NEWS ANALYSIS : Emotion, Intellect Woven Into King Case Prosecution : Trial: As government concludes its presentation, legal experts say the position is strong but not invulnerable.

Thirteen days after calling their first witness, federal prosecutors on Monday rested their case against four police officers charged with violating Rodney G. King’s civil rights, concluding a carefully paced presentation that alternated wrenching accounts of the beating with coolly efficient expert testimony.

A police sergeant blasted the officers for continuing to hit King while he was down, and a medical expert told jurors that King suffered his most serious injuries from direct baton blows to the head. Civilian witnesses said they were horrified by what they saw, and jurors finally got to hear from King, who delivered two days of showstopping testimony.

There were, to be sure, moments that did not go nearly so well for the government. Prosecutors put on evidence, for instance, that two of the defendants violated police policy when they detoured by the Foothill Division as they were supposed to be transporting King from one hospital to another. But one of the telling details about that unscheduled stop was challenged by the very witness called by prosecutors to support it.

Despite a few setbacks, legal experts said the government lawyers accomplished the essence of what they set out to do: present a complete picture of the beating that moved beyond the videotape and wove together two themes, one emotional and the other intellectual.

They succeeded, most analysts agree, by presenting King and four civilian witnesses to make their emotional case and by calling a Dutch doctor and an LAPD sergeant as the twin pillars of their intellectual case.

“This is exactly what the prosecution should have done in the first trial,” said Barry Levin, a defense lawyer and former police officer. “In a sense, this is the first real trial of these officers.”

But even as they praised the prosecution team, defense lawyers, law professors and civil rights experts warned that convicting the defendants, particularly Officer Theodore J. Briseno, remains a difficult task.

“These prosecutors have presented a far stronger case than the state prosecutors did,” said Peter Arenella, a UCLA law professor. But, he added, “I think the impression that some people have, particularly after Rodney King’s testimony, is that the convictions are going to be easy to win. I hope expectations are not being raised too high.”

A Different Case

From the opening moments of the federal trial, prosecutors had promised prospective jurors that they would hear a different case from the one that unfolded in Ventura County last year, and nothing symbolized that better than King’s appearance on the witness stand last week.

King never testified in state court, in part because prosecutors there were worried about his history of conflicting statements about the beating. To some extent, those fears were borne out by his testimony in the federal trial, as King wrestled with those past statements and admitted that he had lied on previous occasions--he had previously denied ever using marijuana, had said he was not drinking on the night of the incident and had insisted that he did not flee police.

“I lied, sir,” King conceded at one point. “And I do not feel happy or proud of it.”

On the stand, King also accused officers of taunting him with a racial epithet during the beating, and then was forced to admit he could not be sure. He admitted time and again--first to government lawyers and later, more emphatically, to defense attorneys--that he could not be sure whether the epithet was used.

Those reversals tarnished King’s testimony, but he survived more than a day on the stand without losing his temper or raising his voice in anger. He was polite, even deferential to the defense lawyers, and that attitude, some experts say, may prove more important than anything he said.

“Even if he has been impeached, they (prosecutors) don’t rely on him for any evidence,” said Daniel Rinzel, former head of the criminal section of the Justice Department’s civil rights division. “And in the meantime, they’ve humanized him. . . . During the time that I was with the civil rights division, I don’t remember a case where we did not put on the victim. Otherwise, jurors might feel that the government was trying to hide something.”

A much more serious defect in the prosecution’s case, analysts said, is the relatively weak evidence that government lawyers introduced against Briseno. Briseno is pictured on the videotape stomping on King’s upper body, and jurors already have seen the tape many times.

It is presumably that blow that accounts for the indictment against him, since Briseno’s only other participation in the incident is to block a blow by Officer Laurence M. Powell and to handcuff King. The problem for prosecutors is that their expert on the use-of-force, Sgt. Mark John Conta, testified that he believes Briseno’s stomp was administered to “control” King.

That suggests that the government’s own expert does not believe that Briseno stomped King with the intention of using unreasonable force. And the prosecution needs to prove that intent in order to find Briseno guilty of violating King’s civil rights.

Prosecutors had hoped to introduce evidence that Briseno stomped another suspect in 1987, but the judge ruled that was inadmissible, so jurors will not hear about it. Prosecutors also have said they would present evidence that Briseno lied about the incident, but so far they have not.

“Briseno is sort of a wild card. He gives the jury the power to compromise without having to acquit the other defendants,” Levin said. “I think Briseno is likely to be found not guilty.”

Unsurprisingly, Briseno’s lawyer, Harland W. Braun, agrees. In fact, Braun had hoped U.S. District Judge John G. Davies would acquit Briseno on Monday, but Davies refused to grant Braun’s motion along with those filed by lawyers for the three other officers.

Since his client remains on trial, Braun said he will use the charges against Briseno to undermine the government’s case against the other defendants.

“They stretch their moral position by indicting Briseno,” Braun said. “It allows me to get up there and say these guys will indict anyone, even an officer who their own expert says should be commended for blocking a blow.”

Their case against Briseno was thin, but prosecutors offered a much more damning portrait of the three other defendants, principally through the testimony of Conta and Dr. Harry Smith, the prosecution’s chief medical expert.

Prosecutors in the state trial did not call a use-of-force expert during their main case, only producing Cmdr. Michael Bostic after the defense had presented its own experts to say that the beating appeared justified. Bostic’s testimony was further undermined by the defense’s successful effort to portray him as an aloof senior officer, unfamiliar with the rough-and-tumble of street police work.

This time, federal prosecutors called Conta, a Charles Bronson look-alike with 17 years of street experience. And they called him early, so that jurors’ initial description of police policy came from an officer who testified that the defendants violated department rules when they continued to hit King after he was knocked to the ground.

Although Conta, who heads the physical training and self-defense unit at the Los Angeles Police Academy, found fault with all four officers, he was particularly vehement in his criticism of Sgt. Stacey C. Koon, the senior officer at the scene. “He should have stopped this and helped his people when they needed him most,” Conta said. “He failed to do so.”

Conta slipped on a few points, but he persevered through cross-examination and through withering attacks on him made by some of the defendants and their lawyers outside of court.

“My impression is that he was an extremely effective witness,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, a USC law professor who has followed the trial.

Ira Salzman, who represents Koon, agreed that Conta had scored some points. But Salzman said he did not believe Conta ultimately would prove important. Even if the jury believes that LAPD policy was violated, he said, that does not mean that King’s constitutional rights were abridged.

While prosecutors put Conta on the stand early in their case, they saved their other key expert until near the end. Smith, a vice president of the San Antonio-based Biodynamics Research Corp., took the stand immediately after King, and he used humor and his appealing Dutch accent to captivate jurors and lay out a precise description of King’s injuries.

But Smith’s most powerful and damaging testimony came when he was asked to explain what caused a number of skull fractures that King suffered. The injuries, Smith said, were caused not by falls to the ground, as the defense has claimed, but by three to four direct baton blows to King’s head.

Asked by prosecutor Steven D. Clymer to identify which officer delivered those blows, Smith reviewed a portion of the videotape and noted that in the opening 15 or 20 seconds, Officer Powell appears to be striking King’s upper body near the head. That gave him “the opportunity” to inflict the most serious injuries of the incident, Smith said.

Doubt Cast on Powell

No conclusive medical testimony about baton blows to King’s head was offered during the state trial, and Smith’s account, which was backed up by one of the doctors who treated King, accomplished two points for the prosecution. It suggested that Powell’s blows may have been intentional, since accidentally striking King in the head three or four times is less likely than accidentally striking him there once; and it casts doubt on Powell’s truthfulness, since he has always insisted that none of his blows hit King’s head.

Michael P. Stone, Powell’s lawyer, said his expert witness will challenge some of Smith’s conclusions. He added that even if jurors agree with Smith that baton blows caused the damage to King’s skull, that does not prove that Powell hit King there intentionally.

While prosecutors scored victories with their expert witnesses, they also faltered on occasion. They lost a battle to introduce evidence that one of King’s passengers also was struck by authorities, and struggled with two police officer witnesses they called to the stand.

Early in the trial, they called Officer Rolando Solano, Briseno’s former partner. Solano helped prosecutors by testifying that Briseno told him after the incident that Sgt. Stacey C. Koon should have handled the arrest better.

But in response to questions from defense lawyers, Solano said he saw no evidence of misconduct by any officer and added that Clymer had threatened him with perjury charges if he did not change his account of the beating. Solano conceded that his description of the beating does not square with the video, but said he testified to the best of his recollection.

Late in the prosecution case, government lawyers came up short with another officer, Daniel Gonzalez. In his opening statement, Clymer had said that prosecutors would introduce evidence that Powell and Timothy E. Wind detoured by their police station when they were supposed to be taking King from Pacifica Hospital to Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center. Clymer said that while they were at the station Powell had sent other officers out to look at the wounded King.

Gonzalez acknowledged that the wounded King was brought by the station and said he asked Powell’s permission to look at his suspect. He also said he heard Powell telling a “war story” about the beating. But he denied that Powell had sent him out to the car to look at King.

“I asked Officer Powell if it would be OK if I looked at the suspect.” Gonzalez testified. “He said I could.”

That testimony came on the penultimate day of the prosecution’s case, and it seemed to leave government lawyers limping toward a conclusion. Braun said later that “for all their slickness, these prosecutors don’t seem to have a real strategy.”

“It’s like the old joke,” Braun said. “The pilot of a plane comes on the intercom and says: ‘We’ve got good news, and we’ve got bad news. The good news is we’re making incredible time. The bad news is we don’t know where we are.”

Braun, however, has consistently baited prosecutors, publicly accusing them of misconduct and mocking their case. Less partial observers said they believed the prosecution’s case appeared to be unfolding about as the government lawyers had hoped.

“We all knew from the beginning that these are very experienced, highly successful prosecutors,” Chemerinsky said. “They’ve lived up to their billing.”