobbling together a sufficient quantity of inconsistencies and memory lapses to tilt the jury’s view toward a finding of reasonable doubt. That is why some lawyers, such as Bruce Rogow, who last year defended the rap group 2 Live Crew in its obscenity case, assert that the case will inevitably end in acquittal.

“There is a week or more before the case goes to the jury, and the defense will begin to plant seeds of doubt,” he said. “And that’s all you need.”

Arnold Loewy, a professor of criminal law at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, said that poking even tiny holes in the witness’s account can pay off.

“If the defense can’t have a clear appearance of innocence, the best next thing is to muddy the waters,” Loewy said. “The prosecution can usually win only with unmuddy waters and a clear appearance of guilt.”

Defense lawyer Black is considered one of the criminal defense bar’s foremost practitioners. But some lawyers contend that in his seven-hour cross-examination of the woman, he may have tried to go over too many points, and ended up creating some sympathy for her.

This may have been particularly true in his questioning of the woman about the precise facts of the alleged rape incident itself. Each time he would mention the alleged assault, she would break down, but he would persist.

“If you dwell on these things too long, jurors will view the attorney as quibbling over inconsequential matters, for some ulterior motive,” said David Acton, a Palm Beach County defense attorney who was a state prosecutor between 1981 and 1985.

Some jurors, lawyers said, consider this kind of technique no more than bullying. As one spectator at the trial put it as she awaited the end of a recess: “They ask you this question, that question and then that question. And if you answer them--then they’ve got you in their web.”

Nevertheless, Black clearly has won a series of important battles during the trial. Last Monday, he embarrassed witness Anne W. Mercer, who came to pick up the alleged victim on the night of the incident.

Mercer told Smith she was sorry that “we couldn’t meet under different circumstances.” Even more damaging, she later sold her story to the tabloid television show “A Current Affair” for $40,000.

“That witness did not help the state at all,” Wallshein said.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and his son Patrick seemed to score sympathy points for the defense when they appeared on the stand Friday, turning the day’s testimony into a recounting of the Kennedy family tragedies. As the senator recalled the loss to illness of Stephen Smith, his brother-in-law and William Smith’s father, tears slid down the defendant’s cheek, and Kennedy’s voice grew thick.

Several lawyers wondered if Kennedy’s appearance has served any purpose other than to boost the defense’s prospects, and perhaps the senator’s reelection hopes.

Prosecutor Moira K. Lasch also suffered a setback when Judge Mary Lupo ruled Monday that she could not introduce the testimony of three woman who claimed to have been sexually assaulted by Smith between 1983 and 1988. But many lawyers thought the prosecution motion had been a long shot, in any case.

Some legal observers have faulted Lasch for failing to cultivate sympathy with the jury, as Black has. Although he sorely tried their patience during jury selection with lengthy questions, Black always apologized and sought to connect emotionally with them with a self-deprecating style.

Lasch, who has appeared grim through the 16 days of jury selection and six days of trial, has not seemed to make the same effort. And some lawyers asserted that she could have done more to maximize sympathy for her key witness, the alleged victim, by spending more time in having her describe her caring relationship with her ill daughter, or discussing in greater detail the car accident in which the woman broke her neck in three places.

One key question that remains unanswered is to what extent potentially unflattering details of the accuser’s life may be brought out when the defense presents its case.

The defense has been barred from discussing much of the woman’s sexual and medical history, but it is expected to present expert witnesses to swear that she is resentful of men because, among other things, she was abandoned while she was pregnant with her daughter.

The accuser’s past drug use may also be brought into the presentation, Rothstein said. While the judge’s ruling on the three other women’s testimony was probably the most important ruling of the case, Rothstein said that Lupo’s rulings on motions that will determine how much of the accuser’s past life may be admitted would probably be the next most important.

How seriously jurors will take these stories of alleged weakness and vice is one of the eternal imponderables in such cases. “Sometimes you will find a jury that is what you might call more enlightened,” Acton said. The current jury has an average age of more than 40, and none of its members is a college graduate.

That “might tend to make them a little more traditional in values,” Acton said.

The jurors include a 60-year-old woman who works in her husband’s refrigeration business and who listed George and Barbara Bush as the people she admires most. Also on the panel is a man who appears to be in his 60s who was an Army paratrooper. He commented during juror interviews that a woman who was raped would have her head “bashed.”

The jury includes a man who told lawyers he had once testified on behalf of a friend who had been falsely accused of rape. Three members of the jury said they were Roman Catholic.

Some lawyers said the case is now in the stage that the Clarence Thomas-Anita Faye Hill hearings entered just after Hill made her surprisingly strong testimony accusing the Supreme Court nominee of sexual harassment. The appearance seemed to give her the momentum.

But Thomas had a chance to regain it with his presentation.

Richard A. Sharpstein, a Miami defense attorney and friend of Black, said he believes Smith now is compelled to take the stand in his own defense.

“It boils down to Willie or won’t he,” Sharpstein said. “In this case, it’s necessary.”

Staff writers David Savage and Paul Houston in Washington contributed to this story.