NEWS ANALYSIS : King Case Prosecutors Gamble on Eyewitnesses : Testimony: The descriptions by four people of the beating add human dimension and emotional impact. But defense lawyers focus on the sharply differing accounts.

Benjamin Avila remembered four police officers hitting Rodney G. King “all over his body.” Robert Hill could not remember exactly how many officers there were, but most of the blows he saw were to King’s legs.

Felipe Lopez was maneuvering for a better view and missed a portion of the beating, as did Dorothy Gibson. Gibson remembered hearing someone yell “Please stop!” and she assumed that that person was King. But on reflection, she admitted that she could not be absolutely sure.

In the opening days of the King civil rights trial, those four witnesses delivered accounts that were as conflicting as they were powerful, fleshing out the jury’s knowledge of the incident while subjecting their credibility to doubt. Their testimony was long-awaited--none of the four “civilian witnesses” was called to the stand during last year’s state trial--and their emotional accounts captivated jurors and enlivened the early days of the prosecution’s case.

Although the civilian witnesses were engaging, they also presented lawyers on both sides with difficult challenges: Prosecutors were forced to grapple with calling witnesses whose statements were easily contradicted, while defense lawyers had to deal with the fallout from witnesses relaying the horror of watching police beat an individual.

On balance, legal experts believe that the civilian witnesses probably accomplished what prosecutors had hoped. They took the jury to the scene, re-creating through the eyes of average people--a nurse, a probation officer and two musicians--the shock of the events that unfolded on that chilly March night in 1991 in Lakeview Terrace.

“The real value of the civilian witnesses’ testimony is to convey that emotional impact--the feeling of watching King beaten,” said Peter Arenella, a UCLA law professor. “That’s an important element that was missing from the state case.”

John Gilleland, director of research for the Jury Analysts Group of FTI, agreed.

“They’re going to have a significant impact on the jury because they place you at the scene,” Gilleland said. “The shock, the horror--that’s no small thing, and you don’t necessarily get it from the videotape.”

During the state trial of the officers, prosecutors from the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office weighed the same issues and decided not to take the chance on calling civilian witnesses. But those prosecutors lost, and their federal counterparts are determined not to follow in their footsteps.

This time, federal prosecutors rolled the dice, calling four civilian witnesses in the first three days of their presentation to the jury.

Underlying the testimony of the four citizens was a common thread, and it underscores the essence of the prosecution’s case: that King initially resisted arrest, but that at some point, the four defendants crossed the line, going beyond what was reasonable to take King into custody.

All four civilian witnesses made that point, sometimes expressing astonishment or anger at what they saw. Each stressed that they never saw King attack the officers and that King’s movements were protective, not threatening.

“He was trying to protect himself so he wouldn’t get hit in the head,” said Avila, who witnessed the beating from the bus used by his musical group.

Lopez, another member of the band, echoed Avila’s account. “I don’t think that he was trying to flee or whatever,” he said, testifying through an interpreter. “I think that his instinct to protect himself made him flee from the blows.”

Asked how King looked, Lopez responded: “I don’t know whether it was pain or desperation or what, but he looked bad.”

Prosecutors concede that in the opening moments of the videotape, King jumped up off the pavement, lunging in the general direction of Officer Laurence M. Powell, one of the defendants. Gibson said she saw that happen, but she added that after King was knocked back to the ground, the beating got out of hand.

“They were hitting him all over,” she said. “Anyway they could get a lick in, they were kicking him.”

Gibson, whose voice cracked near the end of her testimony, also supplied jurors with the most chilling detail that they have heard from any witness so far: Once King was hogtied and left face down in the dirt to wait for an ambulance, Gibson said, the officers appeared anything but remorseful.

“They were talking,” she said, “and they were laughing.”

Defense lawyers struck back hard at Gibson, and they succeeded in undermining portions of her story. A transcript of an interview between Gibson and an investigator from the district attorney’s office indicates that she had previously said she believed about five officers struck King with batons. The videotape reveals that only two officers, Powell and Timothy E. Wind, used those weapons.

Confronted with that evidence and other inconsistencies in her statements, Gibson said the transcripts of her earlier interviews were mistaken.

Avila also remembered four police officers hitting King with batons, and his account came under attack for that same discrepancy.

“No disrespect to these people, but this case is a dramatic example of the untrustworthiness of eyewitness testimony,” said Michael P. Stone, who represents Powell. “These eyewitnesses all see this incident from different perspectives, and what they remember is affected by many factors, including the fact that they have seen the videotape.”

Stone said the result will be that jurors will discount the witnesses’ testimony and rely on their own view of the incident as captured on the videotape.

Laurie Levenson, a Loyola law professor and former federal prosecutor, disagreed. She said that small discrepancies in witnesses’ accounts of an incident that occurred two years ago are to be expected. She said the civilian witnesses will give jurors a basis to consider whether the officers’ actions were unreasonable by an average person’s standard.

Even as defense lawyers succeeded in poking holes in some of the witnesses’ accounts, there is a sense in which these prosecution witnesses bolster one of the main premises of the officers’ defense: that people who witnessed the King beating can honestly disagree about what they saw, and that differing accounts are not necessarily evidence that anyone is lying.

“That’s what we’ve been saying all along,” said Ira Salzman, who represents Sgt. Stacey C. Koon. “If civilian witnesses can disagree about what they saw at the scene, then why can’t officers?”

Federal prosecutors have threatened some police officers who witnessed the beating with perjury charges because their stories do not conform to what is on the videotape; those discrepancies, prosecutors have suggested, are evidence of a police “code of silence” intended to thwart investigations of the beating.

Although police officers have been warned of possible perjury indictments, there is no evidence that the government has threatened its civilian witnesses, even though their accounts also are flawed.

Harland W. Braun, the lawyer representing Officer Theodore J. Briseno, said that illustrates the unfairness of the prosecution’s quest to convict the officers.

“Officer (Rolando) Solano was threatened with perjury because the government says his story doesn’t agree with the video,” Braun said. “But these civilian witnesses aren’t any better. Is the government going to charge them with perjury?”

Prosecutors declined to comment, as they have on virtually all aspects of the case.

The issue of differing perceptions has run through the officers’ defense from the beginning, and was highlighted during the state trial by the split that developed between the four defendants.

Briseno testified during that trial that his fellow officers wereout of control and that he tried to stop the beating, at one point blocking a blow by Powell. Briseno stands by those statements, but now says he realizes that he could not see everything that Powell or the other officers saw, and therefore cannot be sure that anyone acted improperly.

“He had a different impression of what was going on,” Braun said. “But so did the civilian witnesses. That doesn’t mean that anybody’s lying, just that everybody saw things differently.”