NEWS ANALYSIS : King’s Showing in Court May Aid Both Sides : Strategy: For the prosecution, it presents the jury with a flesh-and-blood victim. For the defense, it eliminates a ‘mythic looming presence.’

In opening statements, prosecutors reminded the jury that “Rodney King is not on trial.” But for the last two days, in a sense, he was.

When he was done, even defense attorneys acknowledged that he had come across as “a big nice guy,” and that--despite repeated memory lapses and contradictions in his story--King had helped the prosecution by giving the jury a “human element,” a flesh-and-blood victim far more vivid than any videotaped image.

“I think it helped us (too),” said defense attorney Ira Saltzman, who represents Sgt. Stacey C. Koon. “Now he’s not this mythic looming presence in the sky. He’s just a guy.”

But he was a guy whose hours on the witness stand injected high drama into a federal case that until Tuesday had threatened to be largely a replay of its Simi Valley predecessor. In the process, he provided ammunition for both the prosecution and the defense.

For the defense, the points were scored in details; for the prosecution, in emotional impact.

“The overall impression of Rodney King is more of a victim than an attacker. He didn’t look like a drug-crazed giant,” said Laurie Levinson, a Loyola University Law School professor who has attended much of the trial in U.S. District Court.

“Rodney King held up.”

Indeed, from the moment King took the stand, prosecutors wasted no opportunity to wring emotion out of their celebrated witness. Assistant U.S. Atty. Barry F. Kowalski asked King time and again, “How did you feel ?” getting him to describe the “boiling” sensation in his blood brought on by a police Taser, the numbing bruises from police batons, the racial taunts he thought he heard and the nightmares he said haunt him. Then King summed it up, “I was just tryin’ to stay alive, sir.”

Even more significant for the government may have been the way King survived cross-examination from the four defense lawyers. Whereas state prosecutors were afraid to call him as a witness in Simi Valley--fearful that he wouldn’t withstand such intense questioning--King kept his cool throughout and resisted every piece of bait dangled by a defense hoping to provoke him into an outburst, a blunder that would have confirmed their portrayal of him as a man to be feared.

Challenged time and again to explain how he could have said at first that his beating was not racial, then claim he was called “nigger,” then say he wasn’t sure, King replied matter-of-factly that “sometimes I forget.” Or he simply shrugged and said, “I’m not sure.”

Other times, he agreed with defense assertions about him, as when Harland W. Braun, who represents Officer Theodore J. Briseno, commented, “You expect to get millions of dollars.”

“Yes, sir,” King said.

In court, he didn’t resist.

He did once retort sharply, however--when asked whether it was his lawyer who told him he had been struck by a police baton.

“No one had to tell me that,” King said. “I felt it.”

When the trial started, the defense had seemed eager to get its shot at him. “Rodney King needs to be shown for what kind of person he really is,” Officer Laurence M. Powell said.

Afterward, defense attorneys said they were eager to get the testimony behind them, to get jurors looking at the beating not from King’s perspective but from that of the four officers, who face up to 10 years in prison if convicted.

Braun predicted now that the jury would look back on King’s headline-grabbing appearance and conclude “that he was probably irrelevant to the case. They’re going to go back to the tape.”

Defense attorneys spent much of their time with King seeking to make the jury as suspicious of him as, they insist, the officers had every right to be the night of March 3. No detail of his actions went without scrutiny, even his seemingly harmless assertion that, while already “relaxed” from drinking malt liquor, he was hoping to find a store where he could buy more. King was asked whether he had money to buy it--the unspoken implication being that he might have been planning to rob the store.

The defense is expected to ask a series of subsequent witnesses to rebut many parts of King’s testimony, particularly his assertion that the officers chanted racial epithets.

King was asked to go on record on point after point during the cross-examination: Did he deny smoking marijuana when he really had? Did a friend in his speeding car tap him on the shoulder and warn that police were chasing them? Was he sure he halted at an off-ramp stop sign? Did he ever claim that a CHP officer, Melanie Singer, beat and kicked him along with the others?

Even King’s weight became the subject of dispute.

When he walked to the witness stand Tuesday afternoon--as well-dressed as any lawyer in the court in a charcoal-gray, pin-striped suit--King cut an erect, slender figure, a far cry from the burly man videotaped slumped on the ground two years ago. “I’ve got my body in better condition,” King testified, explaining that he has exercise equipment at his apartment.

But when he claimed that he has only lost 14 pounds--down to 211 pounds, from 225--defense attorney Michael P. Stone, representing Officer Laurence M. Powell, showed the jury enlarged photos of a shirtless King taken days after the beating, looking much more massive than now.

Braun later argued that King was probably 40 pounds heavier then and now “doesn’t look so fearsome.”

The perspective that counts, he added, is that of the officers who had to arrest King after the long car chase, not knowing whether he was armed or why he was fleeing. And the way he appeared to them, Braun acknowledged now, may have been “more fearsome than what he really was.”

The defense lawyers had to walk a fine line in their cross-examination, trying to be as tough as possible but careful to treat “Mr. King” with respect--knowing it could be fatal if jurors thought they were bullying him in court.

Kowalski, in contrast, was careful not to present the jury with too sanitized a prosecution portrayal of King. He tried to blunt the defense attack in his own questioning by having King readily admit many of the most damaging parts of his story: that he was a convicted felon, had too much to drink that night and that he fled from police because he feared they would send him back to prison.

The prosecutor also had King acknowledge that he had lied about his behavior at times, has forgotten details, and that, yes, he hoped to get “a lot of money.”

“He didn’t look like a slick liar,” concluded Loyola’s Levinson. “He didn’t look like he was covering up.”

She said those impressions--if shared by the jury--might deter the defense from any temptation to, in effect, keep King “on trial” as the proceedings continue in federal court.

“There’s a risk of doing that, of putting him on trial,” Levinson said, “and that is that the jury will look at it through Rodney King’s eyes. That’s dangerous for (the defense). For those looked like very beaten eyes.”