2 Sides Clash in Closing Remarks for King Case : Trial: Prosecutor says officers’ actions show intent to deprive victim of civil rights. Defense begins counterattack.

A federal prosecutor and the lawyer for Sgt. Stacey C. Koon traded wildly different versions of the Rodney G. King beating during closing arguments Thursday, with the prosecutor alleging that the officers charged in the civil rights trial ruthlessly beat King into submission and the defense attorney suggesting that King was to blame not only for the incident but for last year’s riots as well.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Steven D. Clymer addressed jurors first, and he delivered a compelling 3-hour, 15-minute presentation that accused Koon, Laurence M. Powell, Timothy E. Wind and Theodore J. Briseno of beating King and then covering up their act with a series of lies and false police reports. Those lies, Clymer added, are powerful circumstantial evidence that the defendants knew they had acted illegally during the infamous arrest.

“The defendants tried Rodney King,” Clymer said. “With Stacey Koon as the judge and with Powell, Wind and Briseno as executioners, they found him guilty and punished him.”

The closing arguments are one of the final chapters in the volatile trial, which is concluding against a backdrop of mounting fear and uncertainty in Los Angeles. U.S. District Judge John G. Davies has told jurors that he hoped they would receive the case Friday, but arguments were proceeding slower than anticipated and most observers predicted that the case will probably continue into the weekend.

Although lawyers for the officers will present the bulk of their closing arguments today, Ira Salzman, the lawyer for Koon, kicked off the defense’s closing arguments with a witness-by-witness attack on the prosecution’s case.

Salzman’s three-hour presentation was often personal and sarcastic and drew on sources as varied as the movie “Chinatown” and the Iran-Contra scandal. He called the defendants “sacrificial lambs” and said they are paying the price for negligent LAPD superiors--officials who left their officers without sufficient weapons, short of deadly force, to handle defiant individuals such as King.

Salzman also pointedly attacked King, suggesting that he was responsible for the riots that ravaged Los Angeles last year after a Ventura County jury returned not guilty verdicts on all but one count against the four defendants.

On the stand, King told jurors that he and two passengers were headed for Hansen Dam when they were stopped by police just after midnight March 3, 1991.

“Because of that, people died,” Salzman said. “People lost their homes because someone wanted to go to Hansen Dam without interruption.”

Throughout his presentation, Clymer, a highly regarded prosecutor from the Los Angeles U.S. attorney’s office, belittled the experts who testified on behalf of the officers and appealed to jurors to exercise their common sense.

“We are asking you as members of the community to apply the Constitutional rights that have kept us from being a police state, rights that we have fought for in wars,” Clymer said. “You have to decide what police officers ought to do in a free country. You have to decide whether police officers can beat disrespectful suspects into submission.”

Even lawyers for the officers conceded that Clymer’s presentation was effective, but they vowed to undercut it as they continue presenting closing arguments.

“Given the restraints of his case, I don’t think anyone could do any better than Clymer did,” said Briseno’s lawyer, Harland W. Braun, who has been relentlessly critical of the government prosecution since the indictments of the officers were handed down in August. “But I’m planning to go up there and argue for all these defendants. . . . We want every one to walk out of this courtroom.”

Briseno was the only one of the four defendants to break ranks during last year’s state trial, and federal prosecutors attempted to turn him against the others again by playing a videotape of his testimony for the jurors in this case. But Salzman accused prosecutors of believing Briseno when he favored their case--when he contends, for instance, that Powell hit King in the head with his baton--and then disbelieving him when his testimony works against them.

On the videotape of the beating, Briseno is shown stomping on King’s upper body. Clymer described that as an “act of cowardice.”

As he did in his opening statement six weeks ago, Clymer reminded jurors that King’s behavior is not on trial. King, who was on parole and driving drunk on the night of the incident, led police on a high-speed chase that ended on a Lake View Terrace street.

“Rodney King should have been arrested that night, and Rodney King should have gone to jail,” Clymer said. “If these defendants hadn’t beaten him, that’s exactly what would have happened.”

In a powerful twist to his presentation, Clymer’s closing argument made heavy use of the defense’s own witnesses, most notably California Highway Patrol Officer Melanie Singer.

“I expect that none of you will ever forget Melanie Singer’s testimony,” Clymer said, his voice dropping almost to a whisper. “That professional, accomplished police officer broke down and cried on the witness stand. . . . She said she’d remember those baton blows until the day she died.”

While focusing mostly on weaknesses in the defense case, Clymer also attempted to defuse a problem that emerged during the prosecution’s presentation. In his opening statement, Clymer told jurors they would hear testimony that Powell and Wind stopped by the Foothill station, where Powell summoned colleagues to view King in the back of the patrol car when Powell and his partner were supposed to be transporting him between hospitals.

Clymer conceded that the testimony did not wholly support his earlier statements that officers had been called outside to see King. But Clymer said the prosecution had established that Powell was in the station telling “war stories” while King needed medical attention.

By confronting that prosecutorial shortcoming, Clymer deprived defense attorneys of the advantage they might have gained by raising it first in their closing arguments.

Throughout his presentation, Clymer repeatedly attacked two mainstays of the defense case--that the officers believed King was under the influence of PCP and that they beat him to keep him from getting up off the ground.

The real reason for the beating, Clymer said, was that the defendants were dealing with a disrespectful suspect and they refused to stop until he begged them.

“Why did it stop here?” Clymer asked, as he showed jurors the portion of the videotape that shows King being handcuffed by Briseno. “It stopped here because Rodney King asked them to ‘please stop.’ He begged them to stop. When Rodney King begged them to stop, they had accomplished their purpose: They had beaten him into submission.”

Both Clymer’s presentation and Salzman’s emphasized the key role that the testimony of Koon played in the federal trial.

Koon spent three days on the witness stand, coolly presenting his account of the incident and taking full responsibility for every blow used on King. Based largely on the strength of that testimony, the three other officers chose not to take the witness stand.

“No one can seriously deny the integrity and the moral courage that Sgt. Koon brought to his testimony,” said Salzman, who emphasized that Koon had reported the incident to his superiors and had never tried to hide the fact that force was used to arrest King.

Far from violating King’s rights, Koon actually was doing only that which the community was counting on him to do, Salzman added.

“Koon couldn’t allow a man who took police on a high-speed chase to escape into the night in a residential neighborhood,” Salzman said. “Koon was doing what we want him to do.”

But Clymer attacked Koon’s account, accusing him of exaggerating the danger that King posed and attempting to deceive jurors.

Among the issues in Koon’s testimony that Clymer challenged was the sergeant’s contention that King appeared to be under the influence of PCP. Although Koon said he was “100%” sure that King was under the influence of the drug, King never tested positive for PCP and a number of witnesses said they saw no signs he was under the influence of it.

The federal case at times has resembled a battle of experts, and that contest continued into closing arguments as lawyers for both sides traded sometimes personal attacks on the credibility of one another’s witnesses.

Clymer, for instance, called one defense expert a “small-town police officer,” belittled another as a doctor who conceded that studying injuries such as King’s was a hobby, and reminding jurors that a third defense expert once had her work rejected by a California appellate court.

Salzman responded by challenging the prosecution’s chief expert on the use of force, Sgt. Mark John Conta. Salzman called the sergeant a “PR person,” and he asked the jury to compare him with the defense’s force expert, Sgt. Charles L. Duke, Jr, who testified that he had helped arrange security for the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles and for the Pope during his visits here.