Judge Suppresses King’s Marijuana Test : LAPD Trial: Defense may not disclose evidence of drug. Prosecution is forbidden to reveal Officer Wind’s police experience.

The judge in the trial of four Los Angeles police officers charged in the Rodney G. King beating refused to allow the jury to hear evidence that King had traces of marijuana in his system when he was beaten.

Superior Court Judge Stanley Weisberg also refused to allow prosecutors to admit information that defendant Timothy E. Wind was a veteran police officer in a Kansas suburb before he joined the department in May, 1990.

Wind was four months out of the Police Academy when he and his co-defendants--Sgt. Stacey C. Koon and officers Laurence M. Powell and Theodore J. Briseno--were videotaped as they beat, kicked and fired Taser darts at King on March 3, 1991.

All four are charged with assault with a deadly weapon and using excessive force under color of authority. Koon and Powell also are charged with filing false police reports.

Very little of the prosecution’s case has been directed against Wind, 31, the only defendant who chose not to testify on his own behalf.

Just before resting their case Wednesday, prosecutors sought to admit as evidence Wind’s Los Angeles Police Department application form that said he had worked seven years on the 55-member Shawnee, Kan., Police Department.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Alan Yochelson argued that Wind’s attorney tried to portray his client as “an innocent, a babe in the woods” who was simply following the lead of the more senior officers at the scene.

Powell, 29, was in charge of training Wind when the beating occurred, and on the videotape Powell is seen delivering the vast majority of more than 50 baton blows suffered by King, including at least some prosecutors say landed on his head in violation of department policy.

The tape shows Wind striking King several times on the legs and upper body and Briseno stomping once on King’s neck area as Koon, the highest-ranking officer at the scene, directs the blows from the sidelines.

Wind’s attorney, Paul De Pasquale, argued that mention of Wind’s police experience was irrelevant.

“It doesn’t relate at all to what it means to be a Kansas police officer,” he said, adding that “more time is spent getting cattle out of the street” and that police in Shawnee rarely if ever confront PCP-abusing suspects.

Koon, Powell and Wind maintain that they believed King was under the influence of hallucinogenic drug PCP when they arrested him.

But Weisberg said De Pasquale underrated Wind’s earlier police experience. “You make Shawnee, Kan., seem like a scene out of ‘Gunsmoke,’ ” the judge said.

Weisberg ruled that the prosecutors were attempting to take advantage of the fact that Wind never testified and therefore rejected their bid to mention his experience.

Meanwhile, De Pasquale wanted to tell jurors that in addition to being legally drunk the night he was beaten, King, 27, was found to have evidence of marijuana in his urine. The same blood and urine tests showed that King was legally drunk.

De Pasquale argued that the presence of marijuana was evidence he disobeyed certain laws.